Once, several years ago, some friends and I enrolled in a cooking class taught by an Armenian matriarch and her aged servant. Since they spoke no English and we no Armenian, communication was not easy. She taught by demonstration; we watched (and diligently tried to quantify her recipes) as she prepared an array of marvelous eggplant and lamb dishes. But our recipes were imperfect; and try as hard as we could, we could not duplicate her dishes. ‘What was it,’ I wondered, ‘that gave her cooking that special touch?’ The answer eluded me until one day, when I was keeping a particularly keen watch on the kitchen proceedings, I saw our teacher, with great dignity and deliberation, prepare a dish. She handed it to her servant who wordlessly carried it into the kitchen to the oven and, without breaking stride, threw in handful after handful of assorted spices and condiments. I am convinced that those surreptitious ‘throw-ins’ made all the difference. Formal texts, journal articles, and lectures portray therapy as precise and systematic... Yet I believe deeply that, when no one is looking, the therapist throws in the ‘real thing.’ - Irvin Yalom (1980, p. 3)
I came to supervision uncertain what I had to offer to my supervisees—aware, in the way newly licensed clinicians often are, that the people across from me might see through me before I figured out what I had to give. The program where I work, a rural, newly established PsyD program at a state university, is excellent at what it is designed to do. Our program's faculty are experienced clinicians and empiricists. Our students are trained in evidence-based treatments with rigor and care. I believe in that thoroughly scientific training. I, myself, have been shaped by it.
And yet, sitting with my four doctoral students, one from each year of the program, gathered weekly for group supervision, I kept returning to the same question: What could I possibly offer them that the rest of their training does not?
The answer I kept arriving at was not a model or a framework. It was a book. Specifically, it was Yalom’s (1980) Existential Psychotherapy, the text that had changed how I practiced more than almost anything else in my training. I assigned it to my students not because I had a carefully theorized pedagogy, but because I genuinely did not know what else to offer. It was the “throw-in.”
This is, I think, the underexamined version of the problem facing humanistic psychology today. The concern is usually framed as relevance: Does humanistic psychology speak to contemporary clinical realities? Can it hold its own in an evidence-dominated field? These are fair questions. But beneath them is a quieter and perhaps more urgent one: Who is passing it on, and how? Humanistic psychology does not have a relevance problem so much as a transmission problem. Early career clinicians are not rejecting it. Many are simply not encountering it. It does not fit neatly into training structures that privilege what can be manualized and measured, and so it may arrive late, if at all, in the professional formation of new psychologists. Yalom sits within the existential tradition that humanistic psychology has long embraced, and it is precisely this corner of the literature that may get crowded out first.
In our group supervision reading, we began with death, as Yalom does. The first several weeks of our incorporation of the reading were… uncomfortable. My first-year student—already a clinician with a master’s degree, not someone easily rattled—told me directly that the material scared her. There was reluctance in the room, the kind that signals genuine contact with something rather than disengagement from it. We did not rush past this discomfort, as we would not with a client sitting with their own mortality.
We then reached the section on freedom. In Yalom’s framing, freedom is not relief, it is the terrifying recognition of “groundlessness”: that existence precedes essence, that we are the authors of our own structure, that the choices available to us are genuinely unlimited, even as their consequences are real. In our second week of the section on freedom, near the end of a group supervision meeting, I suggested we skip the book discussion for the week and close early. My first-year student objected immediately, and what followed was one of the better clinical conversations I have been part of. My students were not just discussing a concept but rather reorganizing how they understood their clients. They were recognizing that therapy does not move between a small set of options but opens onto something much larger: the full weight of human agency, the realization that rules exist but are not determinative, that consequences follow choices but do not foreclose them. One student connected this to social justice, and another was able to describe a specific case in a new way. The existential framework was not replacing their evidence-based training, but was sitting beneath it, giving it ground to stand on.
I want to be careful about what I am claiming here. I do not know if two hours of group supervision per week, filtered partly through assigned readings, is sufficient to transmit something as hard-won as a humanistic sensibility. I suspect it is not sufficient on its own. What I believe is that it is not nothing, and that the alternative, which is simply not introducing this material because it does not fit the existing structure, produces clinicians who are technically excellent and existentially underprepared.
The revaluation humanistic psychology requires today may be less philosophical than practical. The question is not whether humanistic psychology’s core principles—presence, freedom, human agency, the irreducible reality of the therapeutic relationship—are still worth holding. I think they plainly are. The question is whether we are finding the small windows, the moments between the curriculum, the supervisory relationships and seminar discussions and assigned readings through which those principles can move from one generation of clinicians to the next.
Yalom’s Armenian teacher did not explain the throw-ins. She did not manualize them or demonstrate their efficacy. Her aide simply carried the dish to the oven and added what she knew. The dish was better for it, even if no one watching could fully account for why.
Humanistic psychology’s future probably depends on what we decide is worth grabbing fast in the moment. It depends on enough people, in enough small instances, deciding to pass it on, imperfectly, implicitly, without a map. The question worth asking is not whether humanistic psychology remains relevant. It is whether we are still throwing it in.
Reference
Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.