Existential Humanistic Psychology

This is a stand-alone peer-reviewed article and the eighth chapter of "The Whole Child: Selected Papers on Existential-Humanistic Child Psychology." Though some authors have argued that the goals of third force psychology are intrinsically harmonious with those of child psychology, humanistic or human science perspectives are rarely represented in child developmental texts, courses, and programs. This is particularly notable at the undergraduate level. A major reason for the relative underrepresentation of third force perspectives in the area of child development is that the large-scale debates inherent to this field have not been conducive to third force thinking. At the same time, contemporary child developmental thinking has evolved considerably within recent years, and the issues that have traditionally kept humanism at a distance from child psychology have changed. In this article, I argue that the nature of these changes is such that the area of child developmental theory is now evidencing opportunities for third force psychology to become a more recognized contributor to the study of child development.

Maurice-Merleau Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy provides the basis for a form of cultural existential therapy. Through an examination of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the phantom limb and anosognosia, we develop a cultural-existential approach to “psychopathology” and its treatment. In the course of this analysis, ego-syntonic labels are seen in the light of culture syntonic considerations, depth analysis is married to breadth analysis, empathic understanding is re-understood through a dialectical mode of understanding, medical and psychological analyses are recast within a cultural analysis, and being is resituated within a flesh ontology. While a cultural existential psychotherapy may compassionately rally around a therapy of situated individuals, it also calls for mindful attention to a therapeutics of culture.
Keywords

This is a stand-alone peer reviewed article and the seventh chapter of "The Whole Child: Selected Papers on Existential-Humanistic Child Psychology." Dynamic systems theory is one of the most recent perspectives to appear in child development texts. This article critically examines some of the dynamic systems thinking that has emerged in the area of child development from an existential-humanistic developmental point of view. In particular, special attention is given to Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith's dynamic systems theory, because they alone have made an effort to build an organized dynamic systems framework for interpreting child development. Moreover, this theoretical framework has remained exceptionally popular and influential relative to other dynamic systems works. It was found that there are both similarities and differences between existential-humanistic developmental thought and Thelen and Smith's theory. Alan Fogel's dynamic systems views were found to be helpful in overcoming barriers to a fruitful dialogue between existential-humanistic and dynamic systems approaches to child development.

For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
                        Y.B. Yeats,
                        Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

And opening my eyes, I am afraid of course
to look—this inward look that society scorns.
Still, I search in these woods and find nothing worse
than myself, caught between the grapes and the thorns.
                        Anne Sexton, 
                        Kind Sir: These Woods

Entre 1949 y 1974 Erich Fromm vivió en México. Durante esos años tuvo una intensa actividad en la clínica psicoanalítica
y ejerció una notable influencia en el desarrollo del movimiento psicoanalítico mexicano. En torno suyo se organizó un grupo de discípulos, principalmente de nacionalidad mexicana. No obstante, Fromm tuvo un discípulo colombiano: el psiquiatra y psicoanalista José Gutiérrez (1927-2008). Entre 1955 y 1961, Gutiérrez participó del círculo inmediato de Fromm, su psicoanalista y mentor. Esos años fueron determinantes en la formación y en el pensamiento psicoanalítico del colombiano. Al regresar a Colombia, Gutiérrez publicó El método psicoanalítico de Erich Fromm (1961), el primer trabajo
crítico sobre el psicoanálisis humanista frommiano. Asimismo, Gutiérrez, con la colaboración de su esposa, la psicóloga y
psicoanalista Magdalena Restrepo, organizó una escuela psicoanalítica y comenzó a entrenar a un grupo de profesionales.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf] 

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

The lived experience of AWARENESS, the experience of awareness of awareness, is embodied…and this unfolding of the awareness field is an embodying unfoldment. This lived experience of awareness is centered within our body and opens immediately out unto the world. Perception and the perceived are given immediately…in oneness…the inner ying meets the outer ying. "To experience" means being an embodied subject simultaneously opening to an existent world and opened to the openness, which is subjectivity. Both subjectivity and world arise out of primordial openness…Primordial embodiment arises out of flesh arising out of the manifestation of the elements…We can never get outside the avenues of experience.

