humanistic approach

• what is client-centered therapy?

  • aims to achieve congruence in the client
  • the cause of incongruence may have been from a lack of unconditional positive regard from parents
  • therapist provides client with unconditional positive regard, empathy and genuineness to try and reduce the client's incongruence
• what is congruence?

  where there is harmony between the actual self and ideal self
• what is incongruence?

  where there is inconsistency between the actual self and ideal self
• what is conditional positive regard?

  when the parents value their child only when they are meet specific criteria
• what are the conditions of worth?

  the criteria that the child has to meet to receive the conditional positive regard from their parents
• what is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs made up of? *from bottom to top!

  1. physiological needs
  2. safety needs
  3. belongingness and love
  4. self esteem needs
  5. self-actualisation
• give a strength of the humanistic approach

  • real world application
  • client-centered therapy, which aims to achieve congruence in the client
  • the cause of incongruence may have been from a lack of unconditional positive regard from parents, which creates psychological problems for the client
  • the therapist provides the client with unconditional positive regard and empathy to try and reduce the incongruence between the client's perceived self and ideal self
  • this will improve the quality of life for the client
  • therefore, this shows the usefulness of the humanistic approach in society
• give a weakness of the humanistic approach

  • subject to culture bias
  • it can apply to individualistic cultures e.g self-actualisation is a focus of individualistic cultures as they value independence and put the needs of the self before the needs of the group
  • however, in collectivist cultures, where the needs of the group come first, self-actualisation would be deemed as abnormal behaviour
  • therefore, the humanistic approach can't explain human behaviour in collectivist cultures e.g in China and may view the behaviour in collectivist cultures as abnormal
• give a weakness of the humanistic approach

  • has untestable and subjective concepts
  • like the psychodynamic approach, the humanistic approach suffers from a lack of empirical evidence and has no possibility of systematically observing and measuring the processes which it describes
  • e.g self-actualisation can't be objectively measured, due to individual differences
  • e.g congruence is up to personal judgement, as opinions of whether one has their ideal self will differ
  • therefore, this does little to improve the scientific credibility of both the humanistic approach and psychology