3 Humanistic and Existential Theories

HUMANISTIC /
EXISTENTIAL THEORIES
Just Lynn D. Panaligan
HUMANISTIC / EXISTENTIAL
THEORIES
1. Maslow: Holistic Dynamic Theory
2. Rogers: Person-Centered Theory
3. May: Existential Psychology

HOLISTIC DYNAMIC THEORY

ABRAHAM MASLOW
ABRAHAM MASLOW
• April 1, 1908
• Manhattan, New York
• Eldest of seven
• Had hatred toward his mother and refused to go to
her funeral
• Hated religion, thus, an atheist
• Married to Bertha Goodman: his cousin

HOLISTIC DYNAMIC THEORY
• The person is being constantly motivated by one need or another and
that people have the potential to achieve self-actualization.

MASLOW’S VIEW OF
MOTIVATION
1. Maslow adopted a holistic approach to motivation.
2. Motivation is usually complex.
3. People are continually motivated by one need or another.
4. All people everywhere are motivated by the same basic needs.
5. Needs can be arranged on a hierarchy.

HIERARCHY OF NEEDS
• Assumes that lower level needs must be satisfied or at least relatively
satisfied before higher level needs become motivators.
1. Conative Needs
2. Aesthetic Needs
3. Cognitive Needs
4. Neurotic Needs

CONATIVE NEEDS
• The five needs composing this hierarchy are conative needs, meaning that they have a
striving or motivational character.

AESTHETIC NEEDS
• Unlike conative needs, aesthetic needs are not universal, but at least some people in every
culture seem to be motivated by the need for beauty and aesthetically pleasing experiences
(Maslow, 1967).
• People with strong aesthetic needs desire beautiful and orderly surroundings, and when these
needs are not met, they become sick in the same way that they become sick when their
conative needs are frustrated.
• People prefer beauty to ugliness, and they may even become physically and spiritually ill
when forced to live in squalid, disorderly environments (Maslow, 1970).

COGNITIVE NEEDS
• Most people have a desire to know, to solve mysteries, to understand, and to be curious.
• When cognitive needs are blocked, all needs on Maslow’s hierarchy are threatened; that is,
knowledge is necessary to satisfy each of the five conative needs.
• Maslow (1968b, 1970) believed that healthy people desire to know more, to theorize, to test
hypotheses, to uncover mysteries, or to find out how something works just for the
satisfaction of knowing.

NEUROTIC NEEDS
• Lead only to stagnation and pathology (Maslow, 1970).
• By definition, neurotic needs are nonproductive. They perpetuate an unhealthy style of life
and have no value in the striving for self-actualization.
• Neurotic needs are usually reactive; that is, they serve as compensation for unsatisfied basic
needs.
• For example, a person who does not satisfy safety needs may develop a strong desire to hoard
money or property. The hoarding drive is a neurotic need that leads to pathology whether or not
it is satisfied.
• A neurotic person may be able to establish a close relationship with another person, but that
relationship may be a neurotic, symbiotic one that leads to a pathological relationship rather than
genuine love.

UNMOTIVATED BEHAVIOR
• Not all determinants are motives. Some behavior is not caused by needs
but by other factors such as conditioned reflexes, maturation, or drugs.

EXPRESSIVE AND COPING BEHAVIOR
• Expressive behavior
• It is often an end in itself and serves no other purpose than to be.
• It is frequently unconscious and usually takes place naturally and with little effort.
• It has no goals or aim but is merely the person’s mode of expression.
• Coping behavior
• It is ordinarily conscious, effortful, learned, and determined by the external
environment.
• It involves the individual’s attempts to cope with the environment; to secure food
and shelter; to make friends; and to receive acceptance, appreciation, and prestige
from others.
• Coping behavior serves some aim or goal (although not always conscious or
known to the person), and it is always motivated by some deficit need (Maslow,
1970).
DEPRIVATION OF NEEDS
• Deprivation of self-actualization needs also leads to pathology, or more
accurately, metapathology.
• Maslow (1967) defined metapathology as the absence of values, the
lack of fulfillment, and the loss of meaning in life.

INSTINCTOID NATURE OF NEEDS
• Maslow (1970) hypothesizes that some human needs are innately
determined even though they can be modified by learning.
• He called these needs instinctoid needs.
• Sex, for example, is a basic physiological need, but the manner in
which it is expressed depends on learning.

