by Noel Shafi
July 2018
In psychology, we often assume that human behavior is based on freewill, and that we, as rational beings endowed with unique capacities for decision-making, can generally think and plan for our actions. Humanistic psychology is an important movement in the recent decades, which ran counter to the psychoanalytic tradition. The humanism movement set the philosophical foundations for positive psychology, family therapy, and existential psychotherapy (Resnick et al., 2001). Freewill is a central theme in humanism, a philosophy that values progressive ideals, such as subjectivity, individual freedom, rationalism, inherit goodness of humanity, and actualization of human potential. However, neuroscience research has challenged our basic notion of freewill, or at least it appears to, due to the perceived materialist ideals of science. And so the question emerges: can neuroscience support a humanistic psychology? Can we use neuroscience and humanism, hand in hand, to unfold the problem of freewill?
Contrary to humanistic psychology, neuroscience research has created tension in our contemporary debate of freewill, due to its fundamentalist ideology of biological determinism. While the issue of freewill may seem like a philosophical question, the way we perceive “freewill” has profound implications for our theory of mental health counseling and clinical practice. That our thoughts precede and cause our actions is an important principle of behavioral causality. It has been suggested that counselors in the 21st century typically viewed causality from a “deterministic, probabilistic self-determinism” viewpoint (Wilks, 2018). Probabilistic self-determinism was defined as a philosophical view which holds that “the presence or absence of physiological, biological, psychological, cognitive, cultural, environmental, systemic, relations, and social events…merely increases the likelihood of a behavior occurring” (Wilks, 2018, p. 214). According to the probabilistic worldview, there is such a thing as human freewill, although our freedom is mediated by numerous factors. In contrast, adherents of determinism hold that the aforementioned factors, or the lack thereof, necessitate a behavior, rather than increase its likelihood. A deterministic worldview is one that is devoid of any concept of human freewill, and typically views behavior as an automated mechanism of cause and effect. Biological determinism is a kind of deterministic worldview often associated with neuroscience. However, such an association is an overgeneralization given the wide diversity of opinion in neuroscience today.
In fact, there is an interesting convergence between neuroscience and humanistic psychology (DeRobertis, 2014), a viewpoint we can call humanistic neuroscience (Dennis, 1995). DeRobertis argue that neuroscience research has contributed to a “renaissance” of humanistic psychology. DeRobertis (2015) offers five tenants of humanistic psychology, which may be supported by neuroscience research, including the irreducibility of human beings, the interpersonal experience of human existence, the notion of human consciousness, consciously based decision-making processes, and the goal-oriented and purpose-driven behaviors of human beings.
The author refers to the recent research on dynamic systems neuroscience. This approach to neuroscience highlights the value of holistic principles in brain development and psychological phenomena in general. Holistic neuroscientists view human brain as nonlinear, self-organized, and interdependent both in terms of how regions within the brain interact with each other (i.e. functional neuroscience) and in terms of how the brain reacts and interacts with the environment (i.e. social-cognitive neuroscience). Again, this is in contrast with the traditional views of a “hard-wired” brain, which is linear in its development, genetically programmed, and relatively independent from its external reality. DeRobertis reviews the previous research using dynamic systems approaches. He found that neuroscience studies on emotion emphasize the role of interacting parts, rather than isolating selected regions in the brain; that studies on cognitive activity often find multiple active regions involved in a single function; that studies on information processing are linked to social context; and notably, that studies on mental illness have repeatedly demonstrated the combined roles of neurochemistry, development, social experience, and culture in the manifestation of such illnesses. He concludes that “intentionality, emotional interpretation, experience, information processing, and neurological processes are all given equal footing and viewed as the coordinated manifestations of a complex psychological whole” (DeRobertis, 2015, p. 8).
I think that reading and reflecting upon the works of Wilks (2018) and Derobertis (2015) in particular were important in moving me to embrace some of the basic tenants of humanistic psychology, both as a personal worldview and as underlying theory of practice. I believe that freewill is a real psychological phenomenon, but just like any other mental experience, is subject to a multitude of biological and environmental factors which mediate our decision-making process. But I ultimately submitted to the idea that any decision regarding our behaviors are ultimately our own. That we, as human beings, actively seek to shape our lives, in order to derive meaning from it.
Although, I wonder, if the phenomena known as freewill would still hold true for individuals who present with disinhibition or impulsivity? This is an important question relating to personal responsibility for criminal offense in the justice system; I suppose this a question I can ponder more deeply in the future.
References
Dennis, D. (1995). Humanistic neuroscience, mentality, and spirituality. Journal of
Humanistic Psychology, 35, 34-72.
DeRobertis, E. M. (2015). A neuroscientific renaissance of humanistic
psychology. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 55(3), 323-345.
Resnick, S., Warmoth, A., & Serlin, I. A. (2001). The humanistic psychology and positive
psychology connection: Implications for psychotherapy. Journal of Humanistic
Psychology, 41(1), 73-101.
Wilks, D. (2018). Twenty‐First‐Century Counseling Theory Development in Relation to
Definitions of Free Will and Determinism. Journal of Counseling &
Development, 96(2), 213-222.