PSY 250 Week 4 Humanistic and Existential Perspectives Example

Finding Meaning After the Layoff: Humanistic and Existential Views of a Displaced Engineer

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSY/250: Psychology of Personality

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The engineer and his circumstances are composites written for a model paper; theories and research come from the sources listed.

Humanistic psychology emerged as an alternative to views that saw people as driven by unconscious conflict or shaped entirely by reinforcement. It holds that people have a natural tendency toward growth and that personal experience and choice matter. Existential psychology adds that people must create meaning in the face of freedom, uncertainty and death. This paper applies both perspectives to a composite engineer in Chandler, Arizona.

The Person

Robert is fifty-two. For twenty-four years he worked as a manufacturing engineer at an aerospace supplier, where coworkers called him the person who could fix any production problem. Six months ago the company moved his line overseas and laid him off. He has applied for dozens of jobs without success. He sleeps late, avoids friends who still work at the company and tells his wife, "I don't know who I am if I'm not that guy."

Rogers: Self-Concept and Congruence

Carl Rogers proposed that each person develops a self-concept, an organized set of beliefs about who they are, and that psychological health depends on congruence between that self-concept and actual experience. When experience contradicts the self-concept, people feel threatened and anxious.

Robert's self-concept was built around being the expert problem solver at one company. The layoff created sharp incongruence: his experience now is unemployment and rejection, while his self-concept still says he is indispensable. That gap explains his distress more than the loss of income alone.

Rogers also wrote about conditions of worth: feeling lovable only on the condition of meeting someone else's standards. Robert's father praised him only for achievement and criticized him for any failure. As an adult, Robert learned to feel worthy only when performing well, which made losing his job feel like losing his worth as a person.

Maslow and Self-Actualization

Maslow (1943) proposed that people move toward self-actualization, realizing their full potential, as more basic needs are met. Robert's severance and his wife's income cover physiological and safety needs for now, but his esteem needs, once met through work, are badly frustrated. Maslow's ideas suggest that until Robert finds new sources of competence and respect, growth toward self-actualization will stall. The hierarchy is better read as a set of tendencies than a strict ladder; people sometimes pursue meaning even when lower needs are unmet.

Existential Themes: Freedom and Meaning

Existential thinkers emphasize that people are free to choose and responsible for their choices, and that meaning is not given but made. Robert's layoff confronts him with a frightening freedom: his life is no longer structured by the job, and he must decide what to do with it. His avoidance and late sleeping can be seen as retreat from that freedom. Existential psychology would ask what he values beyond his former role and what he wants the next decade to mean.

The company took Robert's job; what it could not take is his choice about what comes next, and that choice is what frightens him.

A Research View of Thriving

Ryff (1989) argued that well-being involves more than feeling happy and proposed six dimensions of psychological well-being drawn partly from humanistic theory: self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life and personal growth, and developed scales to measure them. By this measure, Robert's self-acceptance, positive relations, mastery and purpose have all dropped since the layoff.

Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) introduced positive psychology as a scientific study of positive experiences, individual strengths and the institutions that support them, arguing that psychology had focused too much on illness. Their work carried humanistic interests into research, offering tested ways to think about strengths and meaning.

Comparing With Other Perspectives

A behavioral account would explain Robert's late sleeping as avoidance reinforced by relief from facing rejection, and a trait account might note that his high conscientiousness made losing structure especially disorienting. Both are useful. The humanistic view adds something they do not: an account of why the layoff threatens his very sense of who he is and why rebuilding meaning, not only routines, is part of recovery.

What His Wife Notices

Robert's wife sees glimpses of the man she knows when he helps a neighbor repair an irrigation system or explains a machining problem to their son. In those moments he is engaged and confident. From a humanistic view, these are experiences in which he acts from his genuine interests, and they hint at the kinds of work that might restore congruence. Paying attention to such moments can guide his next steps more reliably than chasing job titles like his old one.

Strengths and Limits

The humanistic perspective takes people's experience seriously and offers a hopeful view of change. Its concepts, such as self-actualization, can be vague and hard to measure, and early humanistic writing relied more on clinical observation than controlled research. Measures such as Ryff's scales and the research of positive psychology have answered some of these criticisms by making well-being measurable.

Moving Toward Congruence and Meaning

Several steps follow from the theory. Robert could talk with a counselor who offers the unconditional positive regard Rogers described, helping him separate his worth from his job. He could list the skills and values behind his work, such as solving practical problems and mentoring younger engineers, and look for roles that use them, including teaching at a community college or consulting for small manufacturers. Reconnecting with friends would support positive relations, one of the dimensions of well-being he has lost. And setting small daily goals, such as a morning walk and two hours of job search, would restore a sense of mastery and structure.

Conclusion

Humanistic and existential perspectives explain Robert's crisis as incongruence between a self built on one job and a new reality, deepened by conditions of worth learned in childhood and by the frightening freedom of an unstructured life. Research on psychological well-being and positive psychology adds a measurable picture of thriving. The theory points toward recovery through acceptance, rediscovered values and chosen meaning.

References

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346

Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069-1081. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069

Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5-14. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.5