Knowra Humanistic psychology Humanistic psychology Humanistic psychology emphasizes subjective experience, personal growth, free will, and people’s capacity to create meaning and direct their lives. It emerged partly in opposition to psychoanalytic and behaviorist accounts of human nature.
Self-actualization : The realization of a person’s capacities and potential through growth and self-development. Maslow made the pursuit of fulfilled potential central to his humanistic account of motivation.
Person-centered therapy : A psychotherapy developed by Carl Rogers that supports clients’ growth through empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard. It translates humanistic assumptions into a therapeutic relationship designed to foster self-directed change.
Carl Rogers : An American psychologist who founded person-centered therapy and helped establish humanistic psychology. His client-centered theory gave the movement a practical model of growth through acceptance and empathy.
Humanistic therapy : A family of psychotherapies that emphasizes personal agency, subjective experience, and growth. These treatments apply humanistic principles through attention to clients’ meanings and capacity for change.
Client-centered therapy : Carl Rogers’s psychotherapy approach, later called person-centered therapy, centered on the client’s capacity for self-directed change. It helped shift therapy away from expert interpretation toward a relationship that supports clients’ own understanding.
Phenomenology : The philosophical study of experience as it is lived and perceived from the first-person perspective. Humanistic psychologists treat a person’s experienced world as essential evidence about their behavior.
Unconditional positive regard : Acceptance and respect for a person without making them conditional on particular behaviors or achievements. Rogers proposed that such acceptance helps people explore experience without defensively protecting their self-image.
Abraham Maslow : An American psychologist known for the hierarchy of needs and his studies of self-actualization. His account of human potential helped define humanistic psychology’s positive view of motivation.
Encounter group : A group experience designed to encourage honest interaction, emotional awareness, and personal development. Humanistic psychologists used encounter groups to extend growth-oriented work beyond individual therapy.
Humanistic education : An educational philosophy that supports learners’ agency, personal development, and emotional as well as intellectual growth. It carried humanistic psychology’s emphasis on the whole person into classroom aims and relationships.
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