Carl Rogers (1902 – 1987) and Abraham Maslow (1908 – 1970), were the two co-founders of the humanistic perspective or phenomenological approach, but it can also be called the third force psychology. It is believed that each individual is profoundly good and with personal growth the personality can expand with assistance; this assistance takes the form of needs with its hierarchy. Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs, which took the form of a pyramid, showing how and why each individual or client strives towards a psychological well being. Through these survival needs ranging from thirst, sleep and hunger to desires for knowledge or belonging, the client is able to become the person that he wishes to be, thus achieving ‘self-actualisation’, the tip of the pyramid. “Self-actualisation is based on using one’s capacities to their fullest. Much like Rogers actualising tendency, self-actualisation is an expression of the potential for growth which is part of life” (Glassman, 1995). Rogers enlarged on Maslow’s work to create what he called ‘person-centred psychotherapy’ which was based on three elements: empathy, unconditional positive regard and congruence. All three of these conditions were needed to be present within the therapy, so that the client could achieve personal growth thus becoming a ‘fully functioning person’, this can be interpreted as helping the client get a better, more positive image of himself, which allows the passage from incongruence to congruence to happen (Malim and Birch, 1998).
The psychoanalytic approach would argue that people in general are ruled by innate desires, stemming very often from their childhood, which influence subconsciously their way of behaving, leaving them at the mercy of principally uncontrollable forces. The humanistic point of view would differs to that of the psychoanalytic approach, saying that behaviour is not determined by neither present circumstances or precedent experiences, this means that the individual is free to interact and can make choices, this is often referred to as ‘Free Will’ (Glassman, W.E. 1995).
Rogers (1980) believed that each individual was in need of what he called ‘Unconditional Positive Regard’ (UPR), a basic attention of love and affection given freely throughout childhood from other people towards the child, usually coming from the child’s parent or carer. “Just as empathy perfectly integrates with congruence, unconditional positive regard also takes its place as inseparable from the other two” (Mearns and Thorne, 2002). Owing to this ‘unconditional positive regard’ the child will be capable of developing into a well balances adult, therefore according to Rogers, many of the issues or mental health disorders that the client could experience, were due the absence if this attention throughout their early years. This is an opinion that was shared with Freud, who also believed that early childhood experiences were very important for later adult development. Freud (1909) called this evolution, the ‘psychosexual development’ and maintained that each individual would have to go through certain phases such as the oral, the anal and finally the phallic stage (Pennington, D. 2002).
Erik Erikson (1959) argued that each individual had to go through each of his eight stages of human development, the individual has to correctly complete the present stage before being able to move on to the next. Erikson used the word ‘conflict’ rather than stage, among the conflicts that he proposed; there were ‘trust/mistrust’, ‘initiative/guilt, and ‘generativity/stagnation’, to name just a few (Hayes and Orrell. 1998). A comparable idea was proposed by Abraham Maslow and his ‘hierarchy of needs’, which is often presented under a pyramid form, this pyramid characterize the individual’s consciousness, Maslow stated that before being able to progress to a higher level that it was necessary to fulfil the lower levels of needs first. Though Erikson spoke about stages/conflicts and Maslow talked about needs, they both implied the importance of completing steps in the development of an individual’s personality (Taylor, I. 1999).
Due to the work carried out by Allport in 1937, it can be argued that within psychology, there are two main types of personality theories; the ‘nomothetic’, who concentrates on the features that people share, while the ‘ideographic’ puts the emphasis on the person as an individual, both the psychoanalytic and the humanistic perspectives are part on the latter. The humanistic approach proposes a psychotherapy called ‘Client-centred’ or ‘Person-centred’, it is so called as the people seeking help are seen as clients and not patient thus less clinical (Hayes and Orrell.1998).
