Reviews:

Roy José DeCarvalho's The Founders of Humanistic Psychology, with an excellent grasp of certain roots of the field and a particular delimitation of approach, represents a valuable effort in positioning the humanistic style within contemporary psychology as a whole. Most important, the book's content is sound, the presentation is lucid, and nonspecialized readers as well as specialized will learn a great deal about humanistic psychology's principal concepts and major figures.

—

Contemporary Psychology

Endorsement From

M. Brewster Smith

Professor Emeritus of Psychology

University of California at Santa Cruz

former President, American Psychology Association

:

DeCarvalho, a professional historian, has served humanistic psychology well in this thoroughly researched account of five `founders' of the movement. . . . We get a thorough review of their relations with behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and European phenomenology and existentialism and to the institutional history of the movement--and their full bibliographies in an appendix. . . . [DeCarvalho] writes a lovingly appreciative history [that] . . . should appeal to the movement's friends and followers, and give them needed appreciation of its origins and intellectual resources at a time of soul-searching for new directions.

Endorsement From

Christopher M. Aanstoos

Associate Professor of Psychology

West Georgia College:

[DeCarvalho's] careful elaboration of the coalescence of the humanistic approach through the work of five prominent American psychologists renders a very clear portrait of its relations with other streams of thought, both those that influenced it and those with which it has stood in critical dialogue. This book is a valuable reference for anyone interested in humanistic psychology, as well as a high quality work in historical scholarship.

Description:

This intellectual history narrates the institutionalization of the humanistic current in American psychology and places the thinking of five of its founders (Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and James Bugental) in the context of twentieth century psychology. The Founders of Humanistic Psychology is the first historical and systematic presentation of humanistic psychology. It is also the only study that treats these five thinkers as a unit and places them in the context of history and systems of Western psychology.

Roy José DeCarvalho begins with a discussion of the political institutions that brought this movement together: research facilities, grants, and intellectual stimulation via seminars, conferences, and journals. The text then introduces the biographies of Allport, Maslow, Rogers, May, and Bugental. Following chapters detail the shared views of these five founders with emphasis on the philosophical encounter of humanistic psychology with behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism. DeCarvalho also examines the impact that the neo-Freudians, Kurt Goldstein, and personality and Gestalt psychologies had on the conceptualization of their humanistic psychology. The methodology, views on human nature, and the ethics of humanistic psychology are also discussed. Ending with a chronological bibliography of each founder of the movement, this book is a valuable research tool for humanistic psychologists, as well as graduate and undergraduate students. Social workers and psychologists, as well as historians and philosophers of the social sciences, will also find this an indispensible source of information about the rise of the humanistic movement.

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Stanley Krippner

Introduction

The Institutionalization of Humanistic Psychology

Biographical Sketch

Humanistic Psychology and Behaviorism

Humanistic Psychology and Psychoanalysis

Humanistic Psychology, Existentialism and Phenomenology

Other Sources of Influence in Humanistic Psychology

Human Nature in Humanistic Psychology

Humanistic Ethics in Psychology

The Problem of Method in Humanistic Psychology

Summary and Conclusion

Appendix--Chronological Bibliographies

Gordon W. Allport

Abraham H. Maslow

Carl R. Rogers

Rollo May

James F. T. Bugental

Index

LC Card Number: 91-444

LCC Class: BF204

Dewey Class: 150.19