A review of the applications of Humanistic Psychology (HP) in the workplace. We focus on the work of Maslow and other key theorists, the way key ideas from HP were applied in the workplace and management theory, how they were often trivialized and instrumentalized, the limitations and decline of HP, as well as possible new directions drawing on the rich history of HP and new opportunities.

This paper compares the analytic and experiential approaches to dreams in order to illuminate the intrinsic and necessary relationships between the two understandings. It describes how dream work reflects the bimodalness of symbolism, thought and ultimately human consciousness. An extended example of dream work reflecting both analytic and experiential modalities is presented.

Child psychology textbooks rarely include material on humanism that can be used as a guide for students. Freudian and Eriksonian psychoanalysis, behaviorism and social learning theory, genetic perspectives, the cognitive approaches of Piaget and Vygotsky, and ecological theories all regularly appear in child psychology textbooks. While there are humanistic currents in Eriksonian psychoanalysis, Vygotsky’s theory, and ecological approaches due to their holism (e.g., their emphases on the child’s social context and enculturation), these approaches are not specifically dedicated to a systematic and rigorous humanization of psychology per se. Hence, they are generally not referred to as humanistic theories, nor are they presented in textbooks as belonging to the tradition of humanistic psychology. To be sure, there are works pertaining to child development that allow one to view child development in a more humanistic fashion. I have found these works within two related currents in developmental psychology: humanistic-developmental self-theory and phenomenological child psychology. However, these works have not been brought together into an organized form that would allow them to attract more attention in child psychology on the whole. To this end, this book explores humanistic-developmental self-theory and phenomenological child psychology as options for instructors who wish to expose students of child psychology to humanism at the college or graduate level.

The first chapter discusses the need for the text, its theoretical orientation, and the structure of the book. In the next three chapters, theories of self development are derived from the works of Carl Rogers, Karen Horney, D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, and Charlotte Bühler. Chapters Five and Six introduce the reader to existing self-development theories created by Richard Knowles and Daniel Stern. Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine explore major aspects of childhood experience (i.e., perception, affect, time, space, and maternal relations) from a phenomenological perspective. The final chapter provides an overarching theoretical viewpoint that can be used to put developmental issues into perspective. The perspective offered there is holistic and open to dialogue between various schools of thought, such as American humanism, postmodern psychology, existential-phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, neo-analytic and psychodynamic theories, Vygotskian theory, and ecological psychology.

We have two ways of knowing. Our mind knows forms, things, both subtle and gross. Faces, hands, buildings, trees, math formulas, mind knows subject and the mind knows otherness. The mind knows dualities, the mind knows me and you, us and them, and this and that. Mind knows time, mind knows the past, the present and the sense of the future. The mind knows things and entities, the mind knows beings, infinite numbers of beings and things. The mind knows difference. The mind thinks conceptually, feels affectively, imagines through imagery, the mind has sense and the mind has memory. The mind knows dualistically.

In his later life Maurice Merleau Ponty changed his understanding of how human beings know Being and how human beings know phenomena. His mature understanding went far beyond the early phenomenology of Husserl. His understanding and intellectual position about the subjectivity of mind alone with its corresponding subject object duality dissolved into a experience of non duality within appearance. His dualistic understanding about Being changed to the vast nondual awareness of Being as the source of both subjectivity and objectivity. Before his work on the Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty's thought was contained by equating subjectivity with mind alone and with object alone. His view was dualistic and the source of knowing was located in mind alone. Mind means the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and fantasy.

“Struggle is the perpetual food of the soul, and it knows well enough how
to extract the sweetness from it.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke

“The only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth.”—
Samuel Beckett, Proust

“The individual completes the creative work vastly relieved and more a person than before—but also maimed . . . Human progress is never one-dimensional.”—Rollo May, Love and Will

This review of the remarkable book "The Birth of Relationship: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank" by Robert Kramer suggests a revolution in our thinking about the founding figure(s) of the American version of existential-humanistic (E-H) psychology. Despite traditional emphases on the European philosophical and psychiatric lineages of Martin Heidegger, Medard Boss, and Ludwig Binswanger, it now appears that the most central and comprehensive inspiration for the movement--and thus Carl Rogers and Rollo May's importation of it in the 1930s and 1950s--was Otto Rank. This review elaborates why and raises compelling questions about both the long-standing neglect of Rank in the E-H and neo-analytic therapy communities, as well as ways to revive Rank's critical body of work for a fuller and deeper understanding of human lives.

