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Snygg and Combs

Donald Snygg and Arthur Combs proposed the phenomenal field theory to understand human behavior and motivation. They believed that a person's subjective reality, which they called the phenomenal field, includes physical and mental experiences that are governed by the basic need to preserve and enhance the phenomenal self. According to Snygg and Combs, learning occurs when a person extracts meaningful details from their experiences to improve their phenomenal field. They also incorporated the concept of threat, believing that people take actions to enhance their ability to deal with perceived threats to their phenomenal self. Snygg and Combs saw therapy and education as ways of freeing people from perceptions that restrict their phenomenal field so their natural drive to maintain and enhance

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148 views2 pages

Snygg and Combs

Donald Snygg and Arthur Combs proposed the phenomenal field theory to understand human behavior and motivation. They believed that a person's subjective reality, which they called the phenomenal field, includes physical and mental experiences that are governed by the basic need to preserve and enhance the phenomenal self. According to Snygg and Combs, learning occurs when a person extracts meaningful details from their experiences to improve their phenomenal field. They also incorporated the concept of threat, believing that people take actions to enhance their ability to deal with perceived threats to their phenomenal self. Snygg and Combs saw therapy and education as ways of freeing people from perceptions that restrict their phenomenal field so their natural drive to maintain and enhance

Uploaded by

AprilMartel
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Donald Snygg and Arthur Combs

Phenomenal Field

 Our subjective reality


 Includes physical objects and people and their behaviors, thoughts, images, fantasies,
feelings, and ideas like justice, freedom, equality, and so on.
 A way to understand and predicts people’s behavior.

One Motive
 Snygg and Combs understanding of motivation
 "The basic need of everyone is to preserve and enhance the phenomenal self, and the
characteristics of all parts of the field are governed by this need.
 “Phenomenal Self” is the person’s own view of him/herself and is developed over a
lifetime
 Depending on the person’s physical characteristics
 The body and its needs are a likely part of the self, but not an inevitable one.
 Learning is not a matter of connecting a stimulus and a response or one stimulus with
another or even one response with another.
 Learning is a matter of improving the quality of one's phenomenal field by extracting
some detail from the confusion, because that detail is important, is meaningful, to the
person.

Applied Psychology
 Addressed clinical concerns by adding the concept of threat.
 “Threat” is the awareness of menace to the phenomenal self.
 threat is met with appropriate actions and new differentiations that enhance the person's
ability to deal with similar threats in the future.
 “Therapy” becomes a matter of freeing clients from the dead-end perceptions and
behaviors and cognitions and emotions they have set up to protect themselves from
threat.
 Also a provision of a facilitating situation wherein the normal drive of the organism for
maintenance or enhancement of organization is freed to operate.
 Snygg and Combs also pay a lot of attention to education, and meaning is their favorite
term here.
 Learning occurs when the differentiations involved have direct relevance to the
individual's needs that is, when learning is meaningful to that individual.

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