HUMANISTIC APPROACH

Humanistic Approach is also called the Phenomenilogical Approach, this evolved as alternative to the pessimism and determinism of the psychodynamic and the behavioristic models.  According to humanists, people are neither driven by powerful, instinctive forces nor manipulated by their environments.  They are active creatures who are innately good and capable of choice.  They strive for growth and development of their potentials, seek change, and plan restructure their lives to achieve optimal self-fulfillment.

In sharp contrast to the behaviorist, the humanistic psychologist focuses on the phenomenal world experienced by the individuals, rather that the objective world seen by external observes and researchers.  Unlike the cognitive oriented psychologists who search for general laws that govern people's perceptions and decisions, the humanistic psychologists delve on immediate, individual experience.

The theory gave rise to encounter groups and other types personal growth groups in the 1960s and 1970s.  The three important contributors were Carl Rogers, Rollo May and Abraham Maslow.  Rogers emphasized the individual's natural tendency toward psychological growth and health, and the importance of a positive self-concept in this process.  May integrated some aspects of existential philosophy into his new psychological approach.  Existentialism emphasizes an individual's free will and his search for meaning or purpose in life.  Maslow postulated the need for self-actualization and studied the characteristics of people he judged to be actualized.  The humanistic approach expands the realm of psychology beyond the confines of science to include valuable lessons learned from the study of literature, history and the arts.  In this way psychology becomes a more complete discipline that balances the empirical and the non-empirical, imaginative approaches.  This unification hopes to see the two usually divergent human realms of the science and the humanities together.

PSYCHODYNAMIC APPROACH

Rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis, this approach assumes that all behavior and mental processes reflect the psychological struggles deeply-seated in the unconscious.  Usually, these struggles involve conflict between the impulse to satisfy instincts or wishes, for example, for food, sex, or aggression, and the need to follow the standards imposed by society,  From this perspective, hostility and aggression are viewed as the consequence of the breakdown of defenses against the expression of primitive urges, while anxiety and depression are possibly the overt signs of inner turmoil.

The psychodynamic approach is reflected in a number of contemporary theories of personality, psychological disorders, and therapy.  Most psychologists today, however, prefer any one of the many revised versions of Frued's theory, to name a few, the analytic psychology of Carl Jung, theindividual psychology of Alfred Adler , the feminist personality theory of Karen Horney and the object relations theory of Melanie Klein.

COGNITIVE APPROACH

I learned that Cognitive approach focuses on the mental processing of information.  Cognitive psychologists study how we gather, encode, and store information from our environment using such mental processes as perception, memory, imagery, concept formation, problem solving, reasoning, decision making and language.  If you were listening to a friend describing his rock climbing adventure, a cognitive psychologist would be interested in how you decode the meaning of his words, how you form mental images of the jagged and slippery rocks, how you integrate the impressions of his experience in your previous  concepts of rock climbing and so on.

Cognitive psychologist take what is called an information processing approach in their studies, an approach based on the idea that humans are like computers in that both take in information, process it, and produce a response.  In fact, cognitive psychologist often express models of human thought processes with techniques used in the computer sciences, such as flowcharts (diagrams with arrows leading from one box to successive others) and mathematical formulas.