Humanistic Psychotherapies

What Defines Therapy as Humanistic?

The term humanistic, is understood to incorporate approaches variously defined as experiential, existential, relational, and phenomenological. Therapies that come under the humanistic umbrella share a number of core variables and emphases. 

They include:

• an optimistic view of clients as resourceful and naturally inclined to grow and develop their potential. 

• a belief that the quality of the relationship between therapist and client provides a safe sanctuary that supports the therapeutic process and that is growth inducing in and of itself. The primary endeavor of humanistic therapists, therefore, is the creation of an optimal therapeutic relationship that is individualized to adapt to clients’ needs as they evolve throughout the course of therapy. 

• the core role of therapist empathy in grasping the personal meaning of the client’s experience, facilitating self-exploration and setting in motion a self-reflective process that promotes intrapersonal and interpersonal learning that leads to fresh perspectives and more effective ways of living. 

• a phenomenological emphasis that focuses on clients’ subjective world with the understanding that their current perception is reality and can best be understood by putting aside hypotheses, diagnoses, and preconceptions in an attempt to take in their experience as freshly as possible.

• a strong emphasis on the critical role of emotion in both psychopathology and psychological health with an understanding of the adaptive role emotion plays in effective decision making, emotion regulation, and effective functioning. 

• a focus on the self and self-concept of the client with the understanding that the way clients experience the self has a great influence on their behavior. Enhancing self-exploration, self-definition, reconstrual of the self, and the development of self-knowledge and self-efficacy are primary endeavors of the humanistic therapist. 

• a view that meaning is not a given but is constructed from the raw data of experience, including one’s culture, values, perspectives, and personal history. Humanistic therapists strive to enable their clients to grasp the larger meanings and purposes of their lives. 

• a view that people are essentially free to choose the manner and course of their lives and their attitude toward events and that freedom, choice, and responsibility are interwoven and inescapable. 

• an understanding that all people must confront existential givens and the challenges they present, including (a) life versus death; (b) freedom, choice, and responsibility; (c) isolation versus connection; (d) meaning versus meaninglessness; (e) their “thrownness” (forces or events beyond one’s control); (f) capacity for awareness; (g) anxiety as an inevitable aspect of the human condition; and (h) the fact that they are essentially embodied. 

• a holistic view of people as unique, indivisible organisms composed of interrelated systems that cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts. People are conceived as inseparable from their environment and are therefore best understood as beings-in-the-world.

Humanistic-Integrative Practice

Humanistic psychotherapists have also increasingly integrated concepts and methods from many therapeutic approaches. While remaining true to their core values and beliefs, humanistic therapies have incorporated aspects of other therapies in a manner that retains the integrity of the model used. This means that clients are viewed as capable partners with whom the therapist collaborates to make therapeutic adjustments and to create an optimal relationship and style of therapy that best fits their needs. This approach is guided by research of the past few decades that has clearly shown that client involvement is the best predictor of a good outcome.