I'm a psychology major in college. I took Intro to General Psychology last semester, and I immediately fell in love with the material. I had thoughts of changing my major to psychology before then, though. I thought that it would be a great avenue for me to help others, as I developed an interest in being good, brave, and kind. What really attracted me to psychology, though, was the school of Humanistic Psychology, and prominent psychologists like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

Humanistic psychology was founded as a "third force" in psychology. The two major schools of thought at the time were behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Behaviorism, as pioneered by B.F. Skinner, was the dominant school in American psychology. It focused only on the study of behavior and gave no concession to mental processes like cognition. It also posited that we are entirely products of our environment. Meanwhile, Freudian psychoanalysis still had some sway in the field. It was founded upon the concepts of the unconscious and drive theory, among other theories within the school of thought.

Abraham Maslow introduced the concepts of humanistic psychology with the advent of his Hierarchy of Needs. This was what he believed was the main motivation in humanity. He believed that we were ultimately driven to "self-actualization." This was the ultimate transcendence of our lives from those of seeking food, shelter, and security to that of searching and finding purpose, meaning, and realization of our potential.

Carl Rogers, another humanist, invented client-centered therapy, which regarded the client with unconditional positive regard and did not impose methods of counseling on the patient. Rogers also developed the concept of Rogerian argument, which was a method of argument and discourse that was aimed at finding common ground to agree on between two sides, thereby ending the conflict.

Humanistic psychology was overtaken by cognitive psychology around the end of the 1960s, and it has been criticized for its lack of empirical evidence. However, there are several studies finding that some of Carl Rogers' theories hold water, and Maslow's hierarchy of needs has been gaining support, too, but the biggest point of support has been from an evolutionary perspective, which is also disregarded by mainstream psychology.

Humanistic psychology wasn't completely forgotten, though. Many of the contributions of humanistic psychology can be found in clinical psychology. Rogers' client-centered therapy is one of the main methods by which therapists and counselors conduct sessions, and humanistic psychology even led to the rise of positive psychology at the turn of the millennium.

But the real reason that humanistic psychology is important to me is because it is holistic. Many approaches to psychology analyze only a small snippet of humankind. Cognitive psychologists only look to the brain, behaviorists only look to behavior, and evolutionary psychology only looks at humans in Darwinian terms. However, humanistic psychology is geared toward the entire being of humans. Feelings, motives, desires, relationships, and beliefs all come into play with humanistic psychology.

As humans, it is difficult to mechanistically examine our nature through natural science methods. We can observe how our organs work or how the brain works by thinking. We can even examine some of our instincts! But that is not the whole truth of being human. Humans are much more complicated than just being an organism or a brain. We have subjectivity and consciousness. We have language and meaning-making, and these deserve to be studied and researched just as much as our brains and cognition and behavior.

I am extremely lucky to be exposed to this viewpoint every day in school, for my program of study is largely based upon humanistic psychology. We should be devoting more time into studying the phenomenology of human beings and piecing together how our cognition makes sense when cross referenced with our subjective experience. We need to question how our behavior may influence us to feel a certain way or how a certain feeling makes us behave. Psychology is a diverse field with many different branching perspectives, but at the end of the day, we're studying humans and their entire being as thinkers, doers, feelers, and believers, so it would make the most sense to use all of that being as a subject of study.

Humanistic psychology is a gift to us, we just need to realize that it's time to use it.