PSC 162 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Existential Therapy, Personal Construct Theory, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Document Summary
Experience, existence, & the meaning of life: humanistic & positive psychology. Humanistic psychology concentrates on the ways that studying humans differs from studying objects or animals, including such issues as experience, awareness, & free will. The philosophical school called existentialism breaks experience into 3 types: experience of the external - world, social experience, & introspective experience - of - experiencing. Existentialism also claims that existence has no meaning beyond what each person gives it. Existential philosophers such as sartre concluded that a failure to face life"s lack of inherent meaning constitutes living in bad faith. Modern humanist psychologists added to this existential analysis the assumption that people are basically good & inherently motivated to self - actualize. Rogers & maslow asserted that a person who faces experience directly can become a fully functioning person. Rogers believed this outcome could only occur for individuals who had received unconditional positive regard from the important people in their lies.
