Question

What is third-force psychology? Why did Maslow feel that his third force was needed? Include in your answer the difference between the reductive-analytic approach to science and the holistic-analytic approach. Also discuss the term desacralization.

Answer 1

The humanistic approach in psychology developed as a rebellion against what some psychologists saw as the limitations of the behaviorist and psychodynamic psychology. The humanistic approach is thus often called the “third force” in psychology after psychoanalysis and behaviorism (Maslow, 1968).

Humanism rejected the assumptions of the behaviorist perspectivewhich is characterized as deterministic, focused on reinforcement of stimulus-response behavior and heavily dependent on animal research.

Humanistic psychology also rejected the psychodynamic approach because it is also deterministic, with unconscious irrational and instinctive forces determining human thought and behavior. Both behaviorism and psychoanalysis are regarded as dehumanizing by humanistic psychologists.

As a leader of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow approached the study of personality psychology by focusing on subjective experiences and free will. He was mainly concerned with an individual’s innate drive toward self-actualization—a state of fulfillment in which a person is achieving at his or her highest level of capability. Maslow positioned his work as a vital complement to that of Freud, saying: “It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.”

In his research, Maslow studied the personalities of people who he considered to be healthy, creative, and productive, including Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and others. He found that such people share similar characteristics, such as being open, creative, loving, spontaneous, compassionate, concerned for others, and accepting of themselves

Reductive-Analytic approach to science

Reduces human beings to a collection of habits or conflicts. Overlooks the essence of human nature.

Holistic-analytic approach to science

Studies the person as a thinking, feeling, totality. More likely to yield valid results.

Desacralizing of science:

The banishment of all the experiences of transcendence from the realm of the respectably known and the respectably knowable, and the denial of a systematic place in science for awe, wonder, mystery, ecstasy, beauty, and peak experiences (Maslow, 1966d, p. 121).

It appears to me that science and everything scientific can be and often is used as a tool in the service of a distorted, narrowed, humorless, de-eroticized, de-emotionalized, desacralized and desanctified Weltanschauung . This desacralization can be used as a defense against being flooded by emotion, especially the emotions of humility, reverence, mystery, wonder, and awe (Maslow, 1966d, p. 139).