And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick, or The Whale

The great field for new discoveries . . . is always the the Unclassified Residuum.
William James,
“The Hidden Self”

To get to know the individual is comparable to a sea-voyage over limitless seas to discover a continent; every landing on a shore or island will teach certain facts but the possibility of further knowledge vanishes if one maintains that here one is at the center of things.
Karl Jaspers,
General Psychopathology, Vol. 2

Donald Winnicott's radical existential psychoanalytic understanding of transitional awareness and transitional relatedness is an amazing and little used doorway for today's psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. In today's cognitive clinical culture we have become cognitions tampering with cognitions. Life as cognition. Existential Ontology Winnicott's creative understanding of our capacity for transitional awareness and transitional relatedness intertwines both our personal psychology and our innermost experience of our own existential ontology. Transitional knowingness intertwines both our mind and our primordial awareness field. Our field of awareness knows the field of Being since awareness is the field of Being. Transitional awareness intertwines both our mind and our psyche. Donald Winnicott's phenomenological understanding of the self radicalizes our sense of self from being a representational picture or cognitive affective schema or synthesis of disparate psychological part's to a fluid sense of self as a direct experiential felt sense of ongoing continuity of Being. Our knowingness though the medium of awareness, opens for us the direct knowing of the experience of Being. The experience of Being is for us our sense of natural spirituality. Our liminal transitional awareness field opens us into the immediate ongoing intimate experience of Being. This experience of Being is of Being within our very own self and of Being within our very own relational life-world. Ordinary Personhood We, as a most ordinary person, can experience the unfolding movement of the experiencing of Being within our own self as our self, and simultaneously, the unfolding experiencing of our own being as the being-ness of Being which is the Being of the world. As we experience the Being .

Evidence-Based Practice in Psychology (EBPP) is the current dominant paradigm for evaluating the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Compared to some predecessors, such as the Empirically Supported Treatments (ESTs), EBPP represented greater openness and inclusiveness to different forms of “evidence” and different ways of knowing, at least in its early development. However, Wampold, Goodheart, and Levant (2007) warned of the potential for EBPP to regress to a meaning similar to the ESTs, and there is evidence that suggests their warning may be coming true. When evidence is narrowly defined, those most at risk are the psychotherapy clients, particularly those from historically marginalized groups. Too often in EBPP multicultural considerations have been inadequately addressed by relegating it to one of many variables in a research study. It is imperative that the field of psychotherapy reconsider what is “evidence” while working toward a more inclusive way of evaluating psychotherapy effectiveness. Considering the evidence for existential-humanistic therapy can provide a model for how this can be done. Existential-humanistic therapy has strong evidence supporting its efficacy; however, the evidence draws upon diverse ways of knowing and does not rely upon the type of data that historically has been privileged. In many ways, the evidence supporting existential-humanistic therapy can help illuminate concerns about not adequately considering multiculturalism. Different cultural groups represent different ways of knowing and different values for the good life, including what ends should be sought in psychotherapy. Professional psychology has too often imposed epistemologies, methods, values, and visions of the good life upon clients, often while not recognizing this is occurring. The field of psychotherapy is stronger when varied approaches to evidence as well as varied desired outcomes from therapy are valued.

The felt sense of whoness is not a me-ness…me is self-fixation and in fact the sense of whoness can free us from objectified self-fixation. The sense of me often replaces the sense of who. When the experiential nonconceptual felt sense of who is not known or experienced, the felt sense of me-ness arises desperately. The sense of who is unfixatedness and this innate sense of no-thingness can be found and even experienced as ongoing timeless awareness in time. Innermost awareness in its manifestation can be experienced as whoness, no-thingness and open knowingness. The sense of me-ness is self-fixated, self-referencing and this me -ness can obscure the experiential arising of whoness.