This therapy proposed by Carl Rogers, as for objective, to provide the client with the necessary help, allowing the individual to find a certain internal well being. Through this well being, the client is able to explore their inner feelings and work with these feelings to find their own solution to troubles from which they are suffering (Hayes and Orrell. 1998), therefore this one to one therapy is largely based on the supposition that the client is capable of helping himself with the support of the facilitator (the term therapist is not used), were each of the two protagonists are on an equal level, it is the client that sets the pace of sessions and not the facilitator, which is some what different to the therapy proposed within the psychoanalytic perspective, were it is the therapist who holds the reins during the length of the session. Unlike the ‘client-centred therapy, there is no self-disclosure from the part of the psychoanalytic therapist during the sessions or at any other moment. During the psychoanalysis, the therapist creates what could be called a professional distance with the patient; this could take different forms, such as asking the patient to relax on a sofa while the therapist is sitting in a chair out of his view or conducting the session whilst sitting behind a desk (Malim and Birch. 1998). Freud believed that the role of the unconscious mind was to protect an individual from their underlying desires and fears; the function of the therapist during the therapy is to fetch these feelings and direct them into the consciousness, thus giving the patient an ‘insight’ and minimum of understanding. This is done independently of the patient wishes, during the sessions patients are often confronted with subconscious and painful memories (Dryden. 1999).
Within these two perspectives, Freud and Rogers both acknowledge the use of ‘Defence Mechanisms’. “The conflict which occurs between a person’s wishes and external reality is dealt with by the use of defence mechanisms” (Hough, 1998). In the psychoanalytic these defence mechanisms are the representation of the crisis that is going on between both the ego and the id or between the ego and the superego. The ego chooses to use these defence mechanisms when the situation becomes too hard to handle. Though these defence mechanisms are considered a natural thing, they should be closely monitored… quite often their use could lead to neuroses, which could range from anxiety to obsessions. Just some examples of defence mechanisms which are encountered by individuals are Repression: this produces when an event is too painful to meet head on, that an individual pushes it out of his conscious, pretending that it has never happened, were as Regression: this occurs when an adult in particular starts to use childish behaviour, such as screaming loudly, stamping their feet about as a means of getting what he or she wishes; these are some examples quite extrovert, but regression can take a more introvert form such as sulking or perhaps thumb sucking, this can happen when an individual is faced with the idea of passing a test or an exam. Rogers shared the idea of defence mechanisms, he argued that when a client suffering from incongruity, meaning that the client is not happy with the image that he portrays, this ‘self image’ is not what the client wants to be, but he inspires towards, this is known as the ‘ideal self’. When this passage becomes too difficult, the client makes use of two forms of defence mechanism, which are Denial: which is the total negation to accept any form of incongruity and acting as if the dilemma basically does not exist in his eyes. The second of the two defence mechanisms is Distortion, were the client will purely distort the truth to his or her advantage and therefore the threat is no longer seen as one. All though these defence mechanisms are employed currently on a day to day basis, their excessive use may lead to more consequent psychiatric problems, so therefore a close observation is needed (Hayes and Orrell. 1998).
It can be said, despite the fact that these two perspectives diverge mainly in their approach, they do share a same central core, being the understanding and treatment of mental health and behavioural dilemmas, each looks at what is the human mind, but just from a different angle. Each of these perspectives in their own way is trying to help, treat and eventually propose a solution or remedy to an individual’s crisis, therefore it would be extremely difficult to discuss which of these two perspectives is the more reliable when it comes to looking into human behaviour. The choice would depend on so many internal and external factors, such as the personality of the individual, the illness from which they are suffering or their mental force, as no two individuals are the same, their need for therapy would be different. “Psychology is a young discipline relative to the other sciences. As such it has no global paradigm, or single accepted theory, about the nature of human beings in the way that biology has been influenced by Darwin’s theory. Until this is possible in psychology, the scope and variety of the many different approaches allow us to adopt different levels of explanation in order to explain human functioning” (Malim and Birch. 1998).
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