Humanistic Psychology’s Chief Task: To Reset Psychology on its Rightful Existential–Humanistic Base

Schneider discusses the nature and chief task of humanistic psychology. He says that psychology was and probably always will be a philosophically based discipline. In this light, the field of psychology has actually been "reset" many times over its relatively brief 100-year history, and this resetting has had as much to do with philosophical fashion as it has had to do with empirical evidence. He adds that psychology should now be reset on its rightful base in existence. It is the time that psychology recognized what the great poets and thinkers the world over have recognized for centuries--that the main problem of the human being is the paradoxical problem: that they are both angels and food for worms, that they are suspended between constrictive and expansive worlds, and that they are both exhilarated and stupefied by this tension.