Mind Alone For many years psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy was singularly centered on the unconscious mind and conscious mind. There was only mind and the mind could become aware of its own self and its own representational realm. The self itself was representational and the emphasis on the mind was in the light of analytic thinking and analytic observation. There was an emphasis on objectification of mental phenomena and subjectivity itself. Knowing was knowledge by association, by reflection and mediation by linguistic signifiers. Knowing was neither non-conceptual nor pre-reflective, nor was there a place for direct experiential knowingness. Knowing was associated as mind alone and singular mind functions such as thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and imagination. Transitional Space as Space of Awareness With the presentation of the work of Donald Winnicott there was a shift in the psychoanalytic understanding of knowingness. A similar change in psychoanalytic thinking about knowing was also taking place in the Jungian and archetypal analytic schools. In psychotherapy Winnicott emphasizes a focus on the suspension of mind and in the process of suspension of mind, awareness was freed to focus within awareness, free to focus itself on itself. In the suspension of mind (a Winnicottian form of the phenomenological reduction,) the patient relocates themselves. The patient relocates from being located in mind alone or even located in a particular function of mind alone such as: feeling function or thinking function or sensation function or memory function; the patient enters or relocates themselves into the intermediate area of experience. This intermediate area of experience or this in-between space of experience is also described as the transitional area of experience and relatedness. Sometime this place is also described as the place of potential space. The sense of self shifts from being located in the mind or mental function of the mind into the more embodied sense of spacious awareness or as the place of potential space. Winnicott would described this knowing

The films of Israeli expatriate director Amos Gitai have much to tell us about diaspora, ethnicity, and the paradoxes of history and time:

I believe . . . that what I care about most is the freedom of man, the
liberation of the individual . . . from the network of moral and social
conventions in which he believes, or rather in which he thinks he
believes, [but] which encloses him and limits him and makes him seem
narrower, smaller . . . even worse than he really is. If you really want me
to turn teacher, then condense it with these words: be what you are . . .
discover yourself . . . To me life is beautiful, for all its tragedy and
suffering . . . I am moved by it . . . I do my best to share this way of
feeling with others.
                                    Federico Fellini

I began with the documentary. I abandoned it because every nonfiction filmmaker ends up realizing one day the boundaries that can’t be crossed—those beyond which we risk causing harm to the people we film. That’s when we feel the need to make fiction features.
                                    Krzysztof Kieslowski 

I am trying to change the world.
                                    Jean-Luc Godard

The mindfulness ‘foundations’ of existential-phenomenology appeared at the turn of the twentieth-century.  Humanistic psychology’s affinity with phenomenology emerged in the latter half of the mid twentieth-century.  Yet the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) third wave mindfulness literature does not appear to have turned toward full collaborative acknowledgment of its neighboring precursors.  A revised history of Western mindfulness-based work and psychology is thus provided.  Parallels among Phenomenological-Humanistic Psychology (PHP), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) are also discussed.  Specifically, non-judgmental observation and description, validation, acceptance, intuition, doing and being, bodily mindfulness, letting be, and meaning-making are reviewed.  Herefrom, the CBT third wave is invited into generative intra-disciplinary dialogue with PHP.

Rollo May in Memoriam

I am thinking about mentors and guides and where we now stand. And, gleaned from the notebooks of Samuel Butler (1917, p, 397), a poem entitled “The Life After Death”:

Not on sad Stygian shore, nor in clear sheen
Of far Elysian plain, shall we meet those
Among the dead whose pupils we have been,
Nor those great shades whom we have held as foes;
No meadow of asphodel our feet shall tread,
Nor shall we look each other in the face
To love or hate each other being dead,
Hoping some praise, or fearing some disgrace.
We shall not argue saying “’Twas thus” or “Thus,”
Our argument’s whole drift we shall forget;
Who’s right, who’s wrong, ’twill be all one to us;
We shall not even know that we have met.
  Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again,
  Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.

Although tantras, first took root in Tibet during the 7 th and 8 th centuries C.E., it was during the 11 th century C.E. that Indian tantric Buddhism left India and relocated in Tibet. The 11 th through 14 th centuries was a transition period in which Indian Buddhism took the form of Tibetan Buddhism. Within the Tibetan tradition, there was a re-configuration, both of the experiencing of embodied awareness and of the praxis or process that invoked the realization of the field of awareness and corresponding states of liberation. We might consider that this transitional period was especially focused during the 12 th century, for not only were the Indian tantric practices affected by the seminal heart essence tradition, but so too were the Dzogchen praxes or forms of practice similarly affected. Eventually, however, both Tibetan Dzogchen and Atiyoga traditions went beyond the Indian forms of tantra.

