Humanistic Approach

• Assumption: Behaviour is up to the individual as everyone has free will.
• People may be influenced by internal or external forces but we have a choice over how we behave. Humans have a primary goal of self-actualisation: to achieve their full potential. Maslow argued that humans must work up a hierarchy of needs to achieve this.

  Physiological needs -- food/water/shelter/clothing.

  Safety -- health/employment/family.

  Love -- friendship/family/intimacy.

  Self-esteem -- confidence/achievement/respect.

  Self-actualisation -- creativity/morality/meaning/purpose.
• Carl Rogers -- congruence: ideal self and actual self are the same / incongruence: ideal self and actual self are different.

  Rogers argues that a lot of people have a lack of congruence as their parents placed conditions of worth on them as a child (only giving love to a child if they do something in return -- conditional love)
• Evaluation

  Holistic approach at dealing with abnormal behaviour -- looks at the whole individual and a range of subjective experiences.

  RWA -- led to successful development of effective counselling therapies.

  Lacks scientific credibility -- congruence and free will are difficult to study objectively -- cannot be tested under controlled conditions.

  Takes an idiographic approach -- impossible to produce general laws of behaviour that can be applied to all human beings.