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Psychology - Personality Psychoanalysis, Humanism Term Paper

Pages:2 (601 words)

Subject:Science

Topic:Humanistic Psychology

Document Type:Term Paper

Document:#46548720


Humanism takes the position that the human intellect is sufficient to deduce moral principles and that all human beings have the same natural right to dignity and personal autonomy.

The humanistic perspective does not absolutely reject the underlying principles of psychoanalytical theory, but places more focus on conscious self-reflection than on any assumption that the roots of all human conduct is necessarily a function of repressed trauma, sexual urges, and unresolved psychological conflicts. Humanism also rejects anthropocentrism in that it does not consider human life to be different in kind from other biological life forms, but only different in degree of development and complexity.

Existentialism:

Existentialism rejects many of the same concepts as humanism in the realm of religious or supernatural sources of human morality. Whereas humanists start with an assumption that human beings are inherently good and that the prosperity of human societies is necessarily good, existentialism recognizes no such assumption.

Existential and humanist philosophies share the assumption that human life is no more or less important than other species, except that existentialism considers all life equally meaningless without some purpose defined by the individual, whereas humanism presupposes an inherent value to life, particularly human life, in and of itself without the need to create meaning and purpose. Existentialism acknowledges that human life may ultimately have meaning and purpose, but only to the extent the individual finds a way of consciously defining those concepts. Existentialism differs from psychoanalytic theory in that the latter emphasizes the relevance of the unconscious mind over conscious thought and the former only conscious reasoning; it differs from humanism primarily in that it rejects any suggestion that human life has any inherent worth on it own.


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