The focus of Dzogchen practice is to experientially understand the nature of our awareness through awareness itself. To be nonconceptually aware of the nature of our awareness is rig pa or open presence.The root or the source of all phenomena is Presence. This word presence is often used by 14th century Longechenpa as well the contemporary Namkai Norbu and many dzogchen masters as the signifier of ground of being, the ground as presence. Contemporary Christian philosophers influenced by existential phenomenology, such as Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, describe the ground of being and ground of presence as Divinity. In Dzogchen philosophy descriptors are added such as the divine presence, luminous presence, radiant presence, pure presence, immaculate presence.

Phenomenology is the study of different kinds of giveness, the giveness of experience.There are various ways of being open to experiencing the world and the phenomena of the world. The phenomena and the objects of the world and the world itself can be experienced and perceived more or less directly and more or less in the present. The phenomena, the objects of the world and within the world as the world, can be experienced more or less in breadth and depth, and more or less in obviousness and more or less in subtlety. The world can be experienced more or less in translucidity and more or less in darkness, and more or less in openness and more or less in hiddenness, and more or less concealed and more or less unconcealed. There are many ways of experiencing the world and objects of and in the world which are the appearances of the world.

In the Gudyargarbha tantra there is this most wonderful verse. Appearances, sounds, and thoughts are the diety, mantra and the state of dharmakaya. What this wonderful language brings forward into our awareness is the amazing understanding that self liberation is the direct experiencing of the appearing of appearances.

We have focused on the transmission of the field of awareness and on the extension of the field into the present, the past and the future. We have focused on cutting through methods which are forms of the methodology of the ancient Vajrakilaya. We used cutting through methods as ways of dissolving mental structures. We especially focused on the primitive superego's structuring of unhappy experience. We use various methods of awareness cutting through configurations of awareness. This is why these actions are so direct, immediate and powerful. We are using awareness to cut through the configurations of awareness.

The experience of awareness is embodied. This unfolding of the awareness field is an embodied unfoldment. This lived experience of awareness is centered in our body that opens immediately out into the world. Perception and the perceived are given immediately to us in natural oneness. There is within knowingness itself the natural non-duality of indivisibility of the knower and the known within the context of duality of appearance.

In becoming aware of we go beyond our mind into the spaciousness of awareness, the great expanse. Going beyond our mind into the spaciousness of awareness the radiance of awareness becomes manifest. Within the radiance of awareness we are opened to experiencethe radiance of phenomena. Experiencing the radiance of our own awareness allows us to experience awareness the radiance of phenomena. Self liberation is experiencing the radiance of phenomena within the spaciousness of phenomena. Radiance and spaciousness are in oneness and are completely indivisible. In being in the field of awareness and gazing into awareness both within andwithout, you and I are able to experience the oneness of spaciousness and appearance, the indivisibility of emptiness and appearance, the indivisibility of radiance and appearance. You can experience the radiance of phenomena. The radiance of your own awareness and the radiance of all phenomena are in non-duality and are indivisible. You can even experience the self arising of radiance as the elements, the light particles, the luminous rays of radiance becoming phenomena. Light appearing as appearance.

Judgment as a function of superego can be relentlessly cruel and concrete. This cruelty can be focused on one's self or the self of the other, the "self" of a culture or the "self" of a gender. The focus can be on the very self of one's family or the very self of one's closest companion. The internal drama of deprivation and annihilation are sources of superego judgmentalness and selfdestructiveness. Survival, in its most primitive forms, is the source of much of superego orientation. The superego's relentless pursuit of achievement and functionality destroys children's psyches, relationships, and the sense of whoness in one's self and in others. As the superego arises in ascendency, whoness (which is awareness itself) disappears both in one's self and in the other. Objectivity of cognition pervades, and the sense of righteousness is paramount, so anything and everything can be done to anyone. The gods are truly on one's side. Inflation is the superego's arc, often followed by deflation. The hero-zero show.

Within the nature of the primordial ground of Being ,there is Spontaneous Presence.This spontaneous presence is the nature of the ground. This spontaneous presence abides as the inner radiance of the ground, the ground is basic space and is original purity of Being.