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’ experiencing of the client. It can be a source of confusion that the label ‘experiential’ has been used as a general term to describe all such approaches, but has also been employed as a label for one particular approach