Epistemological foundations of humanistic psychology’s approach to the empirical.

Abstract

This article challenges the myriad criticisms of humanistic psychology's scientific status by directly confronting their common underlying claim: that humanistic psychology lacks an adequately empirical epistemological underpinning. Aristotelian epistemology is shown to be foundational to humanistic psychology's approach to the empirical in contradistinction to the tradition of positivistic empirical psychology, the epistemological roots of which lie primarily in atomism. Core characteristics of humanistic psychology's approach to the empirical are explicated from an account of Aristotelian epistemology as revived and elaborated by St. Thomas Aquinas. The explication is brought to fruition by way of an illustration using Edmund Husserl, one of humanistic psychology's primary progenitors, as an example. The analyses herein find humanistic psychology's empirical epistemological underpinning to emphasize (a) the confluence of the a priori and a posteriori; (b) the qualitative structure of knowledge; (c) formative meaning bestowal; (d) situated knowing; (e) intentional, presentational grounding; (f) imaginative presence to phenomena; (g) intuitive insight into essences; and (h) bracketing the naturalistic assumptions of positivistic empirical psychology.

The Change of a Changer: A Single Case Study of the Indigenization of a Chinese Counseling Psychologist

“…Nevertheless, some scholars made qualitative distinctions between the two. For example, the two views differ in their beliefs regarding whether research should (can) be how to conceptualize human nature, and the role of interpretation in research (Crotty, 1998;Waterman, 2013;DeRobertis, 2021). Considering these fundamental differences, it is not surprising that Jiang started to integrate qualitative research methods in his research practice and view a different future of counseling psychology after he found the values of traditional Chinese wisdom in his 1960s.…”