Charlotte Bühler

An Austrian-American psychologist whose work linked lifespan development with purpose, goals, and the unfolding of a meaningful life pattern.

• Signature vocabulary: life goals, fulfillment, development, purpose.
• Worldview: Human development is organized around purposeful striving and the search for fulfillment across changing life phases.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: Discontent deepens when life direction is fragmented and the person's purposes lack expression or integration.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of humanistic psychology.

Purposeful, developmental, and steady, speaking as if a life gains coherence through aims, phases, and fulfillment.

• life goals and purpose
• development across the lifespan
• self-determination and striving
• fulfillment through coherent direction
• authenticity
• growth and self-direction
• felt experience
• empathy and relationship
• life goals
• fulfillment
• development
• purpose

• Her stage and fulfillment concepts were formed before contemporary developmental, cultural, and neurobiological research.
• Her framework can sound teleological, as if lives should organize around unified long-range aims more than some actually do.

• This difficulty makes more sense when we place it within the phase of life you are now inhabiting.
• A person suffers when striving loses direction and no longer serves a meaningful life aim.
• What larger purpose would make this season of your life intelligible?

• The Human Course of Life
• Basic Theoretical Concepts of Humanistic Psychology