18

Humanistic (Third-Force)
Psychology

THE MIND, THE BODY, AND THE SPIRIT

Generally speaking, human nature can be divided into three major components:
the mind (our intellect), the body (our biological makeup), and the spirit (our
emotional makeup). Different philosophies and, more recently, schools of psy-
chology have tended to emphasize one of these aspects at the expense of the
others. Which philosophy or school of psychology prevailed seemed to be deter-
mined largely by the Zeitgeist. The decade of the 1960s was a troubled time in
the United States. There was increased involvement in the unpopular Vietnam
War and its corresponding antiwar movement; Martin Luther King Jr., John
Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; and violent, racial
protests occurred in a number of major cities. “Hippies” were in open rebellion
against the values of their parents and their nation. Like the ancient Skeptics,
they found little worth believing in, and like the ancient Cynics, they dropped
out of society and returned to a simple, natural life. This Age of Aquarius was
clearly not a time when rational philosophy (with emphasis on the mind) or em-
pirical philosophy (with emphasis on the body) were appealing.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the schools of structuralism, functionalism, be-
haviorism, Gestalt psychology, and psychoanalysis coexisted and pursued their
respective goals. By the mid-20th century, however, structuralism had disap-
peared as a school, and functionalism and Gestalt psychology had lost their dis-
tinctiveness as schools by being assimilated into other viewpoints. In the 1950s
and early 1960s, only behaviorism and psychoanalysis remained as influential, in-
tact schools of thought. In the troubled times described above, the knowledge of
humans provided by behaviorism and psychoanalysis was seen by many as

570

incomplete, distorted, or both. Needed was a new
view of psychology, one that emphasized neither
the mind nor the body but the human spirit.
In the early 1960s, a group of psychologists
headed by Abraham Maslow started a movement
referred to as third-force psychology. These psy-
chologists claimed that the other two forces in psy-
chology, behaviorism and psychoanalysis, neglected
a number of important human attributes. They said
that by applying the techniques used by the natural
sciences to the study of humans, behaviorism lik-
ened humans to robots, lower animals, or compu-
ters. For the behaviorist, there was nothing unique
about humans. The major argument against psy-
choanalysis was that it concentrated mainly on
emotionally disturbed people and on developing
techniques for making abnormal people normal.
What was missing, according to third-force psy-
chologists, was information that would help already
healthy individuals become healthier—that is, to
reach their full potential. What was needed was a
model of humans that emphasized their uniqueness
and their positive aspects rather than their negative
aspects, and it was this type of model that third-
force psychologists attempted to provide.
Although third-force psychology became very
popular during the 1960s and 1970s, its popularity
began to wane in the 1980s. Like behaviorism and
psychoanalysis, however, third-force psychology
remains influential in contemporary psychology
(see, for example, Clay, 2002). Third-force psy-
chology contrasts vividly with most other types be-
cause it does not assume determinism in explaining
human behavior. Rather, it assumes that humans
are free to choose their own type of existence.
Instead of attributing the causes of behavior to sti-
muli, drive states, genetics, or early experience,
third-force psychologists claim that the most im-
portant cause of behavior is subjective reality.
Because these psychologists do not assume deter-
minism, they are not scientists in the traditional
sense, and they make no apology for that. Science
in its present form, they say, is not equipped to
study, explain, or understand human nature. A
new science is needed, a human science. A human
science would not study humans as the physical
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 571
sciences study physical objects. Rather, it would
study humans as aware, choosing, valuing, emo-
tional, and unique beings in the universe.
Traditional science does not do this and must there-
fore be rejected.
ANTECEDENTS OF THIRD-
FORCE PSYCHOLOGY
Like almost everything else in modern psychology,
third-force psychology is not new. It can be traced
to the philosophies of romanticism and existential-
ism, which in turn can be traced to the early
Greeks. In Chapter 7, we saw that the romantics
(such as Rousseau) insisted that humans are more
than machines, which was how the empiricists and
sensationalists were describing them, and more than
the logical, rational beings, which was how ration-
alists were describing them. Like the ancient
Cynics, the romantics distrusted reason, religious
dogma, science, and societal laws as guides for hu-
man conduct. For them, the only valid guide for a
person’s behavior was that person’s honest feelings.
The romantics (especially Rousseau) believed that
humans are naturally good and gregarious, and if
given freedom they would become happy, fulfilled,
and social-minded. That is, given freedom, people
would do what was best for themselves and for
other people. If people acted in self-destructive or
antisocial ways, it was because their natural impulses
had been interfered with by societal forces. People
can never be bad, but social systems can be and
often are. Also in Chapter 7, we saw that the ex-
istentialists (such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche)
emphasized the importance of meaning in human
existence and the human ability to choose that
meaning; this, too, was contrary to the philosophies
of empiricism and rationalism. For Kierkegaard sub-
jectivity is truth. That is, it is a person’s beliefs that
guide his or her life and determine the nature of his
or her existence. Truth is not something external to
the person waiting to be discovered by logical, ra-
tional thought processes; it is inside each person and
is, in fact, created by each person. According to
572 CHAPTER 18
Nietzsche, God is dead, and therefore humans are
on their own. People can take two approaches to
life: they can accept conventional morality as a
guide for living, thus participating in herd confor-
mity; or they can experiment with beliefs, values,
and life and arrive at their own truths and morality
and thus become supermen. Nietzsche clearly en-
couraged people to do the latter.
Third-force psychology combines the philoso-
phies of romanticism and existentialism, and this
combination is called humanistic psychology.
Third-force and humanistic psychology, then, are
the same, but humanistic psychology has become
the preferred label. In applying this label, however,
it is important not to confuse the term humanistic
with the terms human, humane, or humanitarian.
The frequent confusion of the terms hu-
man, humane, and humanistic indicates that
many do not clearly understand the
meaning of the humanistic stance. To
qualify as humanistic, it is not enough to
concern human beings. Playing, working,
building, traveling, organizing, are all hu-
man activities. This, however, does not
make them humanistic. Similarly, when
these activities are performed, for instance,
for charitable or philanthropic purposes,
they are then raised to a humane or hu-
manitarian status, which may be of vital
importance but still does not make them
humanistic. For an endeavor or a view-
point to qualify properly as humanistic, it
must imply and focus upon a certain con-
cept of man—a concept that recognizes his
status as a person, irreducible to more ele-
mentary levels, and his unique worth as a
being potentially capable of autonomous
judgment and action. A pertinent example
of the difference between the humane and
the humanistic outlook is found in the case
of behavior control that relies entirely upon
positive reinforcement. Such an approach is
humane (or humanitarian), since it imple-
ments generous and compassionate atti-
tudes. But it is not humanistic, because the
rationale behind systematic behavior mod-
ification by purely external forces is in-
compatible with a concept of man as a self-
purposive and proactive, rather than merely
reactive, being.
The focus of humanistic psychology is
upon the specificity of man, upon that
which sets him apart from all other species.
It differs from other psychologies because it
views man not solely as a biological organ-
ism modified by experience and culture but
as a person, a symbolic entity capable of
pondering his existence, of lending it
meaning and direction. (Kinget, 1975, p. v)
Although it is true that existentialism is a major
component of humanistic psychology, important
differences exist between existential and humanistic
psychology. After discussing phenomenology, a
technique used by both existential and humanistic
psychologists, we will review existential psychology
and then humanistic psychology, and we will con-
clude the chapter with a comparison of the two.
PHENOMENOLOGY
Throughout this text, we have referred to a variety
of methodologies as phenomenological. In its most
general form, phenomenology refers to any meth-
odology that focuses on cognitive experience as it
occurs, without attempting to reduce that experi-
ence to its component parts. Thus, one can study
consciousness without being a phenomenologist, as
was the case when Wundt and Titchener attempted
to reduce conscious experience to its basic elements.
After making this distinction, however, phenome-
nology can take many forms. The phenomenology
of Johann Goethe and Ernst Mach focused on com-
plex sensations including afterimages and illusions.
The phenomenology of Franz Brentano (1838–
1917) and his colleagues focused on psychological
acts such as judging, recollecting, expecting, doubt-
ing, fearing, hoping, or loving. As we saw in Chapter
9, in Brentano’s brand of phenomenology, the

concept of intentionality was extremely important.
Brentano believed that every mental act refers to
(intends) something outside itself—for example, “I
see a tree,” “I like my mother,” or “That was a good
piece of pie.” The contents of a mental act could be
real or imagined, but the act, according to Brentano,
always refers to (intends) something. In Chapter 14,
we saw how Brentano’s phenomenology influenced
the Gestalt psychologists. Next, we see how
Brentano’s phenomenology was instrumental in
the development of modern existentialism, mainly
through its influence on Edmund Husserl.
The goal of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was
to take the type of phenomenology Brentano de-
scribed and use it to create an objective, rigorous
basis for philosophical and scientific inquiry. Like
Brentano, Husserl believed that phenomenology
could be used to create an objective bridge between
the outer, physical world and the inner, subjective
world. Of prime importance to Husserl was that
phenomenology be free of any preconceptions.
That is, Husserl believed in reporting exactly what
appears in consciousness, not what should be there
according to some belief, theory, or model.
As we saw in Chapter 9, however, Husserl be-
lieved that phenomenology could go beyond an
analysis of intentionality. A study of intentionality
determined how the mind and the physical world
interact, and such a study was essential for the phys-
ical sciences. But, in addition to an analysis of
intentionality, Husserl proposed a type of phenom-
enology that concentrates on the workings of the
mind that are independent of the physical world.
Husserl called this second type of phenomenology
pure phenomenology, and its purpose was to dis-
cover the essence of conscious experience. Whereas
the type of phenomenology that focuses on inten-
tionality involves the person turned outward, pure
phenomenology involves the person turned in-
ward. The goal of the latter is to accurately catalog
all mental acts and processes by which we interact
with environmental objects or events. Husserl be-
lieved that an inventory of such acts and processes
had to precede any adequate philosophy, science, or
psychology because it is those mental acts and pro-
cesses on which all human knowledge is based.
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 573
Husserl’s pure phenomenology soon expanded
into modern existentialism. Whereas Husserl was
mainly interested in epistemology and in the es-
sence of mental phenomena, the existentialists
were interested in the nature of human existence.
In philosophy, ontology is the study of existence,
or what it means to be. The existentialists are con-
cerned with two ontological questions: (1) What is
the nature of human nature? and (2) What does it
mean to be a particular individual? Thus, the exis-
tentialists use phenomenology to study either the
important experiences that humans have in com-
mon or those experiences that individuals have as
they live their lives—experiences such as fear,
dread, freedom, love, hate, responsibility, guilt,
wonder, hope, and despair.
Husserl’s phenomenology was converted into
existential psychology mainly by his student
Martin Heidegger, to whom we turn next.
EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Although it is possible to trace existential philoso-
phy to such early Greek philosophers as Socrates,
who urged people to understand themselves and
said that “an unexamined life is not worth living,”
it has become traditional to mark the beginning of
existential philosophy with the writings of
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The great Russian nov-
elist Fyodor Dostoevsky is also mentioned as among
the first existential thinkers. All these individuals
probed the meaning of human existence and tried
to restore the importance of human feeling, choice,
and individuality that had been minimized in ratio-
nalistic philosophies, such as those of Kant and
Hegel, and in conceptions of people based on
Newtonian concepts, such as those proposed by
the British empiricists and French sensationalists.
Martin Heidegger
Born on September 26, Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976) was Husserl’s student and then his as-
sistant, and he dedicated his famous book Being and
574 CHAPTER 18
Time (1927) to Husserl. Heidegger’s work is gener-
ally considered the bridge between existential phi-
losophy and existential psychology. Many, if not
most, of the terms and concepts that appear in the
writings of current existential psychologists can be
traced to the writings of Heidegger. Like Husserl,
Heidegger was a phenomenologist; but unlike
Husserl, Heidegger used phenomenology to exam-
ine the totality of human existence. In 1933
Heidegger became rector at the University of
Freiburg. In his inaugural speech titled “The Role
of the University in the New Reich,” he was
highly supportive of the Nazi party. Although
Heidegger resigned his rectorship a few months af-
ter the Nazis took office, he never took a strong
stand against them (Langan, 1961, p. 4). In fact,
Farias (1989) leaves little doubt that Heidegger
was committed to Nazism and was involved in
the activities of the Nazi regime. It is ironic that
someone with such unfortunate political leanings
had such a significant influence on humanistic
psychology.
Dasein. Heidegger used the term Dasein to in-
dicate that a person and the world are inseparable.
Literally, Dasein means “to be” (sein) “there” (Da),
© Bettman/CORBIS
Martin Heidegger
and Heidegger usually described the relationship
between a person and the world as “being-in-the-
world.” A more dramatic way of stating this rela-
tionship is to say that without the world humans
would not exist, and without humans the world
would not exist. The human mind illuminates the
physical world and thereby brings it into existence.
But Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is even
more complicated. To be means “to exist,” and to
exist is a dynamic process. To exist as a human is to
exist unlike anything else. In the process of existing,
humans choose, evaluate, accept, reject, and ex-
pand. Humans are not static; they are always be-
coming something other than what they were. To
exist is to become different; to exist is to change.
How a particular person chooses to exist is an indi-
vidual matter, but for all people existence is an ac-
tive process. The Da, or there, in Dasein refers to
that place in space and time where existence takes
place; but no matter where and when it takes place,
existence (to be) is a complex, dynamic, and
uniquely human phenomenon. Unlike anything
else in the universe, humans choose the nature of
their own existence.
Authenticity and Inauthenticity. It was very
important to Heidegger that humans can ponder
the finiteness of their existence. For Heidegger a
prerequisite for living an authentic life is coming
to grips with the fact that “I must someday die.”
With that realization dealt with, the person can get
busy and exercise his or her freedom to create a
meaningful existence, an existence that allows for
almost constant personal growth, or becoming.
Because realizing that one is mortal causes anx-
iety, however, people often refuse to recognize that
fact and thereby inhibit a full understanding of
themselves and their possibilities. According to
Heidegger, this results in an inauthentic life. An
authentic life is lived with a sense of excitement or
even urgency because one realizes one’s existence is
finite. With the time that one has available, one
must explore life’s possibilities and become all that
one can become. An inauthentic life does not have
the same urgency because the inevitability of death
is not accepted. One pretends, and pretending is

