Maslow

Maslow’s humanistic psychology is based on the belief that people are born with the desire to achieve their maximum potential or reach a point Maslow termed self-actualization. Maslow chose to focus his research on the experiences of emotionally healthy people, and he identified their “peak experiences,” moments when they were in complete harmony and unison with the world around them. Rather than focusing on deficiencies, humanistic psychologists argue in favor of finding people's strengths.

Maslow argued that his philosophy was a complement to Freudian psychology. He pointed out that, while Sigmund Freud focused on treating “sick” people, his approach focused on helping people discover positive outcomes and choices.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is the framework around which humanistic psychology is built. Like other theories of development, it is a stage-based theory. A person must complete one level of the hierarchy to move on to the next, but not all people move through all stages. The original five-stage hierarchy was expanded to a seven-stage model in the 1970s with the addition of cognitive and aesthetic needs:

1. Physiological Needs: These include the most basic needs that are vital to survival, such as the need for water, air, food, and sleep. Maslow believed that these needs are the most basic and instinctive needs in the hierarchy because all needs become secondary until these physiological needs are met.

2. Security Needs: These include needs for safety and security. Security needs are important for survival, but they are not as demanding as the physiological needs. Examples of security needs include a desire for steady employment, health care, safe neighborhoods, and shelter from the environment.

3. Social Needs: These include needs for belonging, love, and affection. Maslow described these needs as less basic than physiological and security needs. Relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments, and families help fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance, as does involvement in social, community, or religious groups.

4. Esteem Needs: After the first three needs have been satisfied, esteem needs becomes increasingly important. These include the need for things that reflect on self-esteem, personal worth, social recognition, and accomplishment.

5. Self-actualizing Needs: This is the highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Self-actualizing people are self-aware, concerned with personal growth, less concerned with the opinions of others, and interested fulfilling their potential.

Maslow argued that self-actualized people are driven by metamotivation: rather than seeking fulfillment of basic needs, they are driven to fulfill their full potential.

Characteristics of Self-Actualized People

In addition to describing what is meant by self-actualization in his theory, Maslow also identified some of the key characteristics of self-actualized people:

• Acceptance and Realism: Self-actualized people have realistic perceptions of themselves, others and the world around them.

• Problem-centering: Self-actualized individuals are concerned with solving problems outside of themselves, including helping others and finding solutions to problems in the external world. These people are often motivated by a sense of personal responsibility and ethics.

• Spontaneity: Self-actualized people are spontaneous in their internal thoughts and outward behavior. While they can conform to rules and social expectations, they also tend to be open and unconventional.

• Autonomy and Solitude: Another characteristic of self-actualized people is the need for independence and privacy. While they enjoy the company of others, these individuals need time to focus on developing their own individual potential.

• Continued Freshness of Appreciation: Self-actualized people tend to view the world with a continual sense of appreciation, wonder and awe. Even simple experiences continue to be a source of inspiration and pleasure.

• Peak Experiences: Individuals who are self-actualized often have what Maslow termed peak experiences, or moments of intense joy, wonder, awe and ecstasy. After these experiences, people feel inspired, strengthened, renewed or transformed.

Maslow's concept of self-actualization continues to be a part of contemporary psychology. Although only a small portion of therapists identify as humanists, therapists often encourage their clients to embrace humanistic values by pursuing goals and dreams. Self-actualization is also a part of the colloquial lexicon, with many people using the term when they're fulfilling a long-term goal or pursuing activities that lead to greater happiness and fulfillment. Maslow himself called his work positive psychology, rather than humanist psychology, and positive psychology has recently gained in popularity.

Rogers

Carl Rogers was the 20^th century humanistic psychologist and founder of person-centered psychology. Carl Rogers was born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. He was the fourth of six children of Walter Rogers and Julia Cushing. Rogers was schooled in a strict, religious environment. His original plan was to study agriculture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with an undergraduate focus on history and religion. Rogers began his professional career in child psychology in 1930 as the director of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Rogers moved to Chicago in 1945 to work as a professor. He established a counseling center there and published results of his research in Client-Centered Therapy, in 1951 and Psychotherapy and Personality Change in 1954. Later, Rogers returned to the University of Wisconsin, where he remained until he moved to California in 1963 to join the staff of Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. 

While teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rogers wrote one of his most famous books, On Becoming a Person, in which he claimed that people have their own resources for healing and personal growth. Rogers presented the ideas of compatibility, empathic comprehension, acknowledgment, and unequivocal positive respect into the helpful environment to upgrade the result for customers. He urged advocates to show each of these perspectives with a specific end goal to help the customer pick up understanding, perceive emotions, convey what needs be ideal, and accomplish self-acknowledgment and self-completion.

Rogers claimed that a self-actualized, fully functioning person had seven key traits:

1.     Openness to experience and an abandonment of defensiveness. 

2.     An existential lifestyle that emphasizes living in the moment without distorting it. 

3.     Trust in yourself.

4.     The ability to freely make choices. Fully functioning people take responsibility for their own choices, and are highly self-directed. 

5.     A life of creativity and adaptation, including an abandonment of conformity. 

6.     The ability to behave reliably and make constructive choices. 

7.     A full, rich life that involves the full spectrum of human emotions. 

Roger's person-centered approach to therapy has widespread acceptance and is applied in areas of education, cultural relations, nursing, interpersonal relations, and other service and aid-oriented professions and arenas. Rogers' psychological theories have affected cutting edge psychotherapy and have specifically affected the field of emotional well-being. Rogers additionally promoted humanism in psychology. The humanistic psychology development concentrated on the human experience of flexibility, decision, qualities, and objectives.

