Core Ideas of the Humanistic-Existential Approach, Explained

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Core Ideas of the Humanistic-Existential Approach

Abnormal Psychology · Chapter 7: Humanistic and Existential PerspectivesSection 7.1 · lesson 27 of 9712 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

Two traditions taught as one, and the assumption that keeps them apart.

  • State the shared assumptions of the approach
  • Distinguish the humanistic tradition from the existential
  • Define the three core therapeutic conditions precisely
  • Name the four existential givens and their aims

Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,678 words). Read along, or search it.

Humanistic and Existential Perspectives

Core Ideas of the Humanistic-Existential Approach

Two traditions are almost always taught together under one heading. The humanistic, and the existential. They are not the same thing. Humanistic thought holds that people have an innate tendency toward growth. The right conditions release it. That is the whole claim. Existential thought assumes no inherent positive direction at all. It holds that people face unavoidable features of existence, and must decide how to live with them. Merging the two loses what is distinctive about each. So this section keeps them apart, and shows exactly where they part company. We start with why the framework calls itself the third force. And at the end, one case read two completely different ways.

The Third Force

A Framework Built as a Response

The framework describes itself as the third force in psychology. It was positioned deliberately against the two dominant traditions of its period. So it is best understood as a response, and the charges are worth stating precisely. Against psychodynamic theory it charged determinism. If your present is produced by drives and early experience, there is no room for choice. Against behaviorism it charged environmentalism. If behavior is shaped by contingencies, the person is just a site where learning happens. The shared complaint is that both accounts explain the person away. Both were also built from studying difficulty, clinical cases in one, laboratory animals in the other. A psychology built on what goes wrong will describe damage well, and health poorly. One thing before we go on. This material is educational, and is not a basis for diagnosis. Every case in it is a composite, constructed for instruction.

Shared Ground

Five Assumptions and One Method

Five assumptions are common to both traditions here. First, the whole person. Understanding requires taking someone whole. Not as a set of symptoms, responses, or cognitive components. Second, subjective experience is primary. What matters is how the situation looks from inside it. Third, present focus. The past is real, and it is not where the work is. Fourth, freedom and responsibility. People choose within real constraints. Fifth, growth rather than pathology as the organizing idea. Difficulty gets described as development blocked, not as a defect sitting inside the person. The method that goes with all five is called phenomenology. It studies experience as it presents itself to the person having it. No translation into an outside framework. That is the discipline, and it is harder than sympathy.

Rogers

Growth as the Default, and What Overrides It

The actualizing tendency. Every organism has an inbuilt push toward maintaining and developing itself. Growth is the default. It does not have to be supplied from outside. Notice what kind of statement that is. It is an assumption, not a finding. The organismic valuing process is the matching claim about judgment. An infant, uninstructed, moves toward what is good for it, and away from what is not. Then there is the self-concept, the organized picture a person holds of who they are. It is acquired, not innate, and it is built from how the person has been responded to. Which brings us to the central developmental concept. Conditions of worth. These are the requirements a person learns they must meet in order to be valued. Acceptance available only for achieving. Or for being cheerful, or for not being angry. The person learns that regard is conditional, and then applies the same conditions to themselves.

Incongruence

The Gap Is the Distress

Conditions of worth put the self-concept into conflict with the organismic valuing process. Your own evaluation of an experience says one thing. The conditions under which you are acceptable say another. Experience that violates those conditions cannot be admitted, so the self-concept narrows. The gap that opens up is called incongruence. Now hear the strong version of the claim. Incongruence is the origin of distress. Not a symptom of distress. Not faulty learning, and not distorted thinking. Two defenses guard that zone, and neither one is deliberate. Denial keeps the experience out of awareness entirely. Distortion lets it in, but reinterprets it so it fits the picture. The cost is identical. The experience stops being available to be worked with. Which is why this model aims at awareness, rather than at insight or belief change.

Three Conditions

What the Therapist Has to Provide

Rogers answered with a quality of relationship, and specified three conditions. Unconditional positive regard, empathic understanding, and congruence. He also made a much stronger claim about them. That the three are necessary and sufficient, with technique contributing nothing beyond them. That is the most testable thing this framework ever produced, and it did get tested. Unconditional positive regard is not approval. Approval is a judgment that something is good, so it is conditional by its nature. Collapse the two, and you have rebuilt the conditional regard the model blames for the problem. Empathic understanding is not sympathy. Sympathy is felt from outside the person's frame, and it makes the other person an observer. And congruence is not self-disclosure. It concerns not pretending.

Read Correctly

A Stance Toward the Person, Not Toward Everything

One point about unconditional positive regard gets misread constantly. It is a stance toward the person. It is not a stance toward everything they do. It does not require withholding a concern. And it does not mean a clinician cannot say that something is dangerous. A version that demanded uncritical acceptance of everything would be unsafe. Now look at what happened to these ideas in ordinary practice. Summarizing a person's account so they recognize it is standard in almost any assessment. Not reacting to a difficult disclosure is trained for, and it descends from this tradition. A person testing whether something can be said is watching the clinician's face. And a practitioner delivering a manual while visibly disengaged gets poor results. The parts of this tradition absorbed most completely are the ones it specified precisely enough to measure.

