The Very Idea of a “Humanistic Psychology”

Abstract

In what follows three not entirely independent points shall be argued: (1) The emergence of the very idea of a “humanistic psychology” can only be comprehended and justified when seen as a reaction against an image of scientific theory and praxis which may once well have been a dominant one but which is also one presently branded as archaic, antiquated, exploded—in point of fact, discarded and abandoned—not only by the avant-garde but virtually by the last few generations of almost all professional scientists, metascientists, methodologists, and philosophers of science. (2) The rejected image that vaguely comes to my mind is one that pictures the scientific endeavor (theory or praxis) as though it were a purely disintegrated, autonomous, autarchic, and entirely human-independent enterprise. (3) It is the occasional, unfortunate survival of exactly this image of science in the still pools of metatheoretical and general methodological deadwater which more than any other single factor represents a serious threat to all attempts at effective theorizing within contemporary psychological, behavioral, social, and other “soft” sciences in general.