inauthentic. Other inauthentic modes of existence
include living a traditional, conventional life ac-
cording to the dictates of society and emphasizing
present activities without concern for the future.
The inauthentic person gives up his or her freedom
and lets others make the choices involved in his or
her life. In general, the speech and behavior of au-
thentic individuals accurately reflect their inner
feelings, whereas with inauthentic individuals this
is not the case.
Guilt and Anxiety. Heidegger believed that if
we do not exercise our personal freedom, we ex-
perience guilt. Because most people do not fully
exercise their freedom to choose, they experience
at least some guilt. All humans can do to minimize
guilt is try to live an authentic life—that is, to rec-
ognize and live in accordance with their ability to
choose their own existence.
Because acceptance of the fact that at some
time in the future we will be nothing causes anxi-
ety, such acceptance takes courage. Heidegger be-
lieved that choosing one’s existence rather than
conforming to the dictates of society, culture, or
someone else also takes courage. And in general,
living an authentic life by accepting all conditions
of existence and making personal choices means
that one must experience anxiety. For Heidegger
anxiety is a necessary part of living an authentic
life. One reason for this anxiety is that authentic
people are always experimenting with life, always
taking chances, and always becoming. Entering the
unknown causes part of the anxiety associated with
an authentic life.
Another reason that exercising one’s freedom
in life causes anxiety is that it makes one responsible
for the consequences of those choices. The free
individual cannot blame God, parents, circum-
stances, genes, or anything else for what he or she
becomes. One is responsible for one’s own life.
Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand.
Thrownness. Heidegger did, however, place
limits on personal freedom. He said that we are
thrown into the Da, or there, aspect of our partic-
ular life by circumstances beyond our control. This
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 575
thrownness determines, for example, whether we
are male or female, short or tall, attractive or unat-
tractive, rich or poor, American or Russian, the
time in human history that we are born, and so
on. Thrownness determines the conditions under
which we exercise our freedom. According to
Heidegger, all humans are free, but the conditions
under which that freedom is exercised varies.
Thrownness provides the context for one’s exis-
tence. What Heidegger called thrownness has also
been called facticity, referring to the facts that char-
acterize a human existence.
Ludwig Binswanger
Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966) obtained his
medical degree from the University of Zürich in
1907 and then studied psychiatry under Eugen
Bleuler and psychoanalysis under Carl Jung.
Binswanger was one of the first Freudian psycho-
analysts in Switzerland, and he and Freud remained
friends throughout their lives. Under the influence
of Heidegger, Binswanger applied phenomenology
to psychiatry, and later he became an existential
analyst. Binswanger’s goal was to integrate the writ-
ings of Husserl and Heidegger with psychoanalytic
theory. Adopting Heidegger’s notion of Dasein,
Binswanger called his approach to psychotherapy
Daseinanalysis (existential analysis).
Like most existential psychologists, Binswanger
emphasized the here-and-now, considering the past
or future important only insofar as they manifested
themselves in the present. To understand and help a
person, according to Binswanger, one must learn
how that person views his or her life at the mo-
ment. Furthermore, the therapist must try to under-
stand the particular person’s anxieties, fears, values,
thought processes, social relations, and personal
meanings instead of those notions in general. Each
person lives in his or her own private, subjective
world, which is not generalizable.
Modes of Existence. Binswanger discussed three
different modes of existence to which individuals
give meaning through their consciousness. They
are the Umwelt (the “around world”), the world
576 CHAPTER 18
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of things and events; the Mitwelt (the “with
world”), interactions with other humans; and the
Eigenwel (the “own world”), a person’s private,
inner, subjective experience. To understand a per-
son fully, one must understand all three of his or her
modes of existence.
One of Binswanger’s most important concepts
was that of Weltanschauung, or world-design
(worldview). In general, world-design is how an
individual views and embraces the world. World-
designs can be open or closed, expansive or construc-
tive, positive or negative, or simple or complex, or it
could have any number of other characteristics. In
any case, it is through the world-design that one lives
one’s life, and therefore the world-design touches
everything that one does. If a world-design is ineffec-
tive, in the sense that it results in too much anxiety,
fear, or guilt, it is the therapist’s job to help the client
see that there are other ways of embracing the world,
other people, and oneself.
Ground of Existence. Binswanger agreed with
Heidegger that thrownness places limits on personal
freedom. For Binswanger the circumstances into
which one is thrown determines one’s ground of
existence, defined as the conditions under which
one exercises one’s personal freedom. No matter
what a human’s circumstances are, however, he or
she aspires to transcend them—that is, not to be
victimized or controlled by them. Everyone seeks
being-beyond-the-world. By “being-beyond-
the-world,” Binswanger was not referring to a life
after death, or anything else supernatural, but to the
way in which people try to transform their circum-
stances by exercising their free will.
The Importance of Meaning in One’s Life. People
may be thrown into negative circumstances such as
poverty, incest, rape, or war, but they need not be
devastated by those experiences. Most existentialists
accept Nietzsche’s proclamation: “What does not
kill me, makes me stronger” (Nietzsche, 1889/1998).
This strength comes from finding meaning even in a
negative experience and growing from that meaning.
In his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning
(1946/1984), Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) described
his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. One of
his major observations was that prisoners who, even
under those dire circumstances, found meaning in their
lives and something to live for continued to live:
We who lived in concentration camps can
remember the men who walked through
the huts comforting others, giving away
their last piece of bread. They may have
been few in number, but they offer suffi-
cient proof that everything can be taken
from a man but one thing: the last of the
human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude
in any given set of circumstances, to
choose one’s own way. (p. 86)
According to Frankl (1964/1984), “Suffering
ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a
meaning” (p. 135).
By choosing, we change the meanings and va-
lues of what we experience. Although physical cir-
cumstances may be the same for different people,
how those circumstances are embraced, interpreted,
valued, symbolized, and responded to is a matter of
personal choice. By exercising our freedom, we
grow as human beings; and because exercising
 HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 577

freedom is an unending process, the developmental

process is never completed. Becoming characterizes
the authentic life, which, in turn, is characterized by
anxiety. Not becoming, or remaining stagnant,
characterizes the inauthentic life—as does guilt—
because the person does not attempt to fully mani-
fest his or her human potential.

© Bernard Gotfryd/Contributor/Hulton Archives/Getty Images

Rollo May
Rollo May (1909–1994) introduced Heideggerian
existentialism to U.S. psychology through books he
edited, Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and
Psychology (with Angel and Ellenberger, 1958) and
Existential Psychology (1961). Because Binswanger’s
work has only recently been translated into
English, May was primarily responsible for incorpo-
rating European existential philosophy (mainly
Heidegger’s) into U.S. psychology.
May was born on April 21 in Ada, Ohio.
Neither of his parents was well educated, and there
was little intellectual stimulation in the home.
When his older sister became psychotic, his father
blamed it on too much education. May was not
close to either of his parents, but he especially dis-
liked his mother (Rabinowitz, Good, and Cozad,
1989). May received his Bachelor of Arts degree
from Oberlin College in 1930 and a Bachelor of
Divinity degree from Union Theological
Seminary in 1938. While at the Union Seminary,
May met the existential philosopher Paul Tillich,
and the two became lifelong friends. In 1973 May
wrote Paulus: Reminiscences of a Friendship as a trib-
ute to Tillich, who died in 1965. After receiving his
BD from Union Seminary, May served as a minister
for two years in Montclair, New Jersey. In the
1940s, he studied psychoanalysis at the William
Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis,
and Psychology, and he became a practicing psycho-
analyst in 1946. May enrolled in the doctorate program
at Columbia University, but before he obtained his
degree, he contracted tuberculosis and nearly died.
During this depressing time, May studied
Kierkegaard’s and Freud’s views on anxiety; upon re-
turning to Columbia, he submitted “The Meaning of
Anxiety” as his doctoral dissertation. In 1949 May re-
Rollo May
ceived the first PhD in clinical psychology ever
awarded by Columbia University. In modified form,
this dissertation became his book The Meaning of
Anxiety (1950). May’s other books include The Art of
Counseling: How to Give and Gain Mental Health (1939),
The Springs of Creative Living: A Study of Human Nature
and God (1940), Man’s Search for Himself (1953),
Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), Love and
Will (1969), Power and Innocence: A Search for the
Sources of Violence (1972), The Courage to Create
(1975), Freedom and Destiny (1981), The Discovery of
Being: Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), and
The Cry for Myth (1991). May died on October 22,
1994, of multiple causes.
Like many other existential thinkers, May was
strongly influenced by Kierkegaard, who had re-
jected Hegel’s belief that an individual’s life had
meaning only insofar as it related to the totality of
things, which Hegel called the Absolute.
Kierkegaard proposed that each person’s life is a
separate entity with its own self-determined mean-
ing. Again, for Kierkegaard, subjectivity is truth;
that is, a person’s beliefs define that person’s
reality.
578 CHAPTER 18
The Human Dilemma. May (1967) pointed out
that humans are both objects and subjects of expe-
rience. We are objects in the sense that we exist
physically, and therefore things happen to us. As
objects, we are not distinguished from the other
physical objects that are studied by the natural
sciences. It is as objects that humans are studied
by the traditional methods of science—the assump-
tion being that human behavior is caused in much
the same way that the behavior of any physical ob-
ject is caused. Besides being objects, however, we
are also subjects. That is, we do not simply have
experience; we interpret, value, and make choices
regarding our experience. We give our experience
meaning. This dual aspect of human nature, which
May called the human dilemma, makes humans
unique in the universe. By dilemma, May did not
mean an insoluble problem; rather, he meant a par-
adox of human existence.
Normal and Neurotic Anxiety. May believed,
along with the other existentialists, that the most
important fact about humans is that they are free.
As we have seen, however, freedom does not pro-
duce a tranquil life. Freedom carries with it respon-
sibility, uncertainty, and therefore anxiety. The
healthy (authentic) person exercises freedom to
embrace life fully and to approach his or her full
potential. Exercising one’s freedom means going
beyond what one previously was, ignoring the ex-
pectations (roles) for one’s behavior that others
impose, and therefore often acting contrary to tra-
ditions, mores, or conventions. All this causes
anxiety, but it is normal, healthy anxiety because
it is conducive to personal growth (becoming).
Neurotic anxiety is not conducive to personal
growth because it results from the fear of freedom.
The person experiencing neurotic anxiety lives his
or her life in such a way that reduces or eliminates
personal freedom. Such a person conforms to tradi-
tion, religious dogma, the expectations of others, or
anything else that reduces his or her need to make
personal choices. Kierkegaard called the neurotic’s
situation shut-upness. The neurotic is shut off
from himself or herself as well as from other people;
he or she has become alienated from his or her true
self. Self-alienation occurs whenever people ac-
cept, as their own, values dictated by society rather
than those personally attained. Self-alienation re-
sults not only in guilt but also in apathy and despair.
The frightening aspects of human freedom and the
many ways people attempt to escape from their
freedom are discussed in Erich Fromm’s classic
book Escape from Freedom (1941).
According to Kierkegaard, May, and most
other existentialists, we can either exercise our
free will and experience normal anxiety or not
exercise it and feel guilty. Obviously, it is not easy
being human, for this conflict between anxiety and
guilt is a constant theme in human existence: “The
conflict is between every human being’s need to
struggle toward enlarged self-awareness, maturity,
freedom and responsibility, and his tendency to re-
main a child and cling to the protection of parents
or parental substitutes” (May, 1953, p. 193).
The Importance of Myth. According to May,
myths provide the major vehicle for providing
meaning in life: “Myth is a way of making sense
in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns
that give significance to our existence” (1991, p.
15). After a long, illustrious career as a psychoana-
lyst, May reached the following conclusion about
people seeking professional help: “As a practicing
psychoanalyst I find that contemporary therapy is
almost entirely concerned, when all is surveyed,
with the problems of the individual’s search for
myth” (1991, p. 9). In sympathy with May’s con-
clusion, McAdams and Pals (2006) say, “The pro-
cess of putting life experience into a meaningful
narrative form influences development, coping, and
well-being” (p. 210). Because myth is a type of
narrative (story), May’s observation that effective
living depends on effective myths is supported by
recently developed “narrative therapy.” Narrative
therapy examines the stories by which people live
and understand their lives and the effectiveness of
those stories (see, for example, Lieblich, McAdams,
and Josselson, 2004; McAdams, 2006; McLeod,
1997; Pennebaker and Seagal, 1999; Singer, 2004;
White and Epston, 1990).

