On what grounds have the theories of Maslow and Rogers been criticized?
Two psychologists who worked in the field of humanistic psychology are Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. Abraham Maslow is also known as the humanistic psychology’s spiritual father. He studied a handful of outstanding people to analyze their base of difference from the other normal people. Maslow was enrolled as a psychology professor, the subject, to which he was not familiar with. The course that had to teach did not fascinate him much.
Hence, he turned away from it and got transferred to Wisconsin university. He started with his own childhood stories; how he used to escape from the awful situation by reading books. Hence, he became the first psychologist to study the human’s positive aspects. He determined his work that would be helpful for humans, for developing their personalities and positive attitude towards life.
Rogers focused on the mother-child relationship. According to him if the mother satisfies all the need of love of the child, then the child use to develop in the healthy personality. If the love is conditional, then all the aspects of the child do not get expressed. In this case the child considers himself to be worth only in certain situations and would imbibe the attitude of mother.
Though Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow worked to develop a humanistic psychology, their theories failed on several grounds. One criticism was that they used no humanistic model to prove theory theories. Neither was there any experimental proof of any proposal. The humanistic psychology remained isolated from the main stream psychology, even after the 10 years of the contribution by Rogers.
One of the reasons for this isolation was that these theories were used only in the clinical trials; they were never taught in the universities. These psychologists did not train the students and conducted experiments in order to continue the flow of this knowledge in the next generation psychologists; instead the humanistic psychologists practiced in private only, neither did they publish any papers.
Another reason was that humanistic psychologists were busy in opposing the behaviorism and psychoanalysis, which was already weakened by the year 1960-1970. Although, the mainstream psychology was not transformed by humanistic psychology, it had great impact on the main stream psychology.