The Immovable Object Versus the Irresistible Force: Problems and Opportunities for Humanistic Psychology

Abstract

is currently a professor of psychology at Miami University. He has published extensively on various topics relevant to humanistic psychology. He is the editor of The Humanistic Psychologist and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and a past president of the Division of Humanistic Psychology. SALLY N. PHILLIPS, M.A., is currently a clinical psychology intern at the Stone Institute of Psychiatry at Northwestern Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University Medical School. She received her M.A. from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she is completing her Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Her current research and clinical interests include integrating modern psychodynamic and humanistic/existential/constructivist theories and therapies. In addition, she has a long-standing interest in the psychology of adoption and is completing her dissertation on parents' perceptions of their adopted children's adjustment. SummaryThe immovable force of an increasingly reductionistic approach to understanding and treating psychological life and the irresistible force of people searching desperately for solutions to struggles that allow for meaning, purpose, and richness in life create serious challenges and great opportunities for humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology, if it can grasp these opportunities, has the chance to transform the field of psychology. To do so, humanistic psychology will have to deal adequately with three major manifestations of this reductionistic approach to psychology: the DSM as the means for 156

Can There Be a Recovery-Oriented Diagnostic Practice?

“…A cognitive therapist using schema therapy may identify maladaptive schemas. A Rogerian therapist would be interested in a client’s conditions of worth (see also Leitner & Phillips, 2003). After such a process takes place, these therapists construct conceptualizations of the work to be done in psychotherapy.…”

The Heart of Humanistic Psychology

“…Humanistic psychology, after Kant, is an approach to psychology that recognizes the ontological dignity common to all human beings by reason of their nature or being. This is why humanistic psychology is suspicious of all kinds of reductionism that attempt to reduce human beings to the properties of things (Frankl, 2011; Miller, 2000; Leitner & Phillips, 2003). This is why we refuse to permit the narrowing of the meaning of a person to merely a label such as a mental health diagnosis (Bradford, 2010; Kramer & Buck, 1997).…”

Breaking Out of the Mainstream: The Evolution of Peer Support Alternatives to the Mental Health System

“…W hile it is easy to challenge and critique ideologies that one fi nds objectionable, the greater diffi culty lies in creating viable alternatives to the dominant practices of our society (Leitner & Phillips, 2003;Lyons, 2001). The largely grassroots political and advocacy movements of consumers, psychiatric survivors, and ex-patients (c/s/x) have been instrumental in creating and sustaining peer support alternatives that often operate outside of the confi nes of the mental health system.…”