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Category: Humanistic
How to change our past: Memories, Stories, Identity.
Psychotherapy is moving away from grand, unifying theories of human experience and wellbeing. Carl Roger’s potato and Freud’s unconscious are only partially helpful and certainly insufficient to help us understand what people are like and how they can be helped. Postmodern ideas has led to the “deconstruction of absolute truths” (Cooper, M. Rowan, J, 1999)…
Truth is what is helpful
William James is considered the father of Psychology and of Pragmatic Philosophy. In his essay “What pragmatism means” he suggests a provocative but well-rounded argument that truth is what is helpful. The main argument goes like this. Truthness is a type of goodness, rather than a separate entity to it. He says “truth in our…
Existential concerns: Death, Aloneness, Freedom and Meaning
Existential concerns are deeply significant areas of human enquiry. They relate to the core of human existence and they can form the basis of much avoidance, fear and anxiety. They can also be important catalysts for growth, as they make us face repressed anxiety and facilitate our living with renewed enthusiasm and meaning. Irvin Yalom…
Exploring the central humanistic ideas
The humanist tradition spans philosophy, literature, ethics, psychology and many other areas of human endeavour across the centuries. This makes it hard to define and delimit, but Sarah Bakewell does just that brilliantly in her book “Humanly possible”. — In this article, I wanted to lean on Sarah’s attempt to name the core ideas in…
Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic: collective healing in our complex world
Hegel proposed the Master/Slave thought experiment to understand human’s need for self-consciousness through the genuine recognition of (and by) others. Hegel argues that self-consciousness is not just being alive or thinking, but about knowing yourself as a subject. Unlike Descartes, for whom thinking alone proves existence (‘I think, therefore I am’), Hegel argues that existence…
Are we ever free? The experience of fear and the embracing of responsibility in our work towards freedom
Freedom is complex. Are we ever free? Do we want to actually be? And how do we even know we are? This article explores how true freedom is not about escaping fear and responsibility, but about embracing them The struggle to be free is the struggle to exist. We’re driven to free ourselves from our…
Having vs being as modes of existence
Erich Fromm was a humanist philosopher and psychoanalyst associated with critical theory. He blended the analysis of social and psychological factors to explore different philosophies of living. In To Have or To Be?, he examines two broad perspectives on life. — He explored how spiritual and cultural traditions have intertwined with structures of power to…