CRITERIA FOR SELF-
ACTUALIZATION
1. Free from psychopathology.
2. Self-actualizing people had progressed through the hierarchy of needs
and therefore lived above the subsistence level of existence and had no
ever-present threat to their safety.
3. Embracing the B-values.
4. “Full exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc.” (Maslow,
1970, p. 150)

VALUES OF SELF-ACTUALIZERS
• Maslow (1971) held that self-actualizing people are motivated by the “eternal verities,” what
he called B-values. These “Being” values are indicators of psychological health and are
opposed to deficiency needs, which motivate non-self-actualizers.
• Metamotivation is characterized by expressive rather than coping behavior and is
associated with the B-values.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SELF-ACTUALIZING
PEOPLE
1. More Efficient Perception of Reality 1. Gemeinschaftsgefühl
2. Acceptance of Self, Others, and Nature 2. Profound Interpersonal Relations
3. Spontaneity, Simplicity, and Naturalness 3. The Democratic Character Structure
4. Problem-Centering 4. Discrimination Between Means and Ends
5. The Need for Privacy 5. Philosophical Sense of Humor
6. Autonomy 6. Creativeness
7. Continued Freshness of Appreciation 7. Resistance to Enculturation
8. The Peak Experience

JONAH COMPLEX
• Often blocks people’s growth toward self-actualization or the fear of being
one’s best (Maslow, 1979).
• The Jonah complex is characterized by attempts to run away from one’s
destiny just as the biblical Jonah tried to escape from his fate.
• The Jonah complex, which is found in nearly everyone, represents a fear of
success, a fear of being one’s best, and a feeling of awesomeness in the
presence of beauty and perfection.

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
• It is a relatively new field of psychology that combines an emphasis on
hope, optimism, and well-being with scientific research and assessment.

PERSON-CENTERED THEORY
CARL ROGERS
CARL ROGERS
• January 8, 1902
• Oak Park, Illinois
• Parents were both religious, thus, he became interested in
the bible
• Entered the Union Theological Seminary in New York
1924
• PhD from Columbia (1934)
• Married to Helen Elliot
• David
• Natalie
• Rogers was a consummate therapist but only a
reluctant theorist (Rogers, 1959).
PERSON-CENTERED THEORY
• We use the label client-centered in reference to Roger’s therapy and the
more inclusive term person-centered to refer to Rogerian personality
theory.

BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
1. Formative Tendency
• There is a tendency for all matter, both organic and inorganic, to evolve from simpler
to more complex forms.
• For instance, complex galaxies of stars form from a less well-organized mass; crystals such as
snowflakes emerge from formless vapor; complex organisms develop from single cells; and
human consciousness evolves from a primitive unconsciousness to a highly organized awareness.
2. Actualizing Tendency
• Tendency within all humans (and other animals and plants) to move toward
completion or fulfillment of potentials (Rogers, 1959, 1980).
• This tendency is the only motive people possess. The need to satisfy one’s hunger drive, to
express deep emotions when they are felt, and to accept one’s self are all examples of the single
motive of actualization.

SELF-ACTUALIZATION
• It is a subset of the actualization tendency and is therefore not synonymous with it.
• The actualization tendency refers to organismic experiences of the individual; that is, it refers to
the whole person—conscious and unconscious, physiological and cognitive.
• On the other hand, self-actualization is the tendency to actualize the self as perceived
in awareness.
• When the organism and the perceived self are in harmony, the two actualization tendencies are
nearly identical; but when people’s organismic experiences are not in harmony with their view of
self, a discrepancy exists between the actualization tendency and the self-actualization tendency.

SELF-ACTUALIZATION
1. The Self-Concept
• The self-concept includes all those aspects of
one’s being and one’s experiences that are
perceived in awareness (though not always
accurately) by the individual.
• The self-concept is not identical with the
organismic self. Portions of the organismic
self may be beyond a person’s awareness or
simply not owned by that person.
• For example, the stomach is part of the organismic
self, but unless it malfunctions and causes concern,
it is not likely to be part of one’s self-concept.

