User:S.emp/Week 13 lecture 11

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=Week 13, Lecture 11=

Holism and Positive Psychology
Holism states that human-beings are best understood as an integrated, organised whole rather than as a series of differentiated parts. According to this idea any event that affects one system, will affect the entire system, the entire person. Holism has emerged from humanistic psychology and is about striving toward growth and self-realisation and moving away from simply satisfying the expectations of others. It is about working towards your needs, not others.

Positive psychology is a newly emerging field of psychology. It seeks to articulate the idea of the good life and it uses the empirical methods of psychology to understand what makes life worth living. Positive psychology is not a subfield of humanistic psychology. Unlike humanistic psychology, positive psychology has a strong reliance on hypothesis-testing and data-based empirical research. Positive psychology looks at a person and asks ‘what can be?’

Self-Actualisation
Self-actualisation is the inherent striving of individuals to fulfill their talents, capacities and potentials. According to Reeve (2009) Self-actualization has two fundamental directions of self-actualization; Autonomy and Openness to experience. Self-actualization is at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The Problem of evil
I found this part of this chapter and lecture really interesting because I do not think that people are born evil and that no one is completely evil. I think that people who commit evil acts do so because of environmental factors. According to Reeve (2009) evil is the deliberate, voluntary, intentional infliction of painful suffering on another person without respect for their humanity or personhood. Humanistic theorists’ views on evil are that evil is not inherent in human nature, it is not environment that creates an evil person. I completely agree with this and I think that evil acts can be committed by anyone, any race, any age and a person from any educational background. An example of an evil act is the Columbine shootings in 1999, the boys that killed twelve high school students and one teacher did so partly because they had been placed in an environment where they were tortured by fellow students, while it does not excuse them killing other people, it helps to explian why. Here is a link of footage from the massacre. This footage highlights the terrifying reality of what an environment can foster in a person. It is scary and extremely sad and it happens every day. Currently, in our society people are bullied for being gay or a lesbian, time will tell whether these evil acts will create evil in the person who is being tormented. To stop a person from committing evil, we first need to change the environment in which it occurs and that starts with how we treat other people.