Cognitive, Psychodynamic and Humanistic approaches to psychology.
How do I tell them apart?
Students sometimes mix up these approaches to psychology. I've found the following to be very helpful.
1. Cognitive Psychology is about our mental processes that we are aware of. It's about how you solve problems, make decisions, use language and think about your world. It was a reaction to the Behavioral approach that just wanted to look at the outward behavior of an organism.
2. Psychodynamic psychology is about your unconscious. In this view, your unconscious is filled with things that generally cause you problems and drag you down. You spend much of your time trying to overcome this anchor.
3. Humanistic Psychology is rooted in a firm belief that you will, as a wonderful human, find ways to improve. Here it is about reaching your full potential and moving up. This is very different from the downward movement in psychodynamic psychology. Humanism was in part a reaction to the pessimism and over reliance on the unconscious from the psychodynamic approach.
1. Cognitive Psychology is about our mental processes that we are aware of. It's about how you solve problems, make decisions, use language and think about your world. It was a reaction to the Behavioral approach that just wanted to look at the outward behavior of an organism.
2. Psychodynamic psychology is about your unconscious. In this view, your unconscious is filled with things that generally cause you problems and drag you down. You spend much of your time trying to overcome this anchor.
3. Humanistic Psychology is rooted in a firm belief that you will, as a wonderful human, find ways to improve. Here it is about reaching your full potential and moving up. This is very different from the downward movement in psychodynamic psychology. Humanism was in part a reaction to the pessimism and over reliance on the unconscious from the psychodynamic approach.
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