Within counseling and psychotherapy, the most widely used humanistic approaches are person-centered and Gestalt, although psychosynthesis, transactional analysis, and other models also contain strong humanistic elements. The common ingredient in all humanistic approaches is an emphasis on experiential processes.

Rather than focusing on the origins of client problems in childhood events (psychodynamic) or the achievement of new patterns of behavior in the future (behavioral), humanistic therapies concentrate on the ‘here-and-now’ experience of the client.