In his analysis of myth, May (1991) shows close
argument with Jung: “Individual myths will gener-
ally be a variation on some central theme of classical
myths. … Myths are archetypal patterns in human
consciousness [and therefore] where there is con-
sciousness, there will be myth” (pp. 33, 37).
Like Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung, May believed
that positive and negative tendencies coexist in all
humans and that the tension between them is the
primary source of creativity. For May, it is the dai-
monic that is responsible for great literature,
drama, and art, and it is the daimonic that is at
the heart of many myths; for example, myths por-
traying conflicts between good and evil or
between God and Satan. May (1969) defined the
daimonic as
any natural function which has the power to take
over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger
and rage, and the craving for power are
examples. The daimonic can be either
creative or destructive and is normally
both. … The daimonic is the urge in every
being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetu-
ate and increase itself. The daimonic
becomes evil when it usurps the total
personality without regard to the integra-
tion of that self, or to the unique forms and
desires of others and their need for inte-
gration. It then appears as excessive ag-
gression, hostility, cruelty—the things
about ourselves which horrify us most, and
which we repress whenever we can, or
more likely, project on others. But these
are the reverse side of the same assertion
which empowers our creativity. All life is a
flux between these two aspects of the
daimonic. (p. 123)
May had little patience with those who portray
humans as only good or bad. For him, we are po-
tentially both, and therein lies the drama of human
existence.
According to May, myths serve four primary
functions: They provide a sense of identity, provide
a sense of community, support our moral values,
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 579
and provide a means of dealing with the mysteries
of creation. Most important, however, “hunger for
myth is a hunger for community. … To be a mem-
ber of one’s community is to share in its myths”
(1991, p. 45). For May, then, the best myths are
those that encourage a sense of kinship among hu-
mans. The myth of the rugged individual, popular
for so long in the United States, encourages people
to live in isolation and leads to loneliness and vio-
lence. Survival itself depends on replacing myths
that isolate people with those that bind them to-
gether. For example,
We awake after a sleep of many centuries
to find ourselves in a new and irrefutable
sense in the myth of humankind. We find
ourselves in a new world community; we
cannot destroy the parts without destroy-
ing the whole. In this bright loveliness we
know now that we are truly sisters and
brothers, at last in the same family. (May,
1991, p. 302)
Human Science. Unlike many existential thin-
kers, May was not opposed to studying humans
scientifically. He was opposed, however, to em-
ploying the methods of the physical sciences to
study humans. Such methods, he said, overlook at-
tributes that are uniquely human. Instead, May
(1967) suggested the creation of a new science spe-
cifically designed to study humans:
The outlines of a science of man we
suggest will deal with man as the symbol-
maker, the reasoner, the historical
mammal, who can participate in his com-
munity and who possesses the potentiality
of freedom and ethical action. The pursuit
of this science will take no less rigorous
thought and wholehearted discipline than
the pursuit of experimental and natural
science at their best, but it will place the
scientific enterprise in a broader context.
Perhaps it will again be possible to study
man scientifically and still see him whole.
(p. 199)
580 CHAPTER 18

Schneider (1998) elaborates the human science

envisioned by May and discusses its relevance for
contemporary psychology. Also, the emerging field
of positive psychology (discussed later in this chap-
ter) is moving in the direction suggested by May.

George Kelly
George Kelly (1905–1967) was born on April 28
on a farm near Perth, Kansas. An only child, his
father was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and
his mother was a former schoolteacher. By the

© Brandeis University
time Kelly was born, his father had given up the
ministry and turned to farming. In 1909, when
Kelly was 4 years old, his father converted a lumber
wagon into a covered wagon and with it moved his
family to Colorado, where he staked a claim to a
George Kelly
plot of land offered free to settlers. Unable to find
an adequate amount of water on their claim, the
family moved back to Kansas. There, Kelly’s edu-
cation consisted of attending a one-room school the “R” was put there so the “S” would
and being tutored by his parents. From the pioneer- have something to account for. I never did
ing efforts of his family, Kelly developed a prag- find out what that arrow stood for—not to
matic spirit that remained with him throughout this day—and I have pretty well given up
his life: the major criterion he used to judge an trying to figure it out. (p. 47)
idea or a device was whether it worked.
When Kelly was 13, he was sent to Wichita,
Next, Kelly went to the University of Kansas,
where he attended four different high schools in
where he earned his master’s degree in 1928 with a
four years. Upon graduation from high school, he
major in educational psychology and a minor in
attended Friends University in Wichita for three
labor relations. While at the University of Kansas,
years and then Park College in Parkville,
Kelly decided that it was time for him to become
Missouri, where he earned his bachelor’s degree
acquainted with Freud’s writings. Freud did not
in 1926 with majors in physics and mathematics.
impress him any more than S!R psychology did:
Kelly was totally unimpressed by his first psychol-
“I don’t remember which one of Freud’s books I
ogy class. For several class meetings, he waited in
was trying to read, but I do remember the mount-
vain for something interesting to be said. Finally,
ing feeling of incredulity that anyone could
one day the instructor wrote “S!R” on the black-
write such nonsense, much less publish it” (1969,
board, and Kelly (1969) believed that finally he was
p. 47).
going to hear something interesting. He recalled his
The next year was a busy one for Kelly; he
disappointment:
taught part-time in a labor college in Minneapolis
Although I listened intently for several and gave speech classes for the American Bankers
sessions, after that the most I could make Association and an Americanization class to immi-
of it was that the “S” was what you had to grants wishing to become U.S. citizens. In the win-
have in order to account for the “R” and ter of 1928, he moved to Sheldon, Iowa, where he

taught at a junior college. Among his other duties,
Kelly coached dramatics, and this experience may
have influenced his later theorizing. It was here that
Kelly met his future wife, Gladys Thompson, an
English teacher at the same school. After a year
and a half, Kelly returned to Minnesota, where he
taught for a brief time at the University of
Minnesota. He then returned to Wichita to work
for a while as an aeronautical engineer. In 1929 he
received an exchange scholarship, which allowed
him to study for a year at the University of
Edinburgh in Scotland. It was while earning his
advanced degree in education at Edinburgh under
the supervision of the illustrious statistician and psy-
chologist Sir Godfrey Thomson that Kelly became
interested in psychology. His thesis was on predict-
ing teaching success.
In 1930, on his return from Scotland, Kelly
enrolled in the graduate program in psychology at
the State University of Iowa, where he obtained his
doctorate in 1931. His dissertation was on the com-
mon factors in speech and reading disabilities. Kelly
began his academic career at Fort Hays Kansas State
College during the Great Depression. This was a
time when there were many troubled people;
Kelly desperately wanted to help them, but his
training in physiological psychology did not equip
him to do so. He decided to become a psychother-
apist. His lack of training in clinical psychology,
along with his pragmatic attitude, gave Kelly great
latitude in dealing with emotional problems, and
his observations eventually resulted in his unique
theory of personality.
Soon after arriving at Fort Hays, Kelly devel-
oped traveling clinics that serviced the public school
system. The clinics brought Kelly into contact with
a wide range of emotional problems that both stu-
dents and teachers experienced. Kelly soon made a
remarkable observation. Because he was not trained
in any particular therapeutic approach, he began to
experiment with a variety of approaches, and he
discovered that anything that caused his clients to view
themselves or their problems differently improved the situ-
ation. Whether a proposed explanation was “logi-
cal” or “correct” seemed to have little to do with its
effectiveness:
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 581
I began fabricating “insights.” I deliberately
offered “preposterous interpretations” to
my clients. Some of them were about as
un-Freudian as I could make them—first
proposed somewhat cautiously, of course,
and then, as I began to see what was hap-
pening, more boldly. My only criteria
were that the explanation account for the
crucial facts as the client saw them, and
that it carry implications for approaching
the future in a different way. (Kelly, 1969,
p. 52)
In this statement lies the cornerstone of Kelly’s
position: Whether or not a person has a psycholog-
ical problem is mainly a matter of how that person
views things.
At the beginning of World War II, Kelly
joined the Navy and was placed in charge of a local
civilian pilot-training program. After the war, he
taught at the University of Maryland for a year
and in 1946 moved to Ohio State University as
professor of psychology and director of clinical psy-
chology. It was during his 19 years at Ohio State
that Kelly refined his theory of personality and his
approach to psychotherapy. In 1955, he published
his most important work, The Psychology of Personal
Constructs, in two volumes.
In 1960 Kelly and his wife received a grant
from the human ecology fund, allowing them to
travel around the world discussing the relationship
between Kelly’s theory and international problems.
In 1965 Kelly accepted a position at Brandeis
University, where for a short time he was a col-
league of Maslow. Kelly died on March 6, 1967,
at the age of 62. His honors included presidencies
of both the clinical and counseling divisions of the
APA. He also headed the American Board of
Examiners in Professional Psychology, an organiza-
tion whose purpose was to upgrade the quality of
professional psychology.
Constructive Alternativism. Kelly observed
that the major goal of scientists is to reduce uncer-
tainty; and because he believed that this is also the
goal of all humans, he said all humans are like
582 CHAPTER 18
scientists. But whereas scientists create theories with
which they attempt to predict future events, non-
scientists create construct systems to predict fu-
ture events. If either a scientific theory or a personal
construct system is effective, it adequately predicts
the future and thereby reduces uncertainty. And
both scientific theories and construct systems are
tested empirically. That is, they are checked against
reality and are revised until their ability to predict
future events or experiences is satisfactory. For
Kelly a construct was a verbal label. For example,
On meeting a person for the first time, one
might construe that person with the con-
struct “friendly.” If the person’s subsequent
behavior is in accordance with the con-
struct of friendly, then the construct will
be useful in anticipating that person’s be-
havior. If the new acquaintance acts in an
unfriendly manner, he or she will need to
be construed either with different con-
structs or by using the other pole … of the
friendly-unfriendly construct. The major
point is that constructs are used to antici-
pate the future, so they must fit reality.
Arriving at a construct system that corre-
sponds fairly closely to reality is largely a
matter of trial and error. (Hergenhahn and
Olson, 2007, p. 409)
For Kelly, whether or not an experience is
physically pleasant is relatively unimportant. Of
greater importance is whether or not it validates
the predictions generated by one’s construct system.
Kelly (1970) said, “Confirmation and disconfirma-
tion of one’s predictions [have] greater psychologi-
cal significance than rewards, punishments, or…
drive reduction” (p. 11).
With his concept of constructive alternati-
vism, Kelly aligned himself squarely with the ex-
istentialists. Kelly maintained that people are free to
choose the constructs they use in interacting with
the world. This means that people can view and
interpret events in an almost infinite number of
ways because construing them is an individual mat-
ter. No one needs to be a victim of circumstances
nor a victim of the past; all are free to view things as
they wish:
We take the stand that there are always
some alternative constructions available to
choose among in dealing with the world.
No one needs to paint himself into a cor-
ner; no one needs to be completely
hemmed in by circumstances; no one
needs to be the victim of his biography.
(Kelly, 1955, Vol. 1, p. 15)
According to Kelly, it is not common experi-
ence that makes people similar; rather, it is how
they construe reality. If two people employ more
or less the same personal constructs in dealing with
the world, then they are similar no matter how
similar or dissimilar their physical experiences had
been. Kelly also said that to truly understand an-
other person, we have to know how that person
construes things. In other words, we have to
know what that person’s expectations are, and
then we can choose to act in accordance with those
expectations. The deepest type of social interaction
occurs when this process is mutual.
Kelly and Vaihinger. Although Kelly’s thinking
was existential in nature, there is no evidence that
he was directly influenced by any existential philo-
sophers or psychologists. However, he was aware of
Vaihinger’s philosophy of “as if.” Although there
are important differences between Vaihinger’s phi-
losophy and Kelly’s theory (see Hermans, Kempen,
and Van Loon, 1992), both emphasized proposi-
tional thinking, or the experimentation with ideas
to see where they lead. About Vaihinger, Kelly
(1964) said,
Toward the end of the last century a
German philosopher, Hans Vaihinger, be-
gan to develop a system of philosophy he
called the “philosophy of ‘as if.’” In it he
offered a system of thought in which God
and reality might best be represented as
[propositions]. This was not to say that
either God or reality was any less certain
than anything else in the realm of man’s

