Humanistic Therapy

Humanistic therapy, also called humanistic psychotherapy, is a portmanteau term for a range of talking therapies that, rather than concentrating on a presented problem, focus on helping a client overcome long-term difficulties in their relationships with others. It particularly emphasizes the individual, interpersonal and situational dimensions of therapy and a client's reflection on their relationship with themselves, others and the wider psychosocial world, drawing on humanism's focus on meaning, death, freedom, limitation, value, creativity and spirituality. Therapists strive to enter their clients' subjective world and understand their experiences in an emotionally supportive way, attaching great importance to clients' immediate experiences so their responses help clients gain deeper awareness of their emotions and construction of meaning; the aim is to help the client become aware of and use this formative tendency to promote self-actualization and meaning creation, adopting a holistic view in which each client is regarded as a unique individual rather than a case to be managed.