An Intellectual Renaissance of Humanistic Psychology?

Abstract

A review is presented of the historical background of humanistic psychology, which flourished as a distinct movement roughly between the early 1940s to the late 1960s when it fractionated into transpersonal interests in meditation and altered states of consciousness, experiential therapeutics such as body work and the group encounter, and an ultraradicalized form of political psychology, and then became absorbed into the psychotherapeutic counterculture. Having entered a period of relative eclipse since then, its status today after 50 years is assessed. The case is made that humanistic psychologists could potentially launch a renaissance of the movement if they were to dissociate themselves from their present near-pathological focus on the transpersonal, the experiential, and the political long enough to reclaim their rightful place in the history of American academic psychology and then go on to capture the attention of the discipline of psychology with an entirely new metaphysics of how first-rate science should be conducted.