awareness, but only that all matters con-
fronting man might best be regarded in
hypothetical ways. In some measure, I
suppose, I am suggesting that Vaihinger’s
position has particular value for psychol-
ogy. At least, let us pursue the topic—
which is probably just the way Vaihinger
would have proposed that we go at it.
(p. 139)
The following statement nicely summarizes
Kelly’s belief in the importance of propositional
thinking and exemplifies his kinship with existential
philosophy: “Whatever nature may be, or however
the quest for truth will turn out in the end, the
events we face today are subject to as great a variety
of constructions as our wits will enable us to con-
trive” (1970, p. 1).
Fixed-Role Therapy. Kelly’s approach to ther-
apy reflected his belief that psychological problems
are perceptual problems and that the job of the thera-
pist is therefore to help the client view things differ-
ently. Kelly often began the therapeutic process by
having a client write a self-characterization,
which provided Kelly with information about
how the client viewed himself or herself, the world,
and other people. Next, Kelly created a role for the
client to play for about two weeks. The character in
the role was markedly different from the client’s
self-characterization. The client became an actor,
and the therapist became a supporting actor. Kelly
called this approach to treating clients fixed-role
therapy. He hoped that this procedure would
help the client discover other possible ways of
viewing his or her life:
What I am saying is that it is not so much
what man is that counts as it is what he
ventures out to make himself. To make the
leap he must do more than disclose himself;
he must risk a certain amount of confusion.
Then, as soon as he does catch a glimpse of a
different kind of life, he needs to find some
way of overcoming the paralyzing moment
of threat, for this is the instant when he
wonders what he really is—whether he is
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 583
what he just was or is what he is about to be.
(Kelly, 1964, p. 147)
In the role of supporting actor, the therapist
helps the client deal with this threatening moment
and then provides experiences that validate the cli-
ent’s new construct system. According to Kelly,
people with psychological problems have lost their
ability to make-believe, an ability that the therapist
must help the client regain. Kelly’s fixed-role ther-
apy can be seen as an early version of narrative
therapy that was discussed earlier.
In the 1960s, there was much talk about people
being “themselves”; Kelly’s advice was the
opposite:
A good deal is said these days about being
oneself. It is supposed to be healthy to be
oneself. While it is a little hard for me to
understand how one could be anything else,
I suppose what is meant is that one should
not strive to become anything other than
what he is. This strikes me as a very dull way
of living; in fact, I would be inclined to ar-
gue that all of us would be better off if we set
out to be something other than what we are.
Well, I’m not so sure we would all be better
off—perhaps it would be more accurate to
say life would be a lot more interesting.
(Kelly, 1964, p. 147)
Kelly became a major force within clinical psy-
chology in the postwar years, but the popularity of
his ideas in the United States diminished. In England,
however, Kelly’s ideas became extremely popular—
even after his death—primarily because of the efforts
of his disciple Donald Bannister. Exposure to Kelly’s
theory remains a requirement in most clinical pro-
grams approved by the British Psychological
Association (Jankowicz, 1987, p. 483). The popular-
ity of Kelly’s theory is again growing in the
United States, especially in the area of industrial-
organizational psychology (Jankowicz, 1987). Other
areas to which Kelly’s theory is being applied in-
clude friendship formation, developmental psychol-
ogy, perception, political science, and environmental
psychology (Adams-Webber, 1979; Mancuso and
584 CHAPTER 18
Adams-Webber, 1982); depression and suicide
(Neimeyer, 1984; Parker, 1981); obsessive-
compulsive disorders (Rigdon and Epting, 1983);
drug and alcohol abuse (Dawes, 1985; Rivers and
Landfield, 1985); childhood disorders (Agnew,
1985); fear of death and physical illness (Robinson
and Wood, 1984; Viney, 1983, 1984); couples in
conflict (Neimeyer and Hudson, 1984); and other
relationship disorders (Leitner, 1984; Neimeyer and
Neimeyer, 1985).
Neimeyer and Jackson (1997) provide a brief,
but informative, overview of Kelly’s life, the devel-
opment of his ideas, and the relevance of his ideas
in contemporary psychology.
HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY
Abraham Maslow
Some argue that Alfred Adler should be considered
the first humanistic psychologist because he defined
a healthy lifestyle as one reflecting a considerable
amount of social interest and his concept of the
creative self stressed that what a person becomes is
largely a matter of personal choice. Certainly,
Adler’s theory had much in common with those
theories later called humanistic. Usually, however,
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) is recognized as
the one most responsible for making humanistic
psychology a formal branch of psychology.
Maslow was born on April 1 in Brooklyn, New
York. He was the oldest of seven children born to
parents who were Jewish immigrants from Russia.
Maslow recalled his father Samuel as loving whis-
key, women, and fighting (Wilson, 1972, p. 131).
Maslow disliked his father but eventually made
peace with him. Not so with his mother, however;
Maslow hated his mother all his life:
[Maslow] grew to maturity with an unre-
lieved hatred for her and never achieved
the slightest reconciliation. He even re-
fused to attend her funeral. He character-
ized Rose Maslow as a cruel, ignorant, and
© Psychology Archives—The University of Akron
Abraham Maslow
hostile figure, one so unloving as to nearly
induce madness in her children. In all of
Maslow’s references to his mother—some
uttered publicly while she was still alive—
there is not one that expresses any warmth
or affection. (Hoffman, 1988, p. 7)
It is interesting that Maslow saw the motivation
for his work in humanistic psychology in his hatred
of his mother. Shortly before he died, Maslow en-
tered the following comment in his personal
journal:
I’ve always wondered where my
Utopianism, ethical stress, humanism, stress
on kindness, love, friendship, and all the
rest came from. I knew certainly of the
direct consequences of having no mother-
love. But the whole thrust of my life-
philosophy and all my research and theo-
rizing also has its roots in a hatred for and
revulsion against everything she stood for.
(Lowry, 1979, p. 958)
Not being close to his parents and being the
only Jewish boy in his neighborhood, Maslow
was intensely lonely and shy and took refuge in
books and scholarly pursuits. He was an excellent
student at Boys High School in Brooklyn and went

on to attend City College of New York. While
attending City College, he made an effort to satisfy
his father’s desire for him to become a lawyer by
also attending law school. Unhappy with law
school, however, he walked out of class one night,
leaving his books behind. Being a mediocre stu-
dent at City College, he transferred to Cornell
University, where he took introductory psychology
from Edward Titchener. Titchener’s approach to
psychology did not impress Maslow, and after
only one semester at Cornell he transferred back
to City College, partly to be near his first cousin
Bertha Goodman, whom he loved very much. He
and Bertha were married in 1928 when he was 20
and she was 19, and they eventually had two chil-
dren. Prior to their marriage, Maslow had enrolled
at the University of Wisconsin, and Bertha joined
him there. By Maslow’s own account, his life did
not really begin until he and Bertha moved to
Wisconsin.
As ironic as it now seems, Maslow was first
infatuated with the behaviorism of John Watson,
in which he saw a way of solving human problems
and changing the world for the better. His infatua-
tion ended when he and Bertha had their first child:
Our first baby changed me as a psycholo-
gist. It made the behaviorism I had been so
enthusiastic about look so foolish I could
not stomach it anymore. That was the
thunderclap that settled things. … I was
stunned by the mystery and by the sense of
not really being in control. I felt small and
weak and feeble before all this. I’d say
anyone who had a baby couldn’t be a be-
haviorist. (M. H. Hall, 1968, p. 55)
At the University of Wisconsin, Maslow earned
his bachelor’s degree in 1930, his master’s degree in
1931, and his doctorate in 1934. As a graduate
student at Wisconsin, Maslow became the first doc-
toral student of the famous experimental psycholo-
gist Harry Harlow. Maslow’s dissertation was on the
establishment of dominance in a colony of mon-
keys. He observed that dominance has more to do
with a type of “inner confidence” than with physi-
cal strength, an observation that may have influ-
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 585
enced his later theorizing. During this time,
Maslow also observed that sexual behavior within
the colony was related to dominance and subservi-
ence, and he wondered whether the same was true
for human sexual activity, a possibility he would
explore shortly. After receiving his doctorate,
Maslow taught at Wisconsin for a while before
moving to Columbia University, where he became
Edward Thorndike’s research assistant. He also be-
gan his research on human sexuality by interview-
ing both male and female college students about
their sexual behavior but soon abandoned males
because they tended to lie too much about their
sexual activities (Hoffman, 1988). Maslow made
important contributions to our knowledge of hu-
man sexuality several years before Kinsey’s famous
research. Furthermore, the interviewing skills he
developed during this research served him well
when he later studied the characteristics of psycho-
logically healthy individuals.
After a year and a half at Columbia, Maslow
moved to Brooklyn College, where he stayed until
1951. Living in New York in the 1930s and 1940s
gave Maslow an opportunity to come into contact
with many prominent European psychologists who
came to the United States to escape the Nazi terror.
Among them were Erich Fromm, Max Wertheimer,
Karen Horney, and Alfred Adler. Adler began giving
seminars in his home on Friday evenings, and
Maslow attended frequently. Maslow also befriended
the famous anthropologist Ruth Benedict about this
same time. Maslow became obsessed with trying to
understand Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer,
whom he considered truly exceptional people, and
it was this obsession that evolved into Maslow’s ver-
sion of humanistic psychology.
In 1951 Maslow accepted the position of chair-
man of the psychology department at Brandeis
University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and it was
here that Maslow became the leading figure in
third-force psychology. In 1968, because of in-
creased disenchantment with academic life and fail-
ing health, Maslow accepted a fellowship offered to
him by the Saga Administrative Corporation.
Hoffman (1988) described the offer that was made
to Maslow:
586 CHAPTER 18
Laughlin [the president and chairman of
the Saga Corporation] cheerfully informed
Maslow, the fellowship was ready. He was
prepared to offer Maslow a two-
to-four-year commitment with the fol-
lowing conditions: a handsome salary, a
new car, and a personally decorated private
office with full secretarial services at Saga’s
attractive campuslike headquarters on
Stanford University’s suburban outskirts.
What would Maslow have to do in return?
Nothing. (p. 316)
Maslow accepted and, as advertised, was free to
think and write as he pleased, and he enjoyed his
freedom very much. On June 8, 1970, however,
Maslow suffered a heart attack while jogging and
died at the age of 62.
Due primarily to Maslow’s efforts, the Journal of
Humanistic Psychology was founded in 1961; also in
1961, the American Association of Humanistic
Psychologists was established, with James F. T.
Bugental as its first president; and a division of
the American Psychological Association (APA),
Humanistic Psychology, was created in 1971.
The Basic Tenets of Humanistic Psychology. The
beliefs shared by psychologists working within the
humanistic paradigm include the following:
■ Little of value can be learned about humans by
studying nonhuman animals.
■ Subjective reality is the primary guide for hu-
man behavior.
■ Studying individuals is more informative than
studying what groups of individuals have in
common.
■ A major effort should be made to discover
those things that expand and enrich human
experience.
■ Research should seek information that will
help solve human problems.
■ The goal of psychology should be to formulate
a complete description of what it means to be a
human being. Such a description would in-
clude the importance of language, the valuing
process, the full range of human emotions, and
the ways humans seek and attain meaning in
their lives.
Charlotte R. Bühler (1893–1974) was a found-
ing member of the Association of Humanistic
Psychologists and served as its president in 1965–
1966. Her influential position paper on humanistic
psychology (1971) elaborated several of the tenets
listed above and showed their relevance to such
topics as creativity, education, and psychotherapy.
Humanistic psychology, which rejects the no-
tion that psychology should be entirely scientific,
sees humans as indivisible wholes. Any attempt to
reduce them to habits, cognitive structures, or S–R
connections results in a distortion of human nature.
According to Maslow (1966), psychologists often use
scientific method to cut themselves off from the po-
etic, romantic, and spiritual aspects of human nature:
Briefly put, it appears to me that science
and everything scientific can be and often
is used as a tool in the service of a distorted,
narrowed, humorless, de-eroticized, de-
emotionalized, desacralized, and desancti-
fied Weltanschauung [world-view]. This
desacralization can be used as a defense
against being flooded by emotion, espe-
cially the emotions of humility, reverence,
mastery, wonder and awe. (p. 139)
Humanistic psychologists flatly reject the goal
of predicting and controlling human behavior,
which so many scientifically inclined psychologists
accept:
If humanistic science may be said to have
any goals beyond sheer fascination with
the human mystery and enjoyment of it,
these would be to release the person from
external controls and to make him less
predictable to the observer (to make him
freer, more creative, more inner deter-
mined) even though perhaps more pre-
dictable to himself. (Maslow, 1966, p. 40)

Humans, then, are much more than physical
objects, and therefore the methods employed by
the physical sciences have no relevance to the study
of humans. Similarly, psychoanalysis, by concen-
trating on the study of psychologically disturbed
individuals, has created a “crippled” psychology:
“It becomes more and more clear that the study
of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy spe-
cimens can yield only a crippled psychology and a
crippled philosophy” (Maslow, 1954/1970, p. 180).
For Maslow, there are exceptional people whose
lives cannot be understood simply as the absence
of mental disorders. To be understood, exceptional
people must be studied directly:
Health is not simply the absence of disease
or even the opposite of it. Any theory of
motivation that is worthy of attention
must deal with the highest capacities of the
healthy and strong person as well as with
the defensive maneuvers of crippled spirits.
(Maslow, 1954/1987, p. 14)
Maslow’s point was not that psychology should
stop attempting to be scientific or stop studying and
attempting to help those with psychological pro-
blems, but that such endeavors tell only part of
the story. Beyond this, psychology needs to attempt
to understand humans who are in the process of
reaching their full potential. We need to know
how such people think and what motivates them.
Thus, Maslow invested most of his energies in try-
ing to understand exceptional humans.
The Hierarchy of Needs. According to Maslow,
human needs are arranged in a hierarchy. The
lower the needs in the hierarchy, the more basic
they are and the more similar they are to the needs
of other animals. The higher the needs in the hier-
archy, the more distinctly human they are.
The needs are arranged so that as one satisfies a
lower need, one can deal with the next higher
need. When one’s physiological needs (such as
hunger, thirst, and sex) are predictably satisfied,
one can deal with the safety needs (protection
from the elements, pain, and unexpected dangers);
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 587
when the safety needs are reasonably satisfied, one is
free to deal with the belonging and love needs (the
need to love and be loved, to share one’s life with a
relevant other); when the belonging and love needs
are adequately satisfied, one is released to ponder
the esteem needs (to make a recognizable contribu-
tion to the well-being of one’s fellow humans); if
the esteem needs are met satisfactorily, one is in a
position to become self-actualized. Maslow’s pro-
posed hierarchy of needs can be diagrammed as
follows:
Self-Actualization
"
Esteem Needs
"
Belonging and Love Needs
"
Safety Needs
"
Physiological Needs
Self-Actualization. By self-actualization, Mas-
low meant reaching one’s full, human potential:
So far as motivational status is concerned,
healthy people have sufficiently gratified
their basic needs for safety, belongingness,
love, respect, and self-esteem so that they
are motivated primarily by trends to self-
actualization defined as ongoing actuali-
zation of potentials, capacities and talents,
as fulfillment of mission (or call, fate, des-
tiny, or vocation), as a fuller knowledge of,
and acceptance of, the person’s own in-
trinsic nature, as an unceasing trend toward
unity, integration or synergy within the
person. (Maslow, 1968, p. 25)
Musicians must make music, artists
must paint, poets must write if they are to
be ultimately at peace with themselves.
What humans can be, they must be. They
must be true to their own nature. This
need we may call self-actualization.
(Maslow, 1954/1987, p. 22)
588 CHAPTER 18
The concept of self-actualization goes back at
least as far as Aristotle, but what Aristotle meant by
self-actualization was the innate tendency to mani-
fest the characteristics or the essence of one’s spe-
cies. For example, an acorn has an innate tendency
to become an oak tree and to exhibit the character-
istics of oak treeness. Jung reintroduced the concept
of self-actualization into modern psychology, and
what he meant by the term and what Maslow later
meant by it was distinctly different from the
Aristotelian meaning. By self-actualization, Jung,
Maslow, and Rogers (whom we consider next)
meant the realization of an individual’s potential,
not that of the species’ potential, as was Aristotle’s
meaning.
Because it is impossible for any person to
completely reach his or her full potential, Maslow
referred to those who have satisfied hierarchical
needs as self-actualizing. (A list of characteristics of
self-actualizing people is given shortly.)
As one climbs the hierarchy, the needs become
more fragile. That is, the physiological and safety
needs have a long evolutionary history and are
therefore very powerful; the higher needs for
love, esteem, and self-actualization are “newer”
and distinctly human and therefore do not have as
firm a biological foundation. This means that their
satisfaction is easily interfered with. The higher
up the hierarchy one goes, the truer this is; and
therefore the satisfaction of the need for self-
actualization—although the need is innate—is eas-
ily interfered with. Of self-actualization, Maslow
said, “This inner nature is not strong and overpow-
ering and unmistakable like the instincts of animals.
It is weak and delicate and subtle and easily over-
come by habit, cultural pressure, and wrong atti-
tudes toward it” (1968, p. 4).
Thus, although all humans have an innate drive
to be self-actualized (to reach their full potential as
humans), self-actualized people are rare. Another
major reason that self-actualization occurs so infre-
quently is that it requires a great deal of honest
knowledge of oneself, and most humans are fearful
of such knowledge:
More than any other kind of knowledge
we fear knowledge of ourselves, knowl-
edge that might transform our self-esteem
and our self-image. … While human
beings love knowledge and seek it—they
are curious—they also fear it. The closer to
the personal it is, the more they fear it.
(p. 16)
Related to the fear of self-knowledge is the
Jonah complex, which Maslow (1971) defined as
“fear of one’s own greatness, … evasion of one’s
destiny, … running away from one’s best talents”
(p. 34). According to Maslow, humans often fear
success as much as they do failure and this fear,
like the fear of self-knowledge, militates against
self-actualization.
The Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People. As
we have seen, Maslow believed that for too long
psychology had emphasized the study of lower an-
imals and psychologically disturbed individuals. To
begin to remedy the situation, he studied a number
of people he thought were self-actualizing. Among
them were Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer,
Sigmund Freud, Jane Addams, William James, and
Abraham Lincoln. Maslow concluded that self-
actualizing people have the following
characteristics:
■ They perceive reality accurately and fully.
■ They demonstrate a great acceptance of
themselves and of others.
■ They exhibit spontaneity and naturalness.
■ They have a need for privacy.
■ They tend to be independent of their envi-
ronment and culture.
■ They demonstrate a continuous freshness of
appreciation.
■ They tend to have periodic mystic or peak
experiences. Maslow (1954/1987) described
peak experiences as

