Remaining Challenges for Humanistic Psychology

Abstract

The humanistic psychology movement that began in the late 1950s and blossomed in the 1960s was a necessary corrective to the mainstream psychology of that era. Primarily, the humanistic movement was a significant factor in restoring the image of the human person that was greatly reduced by behaviorism and strict psychoanalysis. However, humanistic psychology did not totally free itself from the methods and strategies inherited from natural scientific psychology. This article demonstrates the compatibility between humanistic psychology and a phenomenological approach and suggests that remaining challenges to humanistic psychology demand explicit acknowledgement of the need for the development of nonreductionistic human scientific methods for studying persons in psychological meaningful ways.