Humanism in Psychology

I’ve always been fascinated and intrigued by the way the human mind functions. The brain is the basis of people’s behaviors, which include their mental processing and emotional characteristics, as well as their responses to a specific situation, individual, or group. For my topic, I want to dive into the humanist perspective of psychology. Humanism and psychology go handily with one another, but humanistic psychologists also take particular approaches when they are viewing their patients’ specific needs and disorders and treating them. Often they will identify with them to the different factors within the human culture and apply them to the individual’s needs (think of: archetypes, human potential, self-actualization, nature-nurture, ideal of individualism and collectivism, etc.). 

My wish is that by looking at psychology and then approaching it from a humanistic perspective, it’ll help my understanding, as well as others’, of the role culture plays in people’s lives and the aspects that make us human. Psychology helps us to understand what goes on in the human mind and how it functioned at the beginning of our time to even the present time. It can give us an understanding to how and why our ancestors’ acted as they did in the time period they lived based on what we observe and analyze in the human culture today and the human culture seen in archaeological discoveries. I’m excited to center my focus on the study of humanism while using psychology as a research tool.