feelings of limitless horizons opening up to
the vision, the feeling of being simulta-
neously more powerful and also more
helpless than one ever was before, the
feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and
awe, the loss of placing in time and space
with, finally, the conviction that some-
thing extremely important and valuable
had happened, so that the subject is to
some extent transformed and strengthened
even in his daily life by such experiences.
(p. 137)
■ They are concerned with all humans instead of
with only their friends, relatives, and
acquaintances.
■ They tend to have only a few friends.
■ They have a strong ethical sense but do not
necessarily accept conventional ethics.
■ They have a well-developed but not hostile
sense of humor.
■ They are creative.
Although Maslow (1954/1987) concluded that
his group of self-actualizing people was made up of
outstanding humans, he also indicated that they
were not without faults:
Our subjects show many of the lesser hu-
man failings. They too are equipped with
silly, wasteful or thoughtless habits. They
can be boring, stubborn, irritating. They
are by no means free from a rather super-
ficial vanity, pride, partiality to their own
productions, family, friends, and children.
Temper outbursts are not rare.
Our subjects are occasionally capable of
an extraordinary and unexpected ruthless-
ness. It must be remembered that they are
very strong people. This makes it possible
for them to display a surgical coldness when
this is called for, beyond the power of the
average man. The man who found that a
long-trusted acquaintance was dishonest cut
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 589
himself off from this friendship sharply and
abruptly and without any observable pangs
whatsoever. Another woman who was
married to someone she did not love, when
she decided on divorce, did it with a deci-
siveness that looked almost like ruthlessness.
Some of them recover so quickly from the
death of people close to them as to seem
heartless. (p. 146)
Deficiency and Being Motivation and Perception. If
a person is functioning at any level other than self-
actualization, he or she is said to be deficiency-
motivated. That is, the person is seeking specific
things to satisfy specific needs, and his or her per-
ceptions are need-directed. Jourard describes need-
directed perception (also called deficiency or D-
perception) as follows: “Need-directed perception
is a highly focused searchlight darting here and
there, seeking the objects which will satisfy needs,
ignoring everything irrelevant to the need” (1974,
p. 68). Deficiency motivation (D-motivation)
leads to need-directed perception.
Unlike most psychologists, Maslow was mainly
interested in what happens to people after their basic
needs are satisfied. His answer was that people who
satisfy their basic needs and become self-actualizing
enter into a different mode of existence. Instead of
being deficiency-motivated, they are being-
motivated (B-motivated). Being motivation in-
volves embracing the higher values of life such as
beauty, truth, and justice. Being-motivated people
are also capable of B-love, which unlike D-love is
nonpossessive and insatiable. Unlike D-perception,
being perception (B-perception) does not involve
seeking specific things in the environment.
Therefore, the person interacting with the world
through B-perception is open to a wider range of
experience than the person who interacts through
D-perception.
Transpersonal Psychology. Toward the end of
his life, Maslow began to ponder a new kind of
psychology that went beyond personal experience.
This transpersonal psychology would constitute
a fourth force and would focus on the mystical,
590 CHAPTER 18
ecstatic, or spiritual aspects of human nature. In the
preface of his book Toward a Psychology of Being
(1968), Maslow described his vision of fourth-
force psychology:
I … consider Humanistic, Third Force
Psychology to be transitional, a preparation
for a still “higher” Fourth Psychology,
transpersonal, transhuman, centered in the
cosmos rather than in human needs and
interest, going beyond humanness, iden-
tity, self-actualization, and the like. …
These new developments may very well
offer a tangible, usable, effective satisfac-
tion of the “frustrated idealism” of many
quietly desperate people, especially young
people. These psychologies give promise
of developing into the life-philosophy, the
religion-surrogate, the value-system, the
life-program that these people have been
missing. Without the transcendent and the
transpersonal, we get sick, violent, and
nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic.
We need something “bigger than we are”
to be awed by and to commit ourselves to
in a new, naturalistic, empirical, non-
churchly sense. (pp. iii–iv)
Maslow lived to see Anthony J. Sutich (1907–
1976), who was also a founding editor of the Journal
of Humanistic Psychology, found the Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology in 1969. Maslow’s “The
Farther Reaches of Human Nature” appeared as
the lead article in the new journal. (This article
should not be confused with the book of readings
published posthumously [1971] with the same title.)
Transpersonal psychology has much in common
with non-Western psychologies, philosophies, and
religions. For example, all recognize meditation as a
way of getting in touch with the higher states of
consciousness. Many interested in the occult and in
parapsychology have been attracted to humanistic
psychology and especially to transpersonal psychol-
ogy. Perhaps because these topics are generally
viewed as outside the realm of science, the APA
has thus far denied petitions to create a division of
transpersonal psychology.
Maslow’s many honors include election to the
presidency of the APA for the year 1967–1968. At
the time of his death in 1970, Maslow’s ideas were
influential not only within psychology but also in
fields such as medicine, marketing, theology, edu-
cation, and nursing. Although Maslow’s influence
has diminished, it is not uncommon for his theory
of motivation to be taught in psychology, educa-
tion, and business courses. Coon (2006) speculates
as to the reasons for Maslow’s lasting appeal:
Perhaps it is that his theory of motivation
embodies deeply felt democratic ideals
expressed in psychological terms. It is
hopeful and optimistic, even utopian in its
dream of an eventual Eupsychia [good
mind country]. Given the right set of
psychological and social conditions, every
person among us has the potential to
become happy, fulfilled, creative, emo-
tionally whole—in Maslow’s terms, self-
actualized. It is the American ethos of
self-improvement taken to its ultimate
psychological conclusion, and it unabash-
edly embraces our right to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. (pp. 270–271)
Carl Rogers
Carl Rogers (1902–1987) was born on January 8
in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, and
was the fourth of six children. He was closer to
his mother than to his father, who was a successful
civil engineer and was often away from home. In
the affluent suburb of Oak Park, Rogers attended
school with Ernest Hemingway and the children
of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Rogers described his family as closely knit and
highly religious. Friendships outside the family
were discouraged:
I think the attitudes toward persons outside
our large family can be summed up sche-
matically in this way: Other persons be-
have in dubious ways which we do not
approve in our family. Many of them play

© Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS
Carl Rogers
cards, go to movies, smoke, drink, and
engage in other activities—some unmen-
tionable. So the best thing to do is to be
tolerant of them, since they may not know
better, and to keep away from any close
communication with them and live your
life within the family. (Rogers, 1973, p. 3)
Not surprisingly, Rogers was a loner in school
and, like Maslow, took refuge in books, reading
everything that he could get his hands on, including
encyclopedias and dictionaries. When Rogers was
12 years old, he and his family moved to a farm 25
miles west of Chicago. The purpose of the move
was to provide a more wholesome and religious
atmosphere for the family. Because his father in-
sisted that the farm be run scientifically, Rogers
developed an intense interest in science, reading
everything he could about agricultural experiments.
Rogers maintained this interest in science through-
out his career, although he worked in one of psy-
chology’s more subjective areas. When Rogers
graduated from high school, he intended to become
a farmer; and when he entered the University of
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 591
Wisconsin in 1919, he chose to study agriculture.
In his early years in college, Rogers was very active
in church activities, and in 1922 he was selected to
attend the World Student Christian Federation
Conference in Peking (Beijing), China. During this
six-month trip, Rogers, for the first time, experi-
enced people of different cultures with different
religions. Rogers wrote to his parents declaring his
independence from their conservative religion, and
almost immediately he developed an ulcer that
caused him to be hospitalized for several weeks.
Upon returning to the University of
Wisconsin, Rogers changed his major from agricul-
ture to history. He received his bachelor’s degree in
1924. Shortly after graduation, he married his child-
hood sweetheart, Helen Elliott, with whom he
eventually had two children. Soon after their mar-
riage, Carl and Helen moved to New York, where
he enrolled in the liberal Union Theological
Seminary while also taking courses in psychol-
ogy and education at neighboring Columbia
University. After two years at the seminary,
Rogers’s doubts about whether the religious ap-
proach was the most effective way of helping peo-
ple caused him to transfer to Columbia University
on a full-time basis; there he earned his master’s
degree in clinical psychology in 1928 and his doc-
torate in 1931. His dissertation concerned the mea-
surement of personality adjustment in children.
After obtaining his doctorate, Rogers went to
work for the Child Study Department of the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
in Rochester, New York, where he had served as a
fellow while working toward his doctorate. Rogers
had several experiences there that caused him to
develop his own brand of psychotherapy. For ex-
ample, the society was dominated by therapists
trained in the psychoanalytic tradition, people
who saw their job as gaining an “insight” into the
cause of a problem and then sharing that insight
with the client. At first, Rogers followed this pro-
cedure. In one case, he concluded that a mother’s
rejection of her son was the cause of the son’s de-
linquent behavior, but his attempts to share this
insight with the mother failed completely. Rogers
(1961) described what happened next:
592 CHAPTER 18
Finally I gave up. I told her that it seemed
we had both tried, but we had failed. …
She agreed. So we concluded the inter-
view, shook hands, and she walked to the
door of the office. Then she turned and
asked, “Do you take adults for counseling
here?” When I replied in the affirmative,
she said, “Well then, I would like some
help.” She came to the chair she had left,
and began to pour out her despair about
her marriage, her troubled relationship
with her husband, her sense of failure and
confusion, all very different from the sterile
“Case History” she had given before. Real
therapy began then.
This incident was one of a number
which helped me to experience that fact—
only fully realized later—that it is the client
who knows what hurts, what directions to
go, what problems are crucial, what ex-
periences have been deeply buried. It be-
gan to occur to me that unless I had a need
to demonstrate my own cleverness and
learning, I would do better to rely upon
the client for the direction of movement in
the process. (pp. 11–12)
It was while Rogers was employed by the
Child Study Department that he wrote his first
book, The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child
(1939), and its publication led to an offer of an
academic position at Ohio State University.
Rogers was reluctant to leave the clinical setting,
but when Ohio State agreed to start him at the
rank of full professor, he decided, at the age of
38, to begin a new career in the academic world.
At Ohio, Rogers communicated his own ideas con-
cerning the therapeutic process in his now famous
Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer Concepts in
Practice (1942). It is widely believed that this book
described the first major alternative to psychoanaly-
sis. Rogers’s approach to psychotherapy was con-
sidered revolutionary because it eliminated the
needs for diagnosis, a search for the causes of dis-
turbances, and any type of labeling of disorders. He
also refused to call disturbed individuals “patients,”
as had been the case with the psychoanalysts; for
Rogers, people seeking help were “clients.”
Gendlin (1988) said that Rogers’s proposed alterna-
tive to psychoanalysis was nothing less than a “war
against monolithic authority” (p. 127).
As part of the war effort, in 1944 Rogers took a
leave from Ohio State to become director of
counseling services for the United Services
Organization in New York. After one year,
Rogers moved to the University of Chicago as pro-
fessor of psychology and director of counseling. It
was during his 12-year stay at Chicago that Rogers
wrote what many consider to be his most important
work, Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice,
Implications, and Theory (1951). This book marked
a change in Rogers’s approach to psychology.
Originally, his approach was called nondirective,
believing that in a positive therapeutic atmosphere
clients would solve their problems automatically.
Therapy became client-centered when Rogers re-
alized that the therapist had to make an active at-
tempt to understand and accept a client’s subjective
reality before progress could be made. It was also at
Chicago that Rogers and his colleagues engaged in
the first attempt to objectively measure the effec-
tiveness of psychotherapy.
To measure therapy’s effectiveness, Rogers
used a method called the Q-technique (also called
the Q-sort technique) created by the British-trained
researcher William Stephenson (1953). Rogers’s
version of the technique involved having clients
describe themselves as they were at the moment
(real self) and then as they would like to become
(ideal self). The two selves were measured in such a
way as to allow the correlation between them to be
determined. Typically, when therapy begins, the
correlation between the two selves is very low,
but if therapy is effective it becomes higher. That
is, the real self becomes more similar to the ideal
self. Using this technique, a therapist can determine
the effectiveness of his or her procedures at any
point during, or after, therapy (see, for example,
Rogers, 1954; Rogers and Dymond, 1955).
In 1957 Rogers returned to the University of
Wisconsin, where he held the dual position of pro-
fessor of psychology and professor of psychiatry, and

