History of Humanistic psychology

We are educators, doctors, nurses, human service workers, community activists, organizational development professionals, students, writers, musicians, artists, health and social workers, counselors, scientists, architects, business people, politicians, spiritual leaders, homemakers, trades people, anyone who shares humanistic values and wants to make a difference. While it has humanized and revolutionized psychology with its emphasis on our conscious ability to choose and create, AHP is not just for psychologists.

It's hard to hold on to humanistic ideals in a world so fearful, so violent and increasingly rigid. In this society driven by production and consumption, sometimes it may seem like you are the only one who is standing up for humanity.

Throughout history many individuals and groups have affirmed the inherent value and dignity of human beings. They have spoken out against ideologies, beliefs and practices which held people to be merely the means for accomplishing economic and political ends. They have reminded their contemporaries that the purpose of institutions is to serve and advance the freedom and power of their members. In Western civilization we honor the times and places, such as Classical Greece and Europe of the Renaissance, when such affirmations were expressed.

Humanistic Psychology is a contemporary manifestation of that ongoing commitment. Its message is a response to the denigration of the human spirit that has so often been implied in the image of the person drawn by behavioral and social sciences. During the first half of the twentieth century, American psychology was dominated by two schools of thought: behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Neither fully acknowledged the possibility of studying values, intentions and meaning as elements in conscious existence. Although various European perspectives such as phenomenology had some limited influence, on the whole mainstream American psychology had been captured by the mechanistic beliefs of behaviorism and by the biological reductionism and determinism of classical psychoanalysis.

Ivan Pavlov's work with the conditioned reflex (induced under rigid laboratory controls, empirically observable and quantifiable) had given birth to an academic psychology in the United States led by John Watson which came to be called "the science of behavior" (in Abraham Maslow's later terminology, "The First Force"). Its emphasis on objectivity was reinforced by the success of the powerful methodologies employed in the natural sciences and by the philosophical investigations of the British empiricists, logical positivists and the operationalists, all of whom sought to apply the methods and values of the physical sciences to questions of human behavior. Valuable knowledge (particularly in learning theory and the study of sensation and perception) was achieved in this quest. But if something was gained, something was also lost: The "First Force" >systematically excluded the subjective data of consciousness and much information bearing on the complexity of the human personality and its development.