Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the podcast,

thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before, welcome back. We talk about a lot on this podcast,

how we want to think and act with others, how we can support ourselves through a difficult life,

and how we can build some psychological skills that will then help us do that.

How we choose to go about doing that is based at least in part on our view of human nature.

And stick with me here.

To start this episode with a little oversimplification, there are two main lenses that we can view human

nature through. The first is that our underlying nature is mostly bad, and we need to learn

how to regulate ourselves effectively. The second view is that our underlying nature is mostly good,

and our job is to clear away the cobwebs and clear away the inhibitions to that kind of natural goodness.

That first view, again to simplify a bit, is the basis of psychoanalysis, which we recently did

a couple of episodes on. This was based on the work of Freud and focused on unconscious drives,

and it took a pretty grim view of human nature. Psychoanalysis arose around the turn of the century,

this was 1900-ish, and it was based in part on the philosophy of the time. Then in the middle

of the 20th century, a new force emerged in psychology that's based more on that second view,

that were mostly good and have enormous potential for personal growth and self-actualization.

In today's episode, we're going to be talking about humanistic psychology,

its critiques of psychoanalysis and behaviorism, its core ideas,

and what you can take from it into your own life.

So to help me do that, I'm joined by somebody that I think it would be fair to say

is a bit of a humanistic therapist himself, clinical psychologist Rick Hanson. So, Dad, how are you doing today?

Oh, you outed me. Oh, I did. I've tried to keep it sick.

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