he did much to resolve differences between the two
disciplines. In 1963 Rogers joined the Western
Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla,
California. At WBSI Rogers became increasingly in-
terested in encounter groups and sensitivity training
and less interested in individual therapy. Toward the
end of his life, he also became interested in promot-
ing world peace. In 1968 Rogers and 75 of his col-
leagues resigned from WBSI and formed the Center
for the Studies of the Person, also in La Jolla. There,
Rogers continued to work with encounter groups,
but he expanded his interests in education and inter-
national politics. In 1985 he organized the Vienna
Peace Project, which brought leaders from 13 coun-
tries together, and in 1986 he conducted peace
workshops in Moscow. Rogers continued to work
on these and other projects until his death on
February 4, 1987, from cardiac arrest following sur-
gery for a broken hip.
Rogers received many honors. He served as
president of the APA in 1946–1947, and in 1956
he was a corecipient, along with Kenneth Spence
and Wolfgang Köhler, of the first Distinguished
Scientific Contribution Award from the APA.
The latter award moved Rogers to tears because
he believed that his fellow psychologists had viewed
his work as unscientific: “My voice choked and the
tears flowed when I was called forth … to receive
[the award]” (Rogers, 1974, p. 117). In 1972
Rogers received the Distinguished Professional
Contribution Award from the APA, making him
the first person in the history of the APA to receive
both the Distinguished Scientific and Professional
Contribution Awards.
Rogers’s Theory of Personality. At the urging
of others, Rogers developed a theory of personality
to account for the phenomena he had observed
during the therapeutic process. The rudiments of
his theory were first presented in his APA presiden-
tial address (Rogers, 1947) and then expanded in his
Client-Centered Therapy (1951). The most complete
statement of his theory was in a chapter titled “A
Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal
Relationships, as Developed in the Client-Centered
Framework” (Rogers, 1959).
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 593
Like Maslow, Rogers postulated an innate hu-
man drive toward self-actualization, and if people
use this actualizing tendency as a frame of reference in
living their lives, there is a strong likelihood that
they will live fulfilling lives and ultimately reach
their full potential. Such people are said to be living
according to the organismic valuing process.
Using this process, a person approaches and main-
tains experiences that are in accord with the actual-
izing tendency but terminates and avoids those that
are not. Such a person is motivated by his or
her own true feelings and is living what the exis-
tentialists call an authentic life—that is, a life moti-
vated by a person’s true inner feelings rather than
mores, beliefs, traditions, values, or conventions im-
posed by others. Here we see Rogers restating the
belief of the ancient Cynics and of Rousseau in the
primacy of personal feelings as guides for action. In
the following quotation (Rogers, 1961), we see a
strong similarity among ancient Cynicism,
Rousseau’s romantic philosophy, and Rogers’s hu-
manistic psychology:
One of the basic things which I was a long
time in realizing, and which I am still
learning, is that when an activity feels as
though it is valuable or worth doing, it is
worth doing. Put another way, I have
learned that my total organismic sensing of
a situation is more trustworthy than my
intellect.
All of my professional life I have been
going in directions which others thought
were foolish, and about which I have had
many doubts myself. But I have never re-
gretted moving in directions which “felt
right,” even though I have often felt lonely
or foolish at the time. … Experience is for
me, the highest authority. … Neither the
Bible nor the prophets—neither Freud nor
research—neither the revelations of God
nor man—can take precedence over my
own experience. (pp. 22–24)
Unfortunately, according to Rogers, most peo-
ple do not live according to their innermost feelings
(the organismic valuing process). A problem arises
594 CHAPTER 18
because of our childhood need for positive re-
gard. Positive regard involves receiving such things
as love, warmth, sympathy, and acceptance from
the relevant people in a child’s life. If positive re-
gard is given freely to a child, no problem will arise,
but usually it is not freely given. Instead parents (or
other relevant people) give children positive regard
only if they act or think in certain ways. This sets up
conditions of worth. The children soon learn that
in order to receive love, they must act and think in
accordance with the values of the relevant people in
their lives. Gradually, as the children internalize
those values, the values replace the organismic val-
uing process as a guide for living life. As long as
people live their lives according to someone else’s
values instead of their own true feelings, experience
will be edited, and certain experiences that would
have been in accord with the organismic valuing
process will be denied:
In order to hold the love of a parent, the
child introjects as his own values and per-
ceptions which he does not actually ex-
perience. He then denies to awareness the
organismic experiencings that contradict
these introjections. Thus, his self-concept
contains false elements that are not based
on what he is, in his experiencing.
(Rogers, 1966, p. 192)
According to Rogers, there is only one way to
avoid imposing conditions of worth on people, and
that is to give them unconditional positive regard.
With unconditional positive regard, people are
loved and respected for what they truly are; there-
fore, there is no need for certain experiences to be
denied or distorted. Only someone who experi-
ences unconditional positive regard can become a
fully functioning person:
If an individual should experience only un-
conditional positive regard, then no conditions
of worth would develop, self-regard would
be unconditional, the needs for positive re-
gard and self-regard would never be at vari-
ance with organismic evaluation, and the in-
dividual would continue to be
psychologically adjusted, and would be fully
functioning. (Rogers, 1959, p. 224)
When conditions of worth replace the organis-
mic valuing process as a guide for living, the person
becomes incongruent. What Rogers called an in-
congruent person is essentially the same as what
the existentialists call an inauthentic person. In both
cases, the person is no longer true to his or her own
feelings. Rogers viewed incongruency as the cause
of mental disorders, and he believed therefore that
the goal of psychotherapy is to help people over-
come conditions of worth and again live in accor-
dance with their organismic valuing processes.
Rogers (1959) described this goal as follows:
This, as we see it, is the basic estrangement in
man. He has not been true to himself, to his
own natural organismic valuing of experi-
ence, but for the sake of preserving the pos-
itive regard of others has now come to falsify
some of the values he experiences and to
perceive them only in terms based upon their
value to others. Yet this has not been a con-
scious choice, but a natural—and tragic—
development in infancy. The path of devel-
opment toward psychological maturity, the
path of therapy, is the undoing of this
estrangement in man’s functioning, the dis-
solving of conditions of worth, the achieve-
ment of a self which is congruent with
experience, and the restoration of a unified
organismic valuing process as the regulator of
behavior. (pp. 226–227)
When people are living in accordance with
their organismic valuing process, they are fully
functioning. The fully functioning person embraces
life in much the same way as Maslow’s self-
actualizing person does.
Rogers fully appreciated the fact that human
growth can be facilitated by relationships other
than that between therapist and client. Rogers
(1980) described the conditions that must charac-
terize any relationship if that relationship is going to
facilitate personal growth:

There are three conditions that must be
present in order for a climate to be growth
promoting. These conditions apply
whether we are speaking of the relation-
ship between therapist and client, parent
and child, leader and group, teacher and
student, or administrator and staff. The
conditions apply, in fact, in any situation in
which the development of the person is a
goal. … The first element could be called
genuineness, realness, or congruence. …
The second attitude of importance in
creating a climate for change is acceptance,
or caring, or prizing—what I have called
“unconditional positive regard.”… The third
facilitative aspect of the relationship is em-
pathic understanding. … This kind of sensi-
tive, active listening is exceedingly rare in
our lives. We think we listen, but very
rarely do we listen with real understanding,
true empathy. Yet listening, of this very
special kind, is one of the most potent
forces for change that I know. [italics
added] (pp. 115–116)
Rogers’s person-centered psychology has been
applied to such diverse areas as religion, medicine,
law enforcement, ethnic and cultural relations, pol-
itics, and international conflict, as well as organiza-
tional development (Levant and Schlien, 1984);
education (Rogers, 1969, 1983); marriage
(Rogers, 1972); personal power (Rogers, 1977);
and the future (Rogers, 1980).
We will have more to say about Rogers’s con-
tributions to professional psychology in Chapter 21.
COMPARISON OF
EXISTENTIAL AND
HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY
Existential and humanistic psychology have enough
in common to cause them often to be lumped to-
gether as “existential-humanistic psychology” or
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 595
simply as humanistic psychology. The following is
a list of beliefs shared by existential and humanistic
psychology:
■ Humans have a free will and are therefore re-
sponsible for their actions.
■ The most appropriate method by which to
study humans is phenomenology, the study of
intact subjective experience.
■ To be understood, the human must be studied
as a whole. Elementism of any type gives a
distorted view of human nature.
■ Humans are unique, and therefore anything
learned about other animals is irrelevant to the
understanding of humans.
■ Each human is unique, therefore, anything
learned about one human is irrelevant to the
understanding of others.
■ Hedonism is not a major motive in human
behavior. Instead of seeking pleasure and
avoiding pain, humans seek meaningful lives
characterized by personal growth.
■ Living an authentic life is better than living an
inauthentic one.
■ Because they possess unique attributes such as
free will, humans cannot be effectively studied
using traditional scientific methodology.
Perhaps humans can be studied objectively, but
to do so would require the creation of a new,
uniquely human science.
The major difference between existential and
humanistic psychology lies in their assumptions
about human nature. The humanists assume that
humans are basically good, and therefore, if placed
in a healthy environment, they will naturally live a
life in harmony with other humans. For humanists
the major motivation in life is the actualizing ten-
dency, which is innate and which continually drives
a person toward those activities and events condu-
cive to self-actualization. The existentialists, on the
other hand, view human nature as essentially neu-
tral. For them, the only thing we are born with is
the freedom to choose the nature of our existence.
596 CHAPTER 18
This is what Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) meant
by his famous statement “Existence precedes
essence.” For Sartre and most existential philoso-
phers, there is no human essence at birth. We are
free to choose our own essence as a unique human
being. We become our choices: “Man is nothing
else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first
principle of existentialism” (Sartre, 1957, p. 15).
We can exercise our freedom to create any type
of life we wish, either good or bad. The major
motive in life, according to the existentialist, is to
create meaning by effectively making choices. Many
existential thinkers have reached the conclusion
that without meaning, life is not worth living, but
that with meaning, humans can tolerate almost any
conditions. Frankl quoted Nietzsche as saying, “He
who has a why to live can bear with almost any
how” (1946/1984, p. 12). Frankl maintained that
there is only one motivational force for humans,
and that is what he called the “will to meaning”
(1946/1984, p. 121).
Generally, the view of human nature the hu-
manists hold causes them to be optimistic about
humans and their future. If societies could be
made compatible with our nature, they say, humans
could live together in peace and harmony. The ex-
istentialists are more pessimistic. For them, humans
have no built-in guidance system but only the free-
dom to choose. Because we are free, we cannot
blame God, our parents, genetics, or circumstances
for our misfortune—only ourselves. This responsi-
bility often makes freedom more of a curse than a
blessing, and people often choose not to exercise
their freedom by conforming to values that others
have formulated. In his famous book Escape from
Freedom (1941), Erich Fromm (1900–1980) said
that often the first thing people do when they rec-
ognize their freedom is attempt to escape from it by
affiliating themselves with someone or something
that will reduce or eliminate their choices.
Another important difference between existen-
tial and humanistic psychologists is that for the
existentialist, the realization that one’s death is in-
evitable is extremely important. Before a rich, full
life is possible, one must come to grips with the fact
that one’s life is finite. The humanistic psychologist
does not dwell as much on the meaning of death in
human existence. For additional discussion of the
differences between existential philosophy and hu-
manistic psychology, see DeCarvalho (1990).
In Chapter 21 we will note the similarities be-
tween third-force psychology and contemporary
postmodernism.
Evaluation
Modern humanistic psychology began as a protest
movement against behaviorism and psychoanalysis.
Behaviorism saw too much similarity between
humans and other animals. The protesters con-
tended that behaviorism concentrated on trivial
types of behavior and ignored or minimized the
mental and emotional processes that make humans
unique. Psychoanalysis focused on abnormal indivi-
duals and emphasized unconscious or sexual moti-
vation while ignoring healthy individuals whose
primary motives included personal growth and the
improvement of society. Humanistic psychologists
criticized scientific psychology in general because it
modeled itself after the physical sciences by assum-
ing determinism and seeking lawfulness among clas-
ses of events. Scientific psychology also viewed in-
dividual uniqueness, something that was very
important to humanistic psychology, as a nuisance;
only general laws were of interest. Also, because
science and reliable measurement went hand in
hand, scientific psychology excluded many impor-
tant human attributes from study simply because of
the difficulty of measuring them. Processes such as
willing, valuing, and seeking meaning are examples
of such attributes, as are such emotions as love,
guilt, despair, happiness, and hope.
Criticisms
It should come as no surprise that humanistic psy-
chology itself has been criticized. Each of the fol-
lowing has been offered as one of its weaknesses:
■ Humanistic psychology equates behaviorism
with the work of Watson and Skinner. Both
men stressed environmental events as the causes

