Question

Why is Maslow or Rogers theory so important to the field of psychology today? What would psychology be missing without Maslow or Theory? (500 - 750 words)

Answer 1

• Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow worked for the huministic approach. Humanistic approach rejected the other perspective of psychology.
• According to Rogers, personality is not shaped by the behavior, unconscious or nor thinking. He directed the focus of psychology toward the self of the person.
• Humanisitic appraoch is important field of psychology because it offered a new approach to understand the human nature or condition.
• It also offered the more effective psychotherapy which is working well on present situations.
• Rogers and Maslow both said that the basic motives of the person are personal growth and fulfillment.
• They conceptualized that an individual needs to aceive his/her self actualization, which can be acheive by fulfillment of other basic needs.
• Their approach was very subjective, according to them objectivity of the reality is less important to understand the perspective of a human behavior.
• According to this approach every individual is different, they have their different experiences, they learn different. therefore they emphasized on open ended questionnaire, unstructured interview and unstructured observations. These methods provided them subjectivity to understand the behavior of the subject.
• They emphasized that the human have free will, their behavior is not always determined.
• They also rejected the idea of comparing the animals with human, because they believed that the human is unique and it can not be understand the behavior of a human by comparing the behavior of an animal.
• Therefore they emphasized on the ideographic approach not on nomothetic approach. Nomothetic approach focuses the average performance of the whole group whereas ideographic focuses on individual performance.
• The humanistic approach is more applicable on the real life setting.
• In this approach subjectivity is more focused because it provide the more insight and more holistic information about the behavior.
• The application of this approach is more applicable for treating depression, education, motivation, self worth.
• Maslow conceptualized the hierarchy of needs, which have levels to fulfill. A human is tend to fulfill his basic needs first that are physical needs and safelty and security need, and then he moves toward the higher level of need such as love and affection need, self esteem and then self actualization. According to Maslow very few people can achieve the level of self actualization.
• Carl Rogers extended the view of Maslow, he stated that a person needs an environment to grow. this environment should have openness self disclosure, acceptance and empathy. Without theis type of environment a healthy personality can not be developed. So basically he emphasized on the nurturance of the human.
• Carl Rogers also talked about ideal self and real self. He said that if there is congruency between ideal self and real self then the person can achieve the self actualization.
• Therefore it can be seen the motive of the human behavior can be understand by the humanistic perspective that is given by Maslow and Rogers. Self- actualization is the main focus of this perspective. According to the present situation, generalization of any behavior's motive is not an easy task, so it is better to try to understand the behavior through individual emphasism. The major contribution of this approach is also education field. In education, it is important to understand the children's behavior to enable them to learn more.