Basic Assumptions Humanistic psychology begins with the existential assumption that people have free will: Carl Rogers (1946) publishes Significant aspects of client-centered therapy (also called person-centered therapy).

Additionally, it could be argued that the unbalance in neurotransmitters such as low serotonin, in a depressed individual is the consequence rather than the cause of depression because the brain is a plastic organ that changes with the way we use it, so it could be that the depressed thinking causes the low level of serotonin observed. Jane Goodall (1957) began her study of primates in Africa, discovering that chimps have behaviors similar to all the human cultures on the planet. It focuses on the present rather than dwell on the past unlike psychoanalysis. This therapy is widely used e.g. health, education and industry. The behaviorist approach has been used in the treatment of phobias, and systematic desensitization.In other words, if heredity (i.e., genetics) affects a given trait or behavior, then identical twins should show a greater similarity for that trait compared to fraternal (non-identical) twins. Bouchard, T. J., & McGue, M. (1981). Familial studies of intelligence: A review. Science, 212(4498), 1055-1059. First, they must be looked at as a whole and meaningful and not broken down into small components of information that are disjointed or fragmented like with psychodynamic theorists. Rogers said that if these individual perceptions of reality are not kept intact and are divided into elements of thought, they will lose their meaning. The underlying assumption is that to some degree the laws of behavior are the same for all species and that therefore knowledge gained by studying rats, dogs, cats and other animals can be generalized to humans. learned emotions – such as love for parents, were explained as paired associations with the stimulation they provide

Being brought up in two cultures showed me that, in different cultures, you have different rules, and that’s cool, because the rules can bend and flex. Also, my mum is an artist, my dad’s a scientist-engineer, and I’m somewhere caught in the middle: too logical to be an artist, too emotional to be a data scientist. To be a scientist, you almost have to be numeric in how you live your life because then you can quantify everything. Deviations from that – whether through being a woman, or being neurodivergent or because of your race – hit a subconscious bias where some people think: “OK, how reliable is this person?”, and wait for something to go wrong because they’re not the bog-standard fit. This is something that I want to challenge. As for being an artist – art and science are inextricably linked, since I understand the world by patterns, which have to be spatial by nature and which capture the senses. But that’s for a later book. Scientists who love biochemistry might not see the parallels with economics. But I do, and that is a superpower Rogers and Maslow placed little value on scientific psychology, especially the use of the psychology laboratory to investigate both human and animal behavior.

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While it was written by someone who clearly knows their science, the science used was almost entirely by analogy rather than application. For example, the 16 different personality types defined in Myers-Briggs, which doesn’t have a great rep these days anyway, gets over-simplified by analogy to less than a handful of protein types. Other than learning a bit about proteins, that seriously dumbed down any real understanding of people. How do we understand the people around us? How do we recognise people's motivations, their behaviour, or even their facial expressions? And, when do we learn the social cues that dictate human behaviour?