of human behavior and denied the importance
of mental events. Other behaviorists, however,
stress both mental events and purpose in their
analysis of behavior—for example, McDougall
and Tolman.
■ Humanistic psychology overlooks the cumu-
lative nature of science by insisting that scien-
tific psychology does not care about the loftier
human attributes. The problem is that we are
not yet prepared to study such attributes. One
must first learn a language before one can
compose poetry. The type of scientific psy-
chology that humanistic psychologists criticize
provides the basis for the future study of more
complex human characteristics.
■ The description of humans that humanistic
psychologists offer is like the more favorable
ones found through the centuries in poetry,
literature, or religion. It represents a type of
wishful thinking that is not supported by the
facts that more objective psychology has accu-
mulated. We should not ignore facts just be-
cause they are not to our liking.
■ Humanistic psychology criticizes behaviorism,
psychoanalysis, and scientific psychology in
general, but all three have made significant
contributions to the betterment of the human
condition. In other words, all three have done
the very thing that humanistic psychology sets
as one of its major goals.
■ If humanistic psychology rejects traditional
scientific methodology as a means of evaluating
propositions about humans, what is to be used
in its place? If intuition or reasoning alone is to
be used, this enterprise should not be referred
to as psychology but would be more accurately
labeled philosophy or even religion. The hu-
manistic approach to studying humans is often
characterized as a throwback to psychology’s
prescientific past.
■ By rejecting animal research, humanistic psy-
chologists are turning their backs on an ex-
tremely valuable source of knowledge about
humans. Not to use the insights of evolutionary
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 597
theory in studying human behavior is, at best,
regressive.
■ Many of the terms and concepts that human-
istic psychologists use are so nebulous that they
defy clear definition and verification. There is
even confusion over the definition of human-
istic psychology. After searching for a definition
of humanistic psychology in the Journal of
Humanistic Psychology, in various books on hu-
manistic psychology, and in the programs of
the Division of Humanistic Psychology of the
APA, Michael Wertheimer (1978) reached the
following conclusion:
It is hard to quarrel with such goals as au-
thenticity, actualizing the potential inher-
ent in every human being, creating truly
meaningful human relationships, being
fully in touch with our innermost feelings,
and expanding our awareness. But what,
really, is humanistic psychology? To para-
phrase an old Jewish joke, if you ask two
humanists what humanistic psychology is,
you are likely to get at least three mutually
incompatible definitions.… It is highly
unlikely that an explicit definition of [hu-
manistic psychology] could be written that
would satisfy even a small fraction of the
people who call themselves “humanistic
psychologists.” (pp. 739, 743)
Contributions
To be fair to humanistic psychologists, it must be
pointed out that they usually do not complain that
behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and scientific psychol-
ogy have made no contributions to the understand-
ing of humans. Rather, their claim has been that
behaviorism and psychoanalysis tell only part of
the story and that perhaps some important human
attributes cannot be studied using the traditional
methods and assumptions of science. As William
James said, if existing methods are ineffective for
studying certain aspects of human nature, it is not
those aspects of human nature that are to be
598 CHAPTER 18
discarded but the methods. Humanistic psycholo-
gists do not want to discard scientific inquiry; they
want to expand our conception of science so that
scientific inquiry can be used to study the higher
human attributes.
The expansion of psychology’s domain is hu-
manistic psychology’s major contribution to the
discipline. In psychology, there is now an increased
tendency to study the whole person. We are con-
cerned with not only how people learn, think, and
mature biologically and intellectually but also how
people formulate plans to attain future goals and
why people laugh, cry, and create meaning in their
lives. In the opinion of many, the humanistic para-
digm has breathed new life into psychology.
Recently, a field called positive psychology has
developed that, like traditional humanistic psychol-
ogy, explores positive human attributes. However,
according to Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000),
although the aspirations of humanistic psychology
were admirable, its accomplishments typically were
not:
Unfortunately, humanistic psychology did
not attract much of a cumulative empirical
base, and it spawned myriad therapeutic
self-help movements. In some of its in-
carnations, it emphasized the self and en-
couraged a self-centeredness that played
down concerns for collective well-being.
Future debate will determine whether this
came about because Maslow and Rogers
were ahead of their times, because these
flaws were inherent in their original vision,
or because of overly enthusiastic followers.
However, one legacy of the humanism of
the 1960s is prominently displayed in any
large bookstore: The “psychology” section
contains at least 10 shelves on crystal
healing, aromatherapy, and reaching the
inner child for every shelf of books that
tries to uphold some scholarly standard.
(p. 7)
Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) describe
what positive psychology has in common with tra-
ditional humanistic psychology and what makes it
different:
[The purpose of positive psychology] is to
remind our field that psychology is not just
the study of pathology, weakness, and
damage; it is also the study of strength and
virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is
broken; it is nurturing what is best.
Psychology is not just a branch of medi-
cine concerned with illness or health; it is
much larger. It is about work, education,
insight, love, growth, and play. And in this
quest for what is best, positive psychology
does not rely on wishful thinking, faith,
self-deception, fads, or hand waving; it
tries to adapt what is best in the scientific
method to the unique problems that hu-
man behavior presents to those who wish
to understand it in all its complexity. (p. 7)
Both positive psychologists and the earlier hu-
manistic psychologists agree that mental health is
more than the absence of mental illness. Currently,
the term flourishing is used to describe people who
are not only free from mental illness but, more im-
portantly, are filled with vitality and are functioning
optimally in their personal and social lives. Keyes
(2007, p. 95) estimates that only one fifth of the
U.S. adult population is flourishing. A major goal
of positive psychology is to increase that number,
and the earlier humanistic psychologists would no
doubt support that goal. In fact, the characteristics
of flourishing individuals are essentially the same as
those thought by Maslow to characterize self-
actualizing individuals or those thought by Rogers
to characterize fully functioning individuals.
For additional information on positive psychol-
ogy, see Aspinwall and Staudinger, 2003; Firestone,
Firestone, and Catlett, 2003; Fowers, 2005; Keyes,
2007; Keyes and Haidt, 2003; Lopez and Snyder,
2003; Seligman, Steen, Park, and Peterson, 2005.

SUMMARY
The 1960s were troubled times in the United
States, and a group of psychologists emerged who
believed that behaviorism and psychoanalysis, the
two major forces in psychology at the time, were
neglecting important aspects of human existence.
What was needed was a third force that emphasized
the positive, creative, and emotional side of hu-
mans. This third-force psychology is a combination
of existential philosophy and romantic notions of
humans; the combination is called humanistic psy-
chology, as well as third-force psychology.
Humanistic psychologists are phenomenologists.
In modern times, Brentano and Husserl developed
phenomenology, which is the study of intact, con-
scious experiences as they occur and without any
preconceived notions about the nature of those ex-
periences. According to Brentano, all conscious acts
intend (refer to) something outside themselves. An
example is the statement “I see that girl.” Husserl
thought that a careful, objective study of mental
phenomena could provide a bridge between philos-
ophy and science. Besides the type of phenomenol-
ogy that focuses on intentionality, Husserl proposed
a second type, a pure phenomenology that studies
the essence of subjective experience. Thus, for
Husserl, phenomenology could study the mind
turned outward or turned inward.
As used by existentialists, phenomenology be-
came a study of the totality of human existence.
Such a study focuses on the full range of human
cognitive and emotional experience, including anx-
iety, dread, fear, joy, guilt, and anguish. Husserl’s
student Heidegger expanded phenomenology into
existential inquiry. Heidegger studied Dasein, or
being-in-the-world. Dasein means “to be there”;
but for humans “to be there” means “to exist
there,” and existence is a complex process involving
the interpretation and the evaluation of one’s ex-
periences and making choices regarding those
experiences. Heidegger believed that although hu-
mans have a free will, they are thrown by events
beyond their control into their life circumstances.
Thrownness determines such things as whether a
person is male or female, rich or poor, attractive
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 599
or unattractive, and so on. It is up to each person
to make the most of his or her life no matter what
the circumstances. Positive growth occurs when a
person explores possibilities for living through his or
her choices. Choosing, however, requires entering
the unknown, and this causes anxiety. For
Heidegger then, exercising one’s freedom requires
courage, but only by exercising one’s freedom can
one live an authentic life—a life that the person
chooses and therefore a life for which the person
is completely responsible. If a person lives his or her
life in accordance with other people’s values, he or
she is living an inauthentic life. For Heidegger the
first step toward living an authentic life is to come
to grips with the inevitability of death (nonbeing).
Once a person comprehends and deals with fini-
tude, he or she can proceed to live a rich, full,
authentic life.
Binswanger applied Heidegger’s philosophical
ideas to psychiatry and psychology. Binswanger called
his approach to psychotherapy Daseinanalysis, or the
study of a person’s approach to being-in-the-world.
Binswanger divided Dasein into the Umwelt (the
physical world), the Mitwelt (the social world), and
the Eigenwelt (the person’s self-perceptions).
According to Binswanger, each person embraces life’s
experiences through a Weltanschauung, or world-
design, which is a general orientation toward life.
Binswanger attempted to understand his patients’
world-designs; if a patient’s world-design was proving
to be ineffective, he would suggest alternative, poten-
tially more effective ones. Like Heidegger,
Binswanger believed that the circumstances into
which one was thrown place limits on personal free-
dom. Thrownness creates what Binswanger called the
ground of existence from which one has to begin the
process of becoming by exercising one’s freedom.
According to Binswanger, each person attempts to
rise above his or her ground of existence and to attain
being-beyond-the-world—that is, to rise above cur-
rent circumstances by transforming them through free
choice.
May was primarily responsible for bringing ex-
istential psychology to the United States. Like the
600 CHAPTER 18
other existential psychologists, May believed that
normal, healthy living involves the experience of
anxiety because living an authentic life necessitates
venturing into the unknown. If a person cannot
cope with normal anxiety, he or she will develop
neurotic anxiety and will be driven from an au-
thentic life to a life of conformity or to a life that
is overly restrictive. Furthermore, because the per-
son with neurotic anxiety is not exercising his or
her human capacity to choose, he or she experi-
ences guilt. Thus, an authentic life is characterized
by normal anxiety and guilt and an inauthentic life
by neurotic anxiety and guilt. May believed that
healthy people embrace myths that provide a sense
of identity and community, support moral values,
and provide a way of dealing with the mysteries of
life. People without such myths feel isolated and
fearful and often seek professional help. By analyz-
ing the effectiveness of the stories by which people
live, narrative therapy reflects May’s belief in the
pragmatic value of myths. According to May, myths
often reflect the daimonic, which is the potential of
any human attribute or function to become nega-
tive if it is expressed excessively. May believed the
most unique aspects of humans elude traditional
scientific methodology and, therefore, if humans
are to be studied scientifically, a new human science
will need to be created.
Kelly, who was not trained as a clinical psy-
chologist, tried a number of approaches to helping
emotionally disturbed individuals. He found that
anything that caused his clients to view themselves
and their problems differently resulted in improve-
ment. Because of this observation, Kelly concluded
that mental problems are really perceptual pro-
blems, and he maintained that humans are free to
construe themselves and the world in any way they
choose. They do this by creating a construct system
that is, or should be, tested empirically. Any num-
ber of constructs can be used to construe any situa-
tion. That is, one can always view the world in a
variety of ways, so how one views it is a matter of
personal choice. Like Vaihinger, Kelly encouraged
propositional thinking—experimentation with ideas
to see where they lead. In fixed-role therapy, Kelly
had his clients write a self-characterization; then, he
would create a role for his client to play that was
distinctly different from the client’s personality. By
offering the client support and help in playing his or
her role, Kelly became a supporting actor and helped
the client to view himself or herself differently. Once
the client saw that there were alternative ways of
viewing one’s self, one’s life, and one’s problems, im-
provement often resulted. According to Kelly, neu-
rotics have lost their ability to “make-believe,” and it
is the therapist’s task to restore it. Kelley’s fixed-role
therapy can be seen as an early version of narrative
therapy.
According to Maslow, usually considered the
founder of third-force psychology, human needs
are arranged in a hierarchy. If one satisfactorily
meets the physiological, safety, belonging and
love, and esteem needs, then one is in position to
become self-actualized. Leading a life characterized
by fullness, spontaneity, and creativity, the self-
actualizing person is being-motivated rather than
deficiency-motivated. That is, because this person
has met the basic needs, he or she does not need
to seek specific things in the environment. Rather,
he or she can embrace the world fully and openly
and ponder the higher values of life. Toward the
end of his life, Maslow proposed fourth-force or
transpersonal psychology, which explores a person’s
relationship to the universe and emphasized the
mystical and spiritual aspects of human nature.
Rogers concluded that the only way to under-
stand a person is to determine how that person
views things—that is, to determine that person’s
subjective reality. This view resulted in Rogers’s
famous client-centered therapy, which was the first
major therapeutic alternative to psychoanalysis.
Rogers was also the first clinician to attempt to
quantify the effectiveness of therapy. He did this
by employing the Q-technique (or Q-sort tech-
nique), which allows the comparison between a
person’s real self and his or her ideal self at various
points during the therapeutic process. Like Maslow,
Rogers postulated an innate actualizing tendency.
For this actualizing tendency to be realized, one
has to use the organismic valuing process as a frame
of reference in living one’s life; that is, one has to
use one’s own inner feelings in determining the

