A Study of Golestan of Saadi in terms of Humanistic Psychology

Golestan of Saadi is one of the classical Persian literature works which has been warmly accepted both inside and outside Iran; it is perhaps because Saadi sets human at the center and pays special attention to all of his aspects. There can be found some concepts and issues in Golestan which have influenced different branches of humanities such as philosophy and psychology. Therefore, it can be said that Saadi is a person who moves in reality while is "on the horse-back of imagination",i.e., the unconscious part of his being presents a general pattern of human in his poetry. Humanistic psychologists also talk about the art of “becoming human” and believe that whenever one is aware of his defensive mechanisms, responsibility taking, hard-working qualities, new means of evaluations, and internal requirements he can find his way to human perfection. In this paper an attempt has been made to compare humanistic concepts in Golestan with the patterns suggested by the humanistic psychologists, in addition to the development of a relation between literature and psychology and approximation of Saadi’s ideas to those of humanistic psychologists. The results of this study show the similarities of the Saadi's ideas to the psychological studies of human which prepare the way to see the amount of relationship between different cultures and schools of thought among nations in terms of understanding human.