Journal of Humanistic Psychology

Health and illness are complex constructs for which a biomedical approach alone is insufficient. The purpose of the present study was to explore how personal attitudes toward health and illness affect health experience. By adopting a constructivist perspective, we carried out individual semistructured interviews with 15 persons enrolled in a yoga class in northern Italy. We analyzed the interview data using interpretative phenomenological analysis and found that participants’ attitudes toward health and wellness were linked to their experiences and perceptions of health and illness, their somatic awareness, and their constructions of themselves and of their relations. The findings point toward the importance of people taking responsibility for their health. In addition, they suggest that health care should be personalized: approaching people as a complex unity and health and illness as inextricable parts of their lives.

Despite Ernest Becker’s claim, nearly 40 years ago, that the denial of death has relevance to the depth of the individual psyche as well as to human bonding behaviors, death anxiety continues to be heavily denied in its clinical application. This denial largely persists in the field of psychology and the practice of psychotherapy as death anxiety is reserved for comprehensive, philosophical, and ontological concerns but rarely informs the organization of the therapeutic dyad or the treatment of patients. The purpose of this article is to illustrate that death anxiety acts as a bonding agent to the close psychotherapeutic relationship and that mortality salient dyadic encounters can be assessed and used by the psychotherapy practitioner. This article introduces death anxiety experiments and theories (mostly contributions of Terror Management Theory) that have more recently demonstrated the buffering and mitigating potential of close relationships on an individual’s death fears. Additionally, this article illuminates the significance of the close relationship, which is a commonly accepted psychotherapeutic agent of change and also, paradoxically, produces death fears. The article concludes by suggesting that death anxiety plays a dominant role in the socially constructed mind and should therefore play a prevalent role in clinical depth work.

This study broadens the construct of gratitude by exploring the lived phenomenal experience in a targeted sample of 51 participants with diverse demographic profiles. Participant descriptions of gratitude experience revealed both thematic patterns in somatic experience and a range of appraisals that included joy, love, awakening, release, awe, and feeling blessed. Cognitive appraisals showed significant correlation between meaning and intensity of gratitude affect, and their influence on relationship boundaries between “self” and “other.” Conclusions point to (a) the need for an expanded definition of the transactional nature of gratitude that accounts for the affective range of emotional experience, (b) the intentionality of gratitude focused on a transpersonal “other,” (c) the frequency and characteristics of the occurrence of an overwhelming emotional experience of gratitude associated with awe, and (d) the potential impact of gratitude on relational boundaries between self and other.

The psychiatric survivor movement is an international coalition of grassroots organizations that work for human rights in the mental health system. Previous research has examined how the survivor movement has critiqued and envisioned alternatives to traditional mental health services. The current study focused on a unique group of individuals who identify as both psychiatric survivors and work as therapists in the mental health system. I interviewed several people with this dual-identity to better understand their approaches toward activism and psychotherapy. This article focuses on one of the survivor-therapist’s experiences, and I explore the broader clinical implications for both survivors and mental health professionals and next steps for developing viable alternatives to the traditional system.

Humanistic psychology and counseling psychology share many of the same core values. This article focuses on three specific common characteristics: strength-based approaches, qualitative methodology, and multiculturalism. In contrast with the prominence of the medical model, both domains work from a holistic understanding of the person. Additionally, most of the development and progress within qualitative research methodologies has taken place in counseling and humanistic psychology. Third, these areas of psychology value culture, context, and members of underrepresented groups. Finally, suggestions are provided for future communication and collaboration.

This article details the history, possibility, limits, and ethics of cross-cultural travel as a qualitative method in psychology. The article provides a brief overview of the ambiguous relationship between psychology and culture and develops an account of the history of travel methods in psychology. It then analyzes an exemplary case of travel research involving Medard Boss’ sojourn to India and his encounters with Indian sages. This article argues that the history of psychology is, in many ways, a history of the exiled, the dispossessed, and the traveler (e.g., Freud, Fromm, Fanon, Jahoda, Rogers, Jung, and others). The article concludes with reflections on using travel methods in an increasingly globalized world and in an ecologically sensitive way.