value of various experiences. If one lives according
to one’s organismic valuing process, one is a fully
functioning person and is living an authentic life.
Unfortunately, because humans have a need for
positive regard, they often allow the relevant peo-
ple in their lives to place conditions of worth on
them. When conditions of worth replace the or-
ganismic valuing process as a frame of reference
for living one’s life, the person becomes incongru-
ent and lives an inauthentic life. According to
Rogers, the only way to prevent incongruency is
for the person to receive unconditional positive re-
gard from the relevant people in his or her life.
Existential and humanistic psychology share the
following beliefs: humans possess a free will and are
therefore responsible for their actions; phenome-
nology is the most appropriate method for studying
humans; humans must be studied as whole beings
and not divided up in any way; because humans are
unique as a species, animal research is irrelevant to
an understanding of humans; no two humans are
alike; the search for meaning is the most important
human motive; all humans should aspire to live au-
thentic lives; and, because humans are unique, tra-
ditional scientific methodology cannot be used ef-
fectively to study them. The major difference
between existential and humanistic psychology is
that the former views human nature as neutral
whereas the latter views it as basically good.
According to existential psychologists, because we
do not have an innate nature or guidance system,
we must choose our existence. Existential psychol-
ogists see freedom as a curse as well as a blessing and
something from which most humans attempt to
escape.
Humanistic psychology has been criticized for
equating behaviorism with the formulations of
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What is third-force psychology? What did the
third-force psychologists see as the limitations
of the other two forces?
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 601
Watson and Skinner and thereby ignoring the
work of other behaviorists who stressed the impor-
tance of mental events and goal-directed behavior,
for failing to understand that psychology’s scientific
efforts must first concentrate on the simpler aspects
of humans before it can study the more complex
aspects, for offering a description of humans more
positive than the facts warrant, for minimizing or
ignoring the positive contributions of behaviorism
and psychoanalysis, for suggesting methods of in-
quiry that go back to psychology’s prescientific his-
tory, for having more in common with philosophy
and religion than with psychology, for overlooking
a valuable source of information by rejecting the
validity of animal research, and for using terms
and concepts so nebulous as to defy clear definition
or verification. Humanistic psychology’s major
contribution has been to expand psychology’s do-
main by urging that all aspects of humans be inves-
tigated and that psychology’s conception of science
be changed to allow objective study of uniquely
human attributes. Recently the field of positive
psychology has emerged, studying positive human
attributes but doing so in a manner more scientifi-
cally rigorous and less self-centered than was often
the case with traditional humanistic psychology.
However, both traditional humanistic psychology
and positive psychology insist that mental health is
more than the absence of mental illness. Both de-
scribe the truly healthy person as living an exciting,
meaningful life. Whereas positive psychologists re-
fer to such a person as flourishing, traditional hu-
manistic psychologists had referred to him or her as
self-actualizing (Maslow) or as fully functioning
(Rogers).
2. Describe Brentano’s phenomenology. What
did he mean by intentionality? What did Husserl
mean by pure phenomenology?
602 CHAPTER 18
3. How did Heidegger expand phenomenology?
Discuss the following terms and concepts from
Heidegger’s theory: Dasein, authenticity, becom-
ing, responsibility, and thrownness.
4. Describe Binswanger’s method of
Daseinanalysis. Discuss the following terms and
concepts from Binswanger’s theory: Umwelt,
Mitwelt, Eigenwelt, world-design, ground of exis-
tence, and being-beyond-the-world.
5. In May’s theory, what is the relationship be-
tween anxiety and guilt? What is the difference
between normal anxiety and neurotic anxiety?
6. What, according to May, is the human
dilemma?
7. For May, what functions do myths provide in
human existence? What determines the con-
tent of classical myths? Are some myths better
than others?
8. Describe the relationship between May’s belief
in the importance of myth in living one’s life
and contemporary narrative therapy.
9. Describe the kind of science that May believed
needs to be created in order to effectively study
humans.
10. Why did Kelly maintain that all humans are
like scientists?
11. Describe Kelly’s concepts of constructive al-
ternativism and prepositional thinking.
12. Describe Kelly’s approach to psychotherapy.
What did Kelly mean when he said that psy-
chological problems are perceptual problems?
What techniques did Kelly use to help his cli-
ents regain their ability to make-believe?
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Coon, D. J. (2006). Abraham H. Maslow:
Reconnaissance for Eupsychia. In D. A. Dewsbury,
L. T. Benjamin Jr., & M. Wertheimer (Eds.),
Portraits of pioneers in psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 255–
271). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
13. What are the main tenets of humanistic
psychology?
14. Summarize Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
15. Why, according to Maslow, are self-actualizing
people so rare?
16. List what Maslow found to be the characteris-
tics of self-actualizing people.
17. What is the difference between deficiency
motivation and being motivation? Give an
example of each.
18. Describe what Maslow meant by transpersonal
or fourth-force psychology.
19. How did Rogers attempt to measure the ef-
fectiveness of psychotherapy?
20. For Rogers, what constitutes an incongruent
person? In your answer, include a discussion of
the organismic valuing process, the need for
positive regard, and conditions of worth.
21. According to Rogers, what is the only way to
avoid incongruency?
22. According to Rogers, what are the three major
components of any relationship that facilitate
personal growth?
23. What are the similarities and differences be-
tween humanistic and existential psychology?
24. Summarize the criticisms and contributions of
humanistic psychology.
25. Compare the contemporary field of positive
psychology with traditional humanistic
psychology.
Hoffman, E. (1988). The right to be human: A biography of
Abraham Maslow. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
Inwood, M. (2000). Heidegger: A very short introduction.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Jankowicz, A. D. (1987). Whatever happened to George
Kelly? Applications and implications. American
Psychologist, 42, 481–487.
Kelly, G. A. (1964). The language of hypotheses: Man’s
psychological instrument. Journal of Individual
Psychology, 20, 137–152.
Kirschenbaum, H. (1979). On becoming Carl Rogers. New
York: Dell.
Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of being (2nd
ed.). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Maslow, A. H. (1971). The farther reaches of human nature.
New York: Penguin Books.
Maslow, A. H. (1987). Motivation and personality (3rd ed.).
New York: Harper & Row. (Original work pub-
lished 1954)
GLOSSARY
Anxiety The feeling that results when one confronts
the unknown, as when one contemplates death or when
one’s choices carry one into new life circumstances.
According to existentialists, one cannot live an authentic
life without experiencing anxiety.
Authentic life According to existentialists, the type of
life that is freely chosen and not dictated by the values of
others. In such a life, one’s own feelings, values, and
interpretations act as a guide for conduct.
Becoming A characteristic of the authentic life because
the authentic person is always becoming something other
than what he or she was. Becoming is the normal,
healthy psychological growth of a human being.
Being motivation For Maslow, the type of motivation
that characterizes the self-actualizing person. Because
being motivation is not need-directed, it embraces the
higher values of human existence, such as beauty, truth,
and justice. (Also called B-motivation.)
Being perception Perception that embraces fully “what
is there” because it is not an attempt to locate specific items
that will satisfy needs. (Also called B-perception.)
Being-beyond-the-world Binswanger’s term for be-
coming. The healthy individual always attempts to tran-
scend what he or she is.
Binswanger, Ludwig (1881–1966) Applied
Heidegger’s existential philosophy to psychiatry and
psychology. For Binswanger a prerequisite for helping an
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 603
May, R. (1991). The cry for myth. New York: Norton.
Rogers, C. R. (1980). A way of being. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Royce, J. R., & Mos, L. P. (Eds.). (1981). Humanistic
psychology: Concepts and criticisms. New York:
Plenum.
Schneider, K. J. (1998). Toward a science of the heart:
Romanticism and the revival of psychology.
American Psychologist, 53, 277–289.
Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000).
Positive psychology: An introduction. American
Psychologist, 55, 5–14.
emotionally disturbed person is to determine how that
person views himself or herself and the world. (See also
Daseinanalysis and World-design.)
Conditions of worth According to Rogers, the con-
ditions that the relevant people in our lives place on us
and that we must meet before these people will give us
positive regard.
Construct systems According to Kelly, the collection
of personal constructs with which people make predic-
tions about future events.
Constructive alternativism Kelly’s notion that it is
always possible to view ourselves and the world in a
variety of ways.
Courage According to existentialists, that attribute
necessary for living an authentic life because such a life is
characterized by uncertainty.
Daimonic According to May, any human attribute or
function that in moderation is positive but in excess is
negative.
Dasein Heidegger’s term for “being-in-the-world.”
The world does not exist without humans, and humans
do not exist without the world. Because humans exist in
the world, it is there that they must exercise their free
will. Being-in-the-world means existing in the world,
and existing means interpreting and valuing one’s ex-
periences and making choices regarding those
experiences.
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Daseinanalysis Binswanger’s method of psychother-
apy that requires that the therapist understand the client’s
worldview. Daseinanalysis examines a person’s mode of
being-in-the-world.
Deficiency motivation According to Maslow, moti-
vation that is directed toward the satisfaction of some
specific need. (Also called D-motivation.)
Eigenwelt Binswanger’s term for a person’s private,
inner experiences.
Existential psychology The brand of contemporary
psychology that was influenced by existential philosophy.
The key concepts in existential psychology include
freedom, individuality, responsibility, anxiety, guilt,
thrownness, and authenticity.
Fixed-role therapy Kelly’s brand of therapy whereby
he would assign a role for his clients to play that was
distinctly different from the client’s self-characterization.
With this type of therapy, the therapist acts much like a
supporting actor. (See also Self-characterization.)
Flourishing According to positive psychologists, the
state of being free from mental illness and also living an
enthusiastic, meaningful, and effective life.
Ground of existence Binswanger’s term for the cir-
cumstances into which a person is thrown and according
to which he or she must make choices. (Also called
facticity.) (See also Thrownness.)
Guilt The feeling that results most intensely from living
an inauthentic life.
Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976) Expanded Husserl’s
phenomenology to include an examination of the total-
ity of human existence.
Hierarchy of needs Maslow’s contention that human
needs are arranged in a hierarchy and that lower needs in
the hierarchy must be adequately satisfied before atten-
tion can be focused on higher needs. The most basic and
powerful needs in the hierarchy are physiological needs,
and then come safety needs, needs for belonging and
love, and the need for self-esteem. When all lower needs
in the hierarchy are adequately satisfied, a person be-
comes self-actualizing.
Human dilemma According to May, the paradox that
results from the dual nature of humans as objects to
which things happen and as subjects who assign meaning
to their experiences.
Humanistic psychology The branch of psychology
that is closely aligned with existential psychology. Unlike
existential psychology, however, humanistic psychology
assumes that humans are basically good. That is, if neg-
ative environmental factors do not stifle human devel-
opment, humans will live humane lives. Humanistic
psychology is concerned with examining the more pos-
itive aspects of human nature that behaviorism and psy-
choanalysis had neglected. (Also called third-force
psychology.)
Inauthentic life A life lived in accordance with values
other than those freely and personally chosen. Such a life
is characterized by guilt.
Incongruent person Rogers’s term for the person
whose organismic valuing process is replaced by condi-
tions of worth as a guide for living.
Intentionality Brentano’s contention that every mental
act refers to something external to the act.
Jonah complex According to Maslow, the fear of one’s
own potential greatness.
Kelly, George (1905–1967) Emphasized that it is al-
ways possible to construe one’s self and the world in a
variety of ways. For Kelly, psychological problems are
essentially perceptual problems.
Maslow, Abraham (1908–1970) A humanistic psy-
chologist who emphasized the innate human tendency
toward self-actualization. Maslow contended that be-
haviorism and psychoanalysis provided only a partial
understanding of human existence and that humanistic,
or third-force, psychology needed to be added to com-
plete our understanding.
May, Rollo (1909–1994) Psychologist who was in-
strumental in bringing European existential philosophy
and psychology to the United States.
Mitwelt Binswanger’s term for the realm of social
interactions.
Narrative therapy Examines the stories by which
people live and understand their lives and, where nec-
essary, encourages the replacement of ineffective stories
with effective ones.
Need for positive regard According to Rogers, the
need for positive responses from the relevant people in
one’s life.
Need-directed perception Perception whose purpose
is to locate things in the environment that will satisfy a
need. (Also called deficiency perception or
D-perception.)
Neurotic anxiety The abnormal fear of freedom that
results in a person living a life that minimizes personal
choice.

Normal anxiety Results from living an authentic life.
(See also Authentic life.)
Ontology The study of the nature of existence.
Organismic valuing process According to Rogers,
the innate, internal guidance system that a person can use
to “stay on the track” toward self-actualization.
Phenomenology The introspective study of intact,
mental experiences.
Positive psychology Field in contemporary psychol-
ogy that explores the positive attributes of humans but
does so in a more scientifically rigorous and less self-
centered way than was often the case with traditional
humanistic psychology.
Propositional thinking According to Kelly, the ex-
perimentation with ideas to see where they lead.
Pure phenomenology The methodology proposed by
Husserl to discover the essence of those mental acts and
processes by which we gain all knowledge.
Responsibility A necessary by-product of freedom. If
we are free to choose our own existence, then we are
completely responsible for that existence.
Rogers, Carl (1902–1987) A humanist psychologist
whose nondirective and then client-centered psycho-
therapy was seen by many as the first viable alternative to
psychoanalysis as a method for treating troubled indivi-
duals. Like Maslow’s, Rogers’s theory of personality
emphasized the innate tendency toward self-
actualization. According to Rogers, a person continues
toward self-actualization unless his or her organismic
valuing process is displaced by conditions of worth as a
guide for living. The only way to avoid creating condi-
tions of worth is to give a person unconditional positive
regard. (See also Conditions of worth, Organismic
HUMANISTIC (THIRD-FORCE) PSYCHOLOGY 605
valuing process, Self-actualization, and
Unconditional positive regard.)
Self-actualization According to Rogers and Maslow,
the innate human tendency toward wholeness. The self-
actualizing person is open to experience and embraces
the higher values of human existence.
Self-alienation According to existentialists, the condi-
tion that results when people accept values other than
those that they attained freely and personally as guides for
living.
Self-characterization The self-description that Kelly
required of many of his clients before beginning their
therapeutic program.
Shut-upness Kierkegaard’s term for the type of life
lived by a defensive, inauthentic person.
Subjective reality A person’s consciousness.
Third-force psychology See Humanistic
psychology.
Thrownness According to Heidegger and Binswanger,
the circumstances that characterize a person’s existence
that are beyond the person’s control. (See also Ground
of existence.)
Transpersonal psychology Maslow’s proposed fourth
force in psychology that stresses the relationship between
the individual and the cosmos (universe) and in so doing
focuses on the mystical and spiritual aspects of human
nature.
Umwelt Binswanger’s term for the physical world.
Unconditional positive regard According to Rogers,
the giving of positive regard without any preconditions.
World-design (Weltanschauung) Binswanger’s term for a
person’s basic orientation toward the world and life.