Psychology and Humanism

Abstract

Humanistic psychology as a social movement was indigestible for many humanistically oriented academic psychologists. Their students wanted easy therapeutic gimmicks, and they saw humanistic psychology as justifying a comfortably optimistic view of people in the world. Leaders of humanistic psychology advanced other worldly concerns over worldly ones. "Secular humanism" in the style of Chein, Fromm, and Murray was essentially unrepresented in the movement, and May's tragic view did not prevail. With recent changes in psychoanalysis and in behaviorism/cognitive psychology, humanistic psychology should keep the windows of psychotherapy, and of arts and letters, open for psychological insights. It might welcome challenges from artificial intelligence; it should focus on the implications of self-reference and cultivate alliance with the burgeoning movement of life-span human development. As personality psychology revives from dormancy, it should become the new humanistic psychology, merging explanation and interpretation.