SELF-ACTUALIZATION
2. The Ideal Self
• One’s view of self as one wishes to be.
• The ideal self contains all those attributes, usually positive, that people aspire to
possess.
• A wide gap between the ideal self and the self-concept indicates incongruence
and an unhealthy personality.
• Psychologically healthy individuals perceive little discrepancy between their
self-concept and what they ideally would like to be.

AWARENESS
• Without awareness the self-concept and the ideal self would not exist.
• Rogers (1959) defined awareness as “the symbolic representation (not necessarily in
verbal symbols) of some portion of our experience” (p. 198). He used the term
synonymously with both consciousness and symbolization.

LEVELS OF AWARENESS
1. Some events are experienced below the threshold of awareness are
either ignored or denied.
2. Some experiences are accurately symbolized and freely admitted to the
self-structure.
3. Awareness involves experiences that are perceived in a distorted form.

DENIAL OF POSITIVE
EXPERIENCES
• Many people have difficulty accepting genuine compliments and positive feedback,
even when deserved.
• Compliments, even those genuinely dispensed, seldom have a positive influence on
the self-concept of the recipient.
• They may be distorted because the person distrusts the giver, or they may be denied
because the recipient does not feel deserving of them; in all cases, a compliment
from another also implies the right of that person to criticize or condemn, and thus
the compliment carries an implied threat (Rogers, 1961).
• “I know this grade should be evidence of my scholastic ability, but somehow I
just don’t feel that way. This class was the easiest one on campus. The other
students just didn’t try. My teacher did not know what she was doing.”

BECOMING A PERSON
• Rogers (1959) discussed the processes necessary to becoming a person.
• First, an individual must make contact—positive or negative—with another person. This
contact is the minimum experience necessary for becoming a person.
• The person develops a need to be loved, liked, or accepted by another person, a need that
Rogers (1959) referred to as positive regard.
• If we perceive that others, especially significant others, care for, prize, or value us, then our need
to receive positive regard is at least partially satisfied.
• Positive regard is a prerequisite for positive self-regard, defined as the experience of
prizing or valuing one’s self. Rogers (1959) believed that receiving positive regard from
others is necessary for positive self-regard, but once positive self-regard is established, it
becomes independent of the continual need to be loved.

BARRIERS TO PSYCHOLOGICAL
HEALTH
1. Conditions of Worth
• One perceives that their parents, peers, or partners love and accept them only if
they meet those people’s expectations and approval.
2. Incongruence
• The psychological disequilibrium when we fail to recognize our organismic
experiences as self-experiences.
3. Defensiveness
• Protection of the self-concept against anxiety and threat by the denial or
distortion of experiences inconsistent with it.

BARRIERS TO PSYCHOLOGICAL
HEALTH
4. Disorganization
• Disorganized behavior occurs when the incongruence between people’s
perceived self and their organismic experience is either too obvious or occurs too
suddenly to be denied or distorted.
5. Distortion
• We misinterpret an experience in order to fit it into some aspect of our self-
concept.
6. Denial
• We refuse to perceive an experience into our awareness.

UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD
• Positive regard is the need to be liked, prized, or accepted by another person.
• When this need exists without any conditions or qualifications, unconditional
positive regard occurs (Rogers, 1980). Therapists have unconditional positive
regard when they are “experiencing a warm, positive and accepting attitude
toward what is the client” (Rogers, 1961, p. 62).
• The attitude is without possessiveness, without evaluations, and without
reservations.

EXISTENTIAL
PSYCHOLOGY
ROLLO MAY
ROLLO MAY
• April 21, 1909
• Ada, Ohio
• English major in Michigan State University (got kicked
out because he was an editor of a radical student
magazine)
• 1933 enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New
York
• Became a pastor for a while, but he realized it’s
meaningless so he studied psychoanalysis
• Before he received his doctorate, he got tuberculosis;
thus he wrote a book about anxiety
EXISTENTIALISM
• Shortly after World War II, a new psychology—existential psychology—began to
spread from Europe to the United States.
• Existential psychology is rooted in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other European philosophers.
• The first existential psychologists and psychiatrists were also Europeans, and these
included Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Victor Frankl, and others.

EXISTENTIALISM
• Existence takes precedence over essence.
• Each of us is ultimately responsible for who we are and what
we will become.

