Humanistic Psychology and Personality

Abstract

Humanistic models of personality share similarities with psychodynamic ones, and are also primarily idiographic in approach, but they differ from them importantly in that they insist people must be studied as individuals, rather than as collections of neuroses or traits. They also differ from Freud, though not from Jung and Adler, in that they insist that personality is never complete. Men and women are regarded as being in a constant state of development throughout life, much as we saw that Erikson considers them to be. Far from having our personalities predominantly fixed in the first five or six years of life, humanistic psychology argues that from birth to old age we are in a constant state of change, or as it is sometimes put, of becoming something else.