Maslow

Real Needs, an Unsupported Ladder

Maslow proposed that human needs are organized in a hierarchy. Conventionally five levels. Physiological needs, safety, belonging and love, esteem, and self-actualization. Self-actualization is the realization of one's potential, becoming what one is capable of becoming. The claim attached to the ordering is that lower needs are prepotent. Meaning they must be substantially satisfied before higher ones become motivating. The strict sequential version is not well supported. People pursue meaning, connection and creative work while hungry, unsafe, or unwell. What has fared better is a weaker claim, that the needs named are real and matter. Maslow also listed characteristics of self-actualizing people, and two cautions apply. The sample was a small number of people he selected as exemplars. They were chosen because they already had the quality being described. And the list describes one ideal of a good life, valuing independence and self-direction.

The Existential Turn

No Inherent Direction Assumed

The existential tradition draws on a philosophical literature, rather than on psychological research. Humanistic thought asks what conditions would release a person's growth. What is it like to be a being who knows they will die? Who must choose without guarantees, and cannot finally be known by anyone else? No inherent positive direction is assumed. There is no given meaning waiting to be discovered in the structure of the world. And anxiety is an appropriate response to the human situation, not a malfunction. Two terms carry the position. Authenticity is living in acknowledgment of these conditions. Bad faith is the self-deception of denying your own freedom. Telling yourself a course of action was forced, when it was chosen. One safety point. Existential anxiety and a clinical anxiety presentation are not the same thing. Treating the second as the first would be a serious error.

Four Givens

Unavoidable Features, and What Is Aimed At

The existential givens are the unavoidable features every person must come to terms with. Death. Awareness of a finitude that cannot be negotiated with. The common evasion is simply not thinking about it, often through constant busyness. Freedom and responsibility. There is no external authority to hand the decision to. The evasion is deferring to convention, or treating a choice as something that happened to you. Isolation. No other person can fully enter your experience, however close the relationship. Meaninglessness. The world supplies no meaning of its own, so meaning has to be made. Now look at the therapeutic aims, because this is the distinctive part. Not one of them is the removal of the anxiety. The aim for death is that awareness of finitude sharpens a life rather than spoiling it. For meaninglessness, constructing and committing to meaning, knowing that it was constructed. And these evasions are ordinary and near-universal. Naming them is not an accusation.

Frankl And Gestalt

Meaning, and Working in the Present

Frankl held that the primary human motivation is the search for meaning. He named three routes to it. Through what one creates or contributes. Through encounter with another person, or with something valued. And through the stance one takes toward suffering that cannot be avoided. The third route is his distinctive claim, and it came out of his own imprisonment. He was held in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Where a situation cannot be changed, what remains is how you meet it. Apply it to suffering that could be relieved, and you have a reason for doing nothing. Gestalt therapy belongs to this family too, and it is considerably more active. Awareness is the central aim, including bodily sensation and how one is behaving in the room. And unfinished business is emotional material that keeps intruding from an incomplete experience.

Two Sessions

Following, and Questioning the Evasion

The relationship is the mechanism of change. It follows that the person-centered therapist is non-directive. If the person has an inbuilt direction, then directing them overrides the very process being relied on. An existentially oriented session looks quite different. It is characterized by confronting, in the narrow sense of raising what is being avoided. The humanistic therapist trusts the direction. The existential therapist questions the evasion. Take one composite case. Yusra, thirty-nine, says she is living someone else's life. The humanistic reading says conditions of worth buried her own evaluations. Provide the conditions, and what she actually feels becomes available again. The existential reading says nothing is buried. Calling the career expected is bad faith, and she has been choosing it every year. Notice that these two make different predictions, which counts in the framework's favor. And notice what neither one addresses. Two years of poor sleep and social withdrawal warrant assessment in their own right.

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Core Ideas of the Humanistic-Existential Approach

What is the difference between humanistic and existential psychology?
Humanistic psychology assumes people have an innate tendency toward growth that the right conditions will release, while existential psychology assumes no inherent positive direction at all. The existential view holds that people face unavoidable features of existence, such as death and freedom, and must decide how to live with them. A humanistic therapist trusts the person's direction, whereas an existential therapist questions what the person is avoiding.
What are Carl Rogers's three core conditions for therapy?
Carl Rogers's three core conditions are unconditional positive regard, empathic understanding, and congruence. Unconditional positive regard is a stance toward the person, not approval of everything they do. Empathic understanding means grasping experience from inside the person's frame, unlike sympathy felt from outside it. Congruence means the therapist is genuine and not pretending, which differs from self-disclosure. Rogers argued that the right relationship conditions are sufficient for change without added technique, a claim later evidence did not support.
What are conditions of worth in person-centered theory?
Conditions of worth are the requirements a person learns they must meet in order to be valued, such as being accepted only for achieving or for staying cheerful. The person then applies those conditions to themselves. Experience that violates them cannot be admitted, so the self-concept narrows, and the gap between self-concept and actual experience, called incongruence, is treated in this theory as the origin of distress.
What are the four existential givens?
The four existential givens, as described by Irvin Yalom, are death, freedom and responsibility, isolation, and meaninglessness. Every person must come to terms with finitude, with having no outside authority to make choices for them, with the fact that no one can fully enter their experience, and with a world that supplies no meaning of its own. Existential therapy does not aim to remove the resulting anxiety but to help a person live with these conditions.

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