Erickson

Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1902. While he was a young child Erikson struggled with his identity because he felt his stepfather never fully accepted him as he did his own daughters. Erikson grew up using his stepfather’s surname; he eventually adopted the name Erikson in 1939. After meeting Anna Freud while working in Vienna, Erikson decided to pursue the field of psychoanalysis.

Erikson affected psychology by developing Sigmund Freud's unique five phases of advancement. Spearheading the investigation of the life cycle, Erikson trusted that every individual advanced through eight phases of improvement. Erikson emphasized that the environment played a major role in self-awareness, adjustment, human development, and identity. Each of Erikson's stages of psychosocial development focus on a central conflict. In Erikson's theory of development, children don't consequently finish every phase on a foreordained calendar. Rather, individuals face summed up difficulties all through life, and the routes in which they answer these difficulties figure out if they grow facilitate or stagnate at a specific phase of development. Erikson's eight stages and related difficulties incorporate:

Eugenics

A film about Eugenics. Its not a great topic and a difficult movie to watch, however it is important to understand what went on and still does. 

Fromm

Erich Fromm was born in Germany in 1900, the only child of orthodox Jewish parents. From a young age Fromm was highly influenced by the bible, Freud, and Marx, as well as by socialist ideology. He believed that humans have been shifted away from their ancient connections with nature and left with no powerful instincts to adapt to a changing world. But because humans have gained the ability to reason, they can think about their isolated condition, a situation Fromm considered the human dilemma.

According to Fromm, our human dilemma cannot be solved by satisfying our animal needs. It can only be addressed by fulfilling our uniquely human needs, an accomplishment that moves us toward a reunion with the natural world. Fromm identified five of these distinctively human or existential needs. 
A. Relatedness
First is relatedness, which can take the form of (1) submission, (2) power, and (3) love. Love, or the ability to unite with another while retaining one's own individuality and integrity, is the only relatedness need that can solve our basic human dilemma.
B. Transcendence
Being thrown into the world without their consent, humans have to transcend their nature by destroying or creating people or things. Humans can destroy through malignant aggression, or killing for reasons other than survival, but they can also create and care about their creations.
C. Rootedness
Rootedness is the need to establish roots and to feel at home again in the world. Productively, rootedness enables us to grow beyond the security of our mother and establish ties with the outside world. With the nonproductive strategy, we become fixated and afraid to move beyond the security and safety of our mother or a mother substitute.
D. Sense of Identity
The fourth human need is for a sense of identity, or an awareness of ourselves as a separate person. The drive for a sense of identity is expressed nonproductively as conformity to a group and productively as individuality.
E. Frame of Orientation
By frame of orientation, Fromm meant a road map or consistent philosophy by which we find our way through the world. This need is expressed nonproductively as a striving for irrational goals and productively as movement toward rational goals

Fromm recognized three major personality disorders:

1. Necrophilia, or the love of death and the hatred of all humanity.

2. Malignant narcissism, or a belief that everything belonging to one's self is of great value and anything belonging to others is worthless.

3.Incestuous symbiosis, or an extreme dependence on one's mother or mothersurrogate.

Fromm believed that humans were "freaks of the universe" because they lacked strong animal instincts while having the capacity to reason. In a word, his perspective rated average on free choice, optimism, unconscious influences, and uniqueness; low on causality; and high on social impacts. The quality of Fromm's hypothesis is his clear compositions on a wide scope of human issues. As a scientific theory, however, nonetheless, Fromm's hypothesis rates low on its capacity to create inquire about and to fit adulteration; it rates low on handiness to the professional, interior consistency, and stinginess.

Myers&Briggs Personality Test

The main function of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI^®) personality test is to make the theory of psychological types described by Carl Jung understandable and useful in people's lives. The core of the theory is that much outwardly random difference in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, being due to basic differences in the ways individuals desire to use their perception and judgment.

My Result:

Take the test at http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp 

Repopulating the Depopulated Pages of Social Psychology

The article, Repopulating the Depopulated Pages of Social Psychology by Michael Billig discussed the ways in which social psychology is written and represented in academic journals. Billing argues that the journals are `depopulated' writings. He later discusses approached to “repopulate” them. Multiple issues arise within this article including the use of multiple verbal devices are outlined, such as `variable vagueness' in describing subjects (pg 311). These verbal devices are not discussed as working defects, but as resources for accomplishing depopulation. Although the positive political plan behind Michael Billig's task is to be praised, his investigation can be challenged on functional, down to business, mental, epistemological, additionally on political grounds. It is contended that privileging people and their involvement in records of exploration raises the twin phantoms of independence and humanism, and undermines to under privilege different levels of `reality' and clarification past the domain of awareness and individual personality. Regardless of the fact that depersonalization can mean a degrading practice, it can likewise be utilized to reference the constructive parts of aggregate character, comprehension and activity. It can be recognized that the experimental method may `depersonalize' and `dehumanize' by subjecting individuals to panoptic power, attempts to free subjects in practice or presentation may respectively undermine the method or deceive us about it (pg 316). It can be argued that trustworthiness about the purpose of power in experimental research may be a better policy than re-population in itself.

Billig, M. "Repopulating the Depopulated Pages of Social Psychology." Theory & Psychology 4.3 (1994): 307-35. Web.