BASIC CONCEPTS
• Being-in-the-World
• Dasein, a German word meaning “to exist there”.
• Oneness of subject and object.
• Ruined by Alienation: separation from nature.
• Lack of interpersonal relations

BASIC CONCEPTS
• 3 Basic Modes of Being-in-the-World
1. Umwelt – the environment around us
2. Mitwelt – Our relations with other people
3. Eigenwelt – relationship with our self

NONBEING
• Nothingness
• The fear of ceasing to exist, but also ceasing to live authentically
(committing to destructive behavior, blind conformity, and general
hostility that can pervade our relations).

ANXIETY
• The subjective state of the individual’s becoming aware that his/her
existence can be destroyed, that one can become nothing.
• Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
• People experience anxiety when they become aware that their
existence or some value identified with it might be destroyed.

ANXIETY
1. Normal Anxiety
• Proportionate to the threat, does not involve repression, and can be
confronted constructively on the conscious level.
• As people grow from infancy to old age, their values change, and with each
step, they experience normal anxiety as they must now surrender past
values.
2. Neurotic Anxiety
• A reaction disproportionate to the threat.
• Involves repression and other forms of intrapsychic conflict and is managed
by various kinds of “blocking-off of activity and awareness”
GUILT
• It happens when people deny their potentialities, fail to accurately
perceive the needs of fellow humans or remain oblivious to their
dependence on the natural world.

SEPARATION GUILT
Separation Guilt
• Related to the umwelt (natural world)
• Occurs when people are separated from nature, common in advanced
societies.

MITWELT GUILT
Mitwelt Guilt
• Stems from our inability to accurately perceive the world of others,
we can see people only through our own eyes and can never perfectly
judge the needs of other people. Thus, we do violence to their true
identity.
• Because we cannot unerringly anticipate the needs of others, we feel
inadequate in our relations with them.

EIGENWELT GUILT
Eigenwelt Guilt
• Denial of our own potentialities or with out failure to fulfill them.
• Similar to Maslow’s Jonah Complex, meaning; fear of doing one’s
best.

INTENTIONALITY
• The structure that gives meaning to experience and allows people to
make decisions about the future.
• May used this to bridge the gap between subject and object.

CARE
• This is an active process, the opposite of apathy, the state in
which something does matter.
• The source of love and will.

CARE
• Will
• Capacity to organize one’s self so that movement in a certain
direction or toward a certain goal may take place.
• It requires self-consciousness and implies possibility of either/or
choice
• Love
• Delight in the presence of the other person and an affirming of that
person’s value and development as much as one’s own.

FORMS OF LOVE
1. Sex
• The power of procreation, the drive which perpetuates the race, the
source at once of the human being’s most intense pleasure and his/her
most pervasive anxiety.
2. Eros
• Psychological desire that seeks procreation or creation through an
enduring union with a loved one.
• Built on care and tenderness, the salvation of sex.
• Eros is making love, sex is manipulating reproductive organs.
FORMS OF LOVE
3. Philia
• Eros is built on the foundation of philia, an intimate nonsexual friendship
between two people.
• Friendship in the simplest terms.
• Example: Love between siblings or friends
4. Agape
• Just eros depends on philia, so philia needs agape.
• Esteem for the other, the concern for the other’s welfare beyond any gain
that one can get out of it; disinterested love or altruistic love.
• Completely undeserved and unconditional.
FREEDOM
• The individual’s capacity to know that he/she is the determined one;
meaning that the person is responsible for their own growth and choices,
and to greater extent, their own destiny.
1. Existential Freedom
2. Essential Freedom

FREEDOM
1. Existential Freedom
• The freedom of action of doing.
• The ability to act on the choices that one makes.
2. Essential Freedom
• Freedom of being: the freedom to exist and live.

DESTINY
• The power to choose, and this power allows us to confront and challenge
our destiny.
• It does not permit any change we wish, we cannot erase our destiny, but
we can choose how we shall respond, how we shall live out our talents
which confront us.

THE POWER OF MYTH
• People have a need for myths, rather for something to believe in. Myths
are not falsehoods, but rather conscious and unconscious belief systems
that provide explanations for personal and social problems.

3 Humanistic and Existential Theories

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

3 Humanistic and Existential Theories

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

HUMANISTIC /

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

HOLISTIC DYNAMIC THEORY

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

Just Lynn D. Panaligan

You might also like