Humanistic psychology and introductory textbooks: A 21st-century reassessment

Twenty-one current introductory psychology textbooks were analyzed to assess the quantity and quality of their presentations of humanistic psychology and related concepts and approaches, such as existential and phenomenological perspectives. Results indicated that coverage of humanistic approaches constitutes an extremely small portion of the field as a whole and is limited almost exclusively to the areas of motivation, personality, and psychotherapy. Coverage is also overwhelmingly limited to the contributions of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, with only occasional, passing inclusion of other important humanistic themes, concepts, or figures of either historical or contemporary note and little representation of existential and phenomenological perspectives. Further, the humanistic approach is frequently characterized explicitly as unscientific and naively overoptimistic, whereas more implicit critiques suggest it is an outdated approach rooted deeply in the culture of the 1960s and perhaps more a form of philosophy or spirituality than psychology or science. The importance of improving both the quantity and quality of coverage of humanistic psychology as well as the challenges inherent in securing improved representation are also discussed.