• The humanistic perspective, led by psychologists such as Carl Rogers

and Abraham Maslow, wanted psychology to focus on the things that

make people uniquely human, such as subjective emotions and the
freedom to choose one’s own destiny.
• Both Maslow and Rogers (1961) believed human beings are always
striving to fulfill their innate capacities and capabilities and to become
everything their genetic potential will allow them to become.
• This striving for fulfillment is called the self- actualizing tendency.
actualization tendency
• Rogers believed people are motivated by an innate tendency to
actualize, maintain, and enhance the self.
• This drive toward self-actualization is part of a larger actualization
tendency, which encompasses all physiological and psychological
needs.
• By attending to basic requirements—such as the needs for food,
water, and safety—the actualization tendency serves to maintain the
organism, providing for sustenance and survival.
organismic valuing process
• The governing process throughout the life span, as Rogers envisioned
it, is the organismic valuing process.
• Through this process we evaluate all life experiences by how well
they serve the actualization tendency.
• Experiences that we perceive as promoting actualization are
evaluated as good and desirable; we assign them a positive value.
Experiences perceived as hindering actualization are undesirable and
thus earn a negative value.
• These perceptions influence behavior because we prefer to avoid
undesirable experiences and repeat desirable experiences.
phenomenology
• In developing his theory, Rogers weighed the impact of the experiential
world in which we operate daily.
• This provides a frame of reference or context that infl uences our growth.
The notion that perception is subjective is an old one and not unique to
Rogers.
• This idea, called phenomenology, argues that the only reality of which we
can be sure is our own subjective world of experience, our inner
perception of reality.
• The phenomenological approach within philosophy refers to an unbiased
description of our conscious perception of the world, just as it occurs,
without any attempt on our part at interpretation or analysis.
Positive regard
• Rogers believed that we are born with an innate need for positive
regard—for acceptance, sympathy, and love from others. Rogers
viewed positive re gard as essential for healthy development.
• Rogers defined positive regard as warmth, affection, love, and
respect that come from the significant others (parents, admired
adults, friends, and teachers) in people’s experience
• Positive regard is vital to people’s ability to cope with stress and to
strive to achieve self-actualization.
• People need positive regard not only from others but also from
themselves.
• Thus, a need for positive self-regard, the desire to feel good about
ourselves, also develops.
• Lack of unconditional positive regard from parents and other signifi
cant people in the past teaches people that they are worthy of
approval and love only when they meet certain standards.
• This fosters the development of conditions of worth that dictate the
circumstances under which we approve or disapprove of ourselves.
• A child who experiences parental approval when behaving in a
friendly fashion but disapproval whenever she becomes angry or ag
gressive may come to disapprove of her own an gry feelings, even
when they are justified.
• As an adult, she may deny in herself all feelings of anger and struggle
to preserve a self-image of being totally loving.
• Rogers believed that conditions of worth can tyrannize people and
cause major incongruence between self and experience, as well as a
need to deny or distort important aspects of experience.
• Conditions of worth are similar to the “shoulds” and “musts” that
populate the Freudian superego.
UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD &
conditional positive regard
• Rogers believed that unconditional positive regard, or love, affection, and
respect with no strings attached, is necessary for people to be able to
explore fully all that they can achieve and become.
• Unfortunately, some parents, spouses, and friends give conditional
positive regard, which is love, affection, respect, and warmth that depend,
or seem to depend, on doing what those people want. conditional positive
regard is dependent on how the child behaves; in the extreme case, love
and acceptance are given to the child only when the child behaves as the
parents wants.
• Ideally, positive regard received from the parents is unconditional—that is,
independent of how the child behaves.
• Unconditional positive regard communicates that the person is inherently
worthy of love, regardless of accomplishments or behavior.
The self
• The central concept in Rogers’s theory is the self, an organized,
consistent set of perceptions of and beliefs about oneself (Rogers,
1959).
• Once formed, the self plays a powerful role in guiding our perceptions
and directing our behavior.
Real and ideal self
• REAL AND IDEAL SELF
• Two important components are the real self (one’s actual perception
of characteristics, traits, and abilities that form the basis of the
striving for self-actualization) and the ideal self (the perception of
what one should be or would like to be).
• The ideal self primarily comes from important, significant others in a
person’s life, especially our parents when we are children.
• Rogers believed that when the real self and the ideal self are very
close or similar to each other, people feel competent and capable, but
when there is a mismatch between the real self and ideal self, anxiety
and neurotic behavior can be the result.
• When a person has a realistic view of the real self, and the ideal self is
something that is actually attainable, there usually isn’t a problem of a
mismatch.
• It is when a per son’s view of self is distorted or the ideal self is impossible
to attain that problems arise.
• Once again, how the important people (who can be either good or bad
influences) in a person’s life react to the person can greatly impact the
degree of agreement, or congruence, between real and ideal selves.
However, as an individual develops, they look less to others for approval
and disapproval and more within themselves to decide if they are living in a
way that is satisfying to them (Rogers, 1951, 1961).
Self concept
• An important tool in human self- actualization is the development of
an image of one self, or the self-concept.
• The self-concept is based on what people are told by others and how
the sense of self is reflected in the words and actions of important
people in one’s life such as parents, siblings, cowork ers, friends, and
teachers.
Self concept
• Rogers theorized that at the beginning of their lives, children cannot
distinguish between themselves and their environment.
• As they inter act with their world, children begin to distinguish
between the “me” and the “not-me.”
• The self concept continues to develop in response to our life
experiences, though many aspects of it remain quite stable over time
Self concept
• Once the self-concept is established, there is a tendency to maintain
it, for it helps us understand our relationship to the world around us.
• We there fore have needs for self-consistency, an absence of conflict
among self-perceptions, and congruence, consistency between self-
perceptions and experience.
• Any experience we have that is inconsistent, or incongruous, with our
self-concept, including our perceptions of our own behavior, evokes
threat, or anxiety.
• Well-adjusted individuals can respond to threat adaptively by
modifying the self-concept so that the experiences are congruent
with the self.
• But other people choose to deny or distort their experiences to
remove the incongruence, a strategy that can lead to what Rogers
termed “problems in living.”
• Thus, a person who always attributes interpersonal difficulties to
shortcomings in another person will be unlikely to consider the
possibility that he or she may have some self-defeating behavior
patterns that deserve attention.
• To preserve their self-concepts, people not only interpret situations in
self-congruent ways, but they also behave in ways that will lead
others to respond to them in a self-confirming fashion.
congruence
• According to Rogers, the degree of congruence between self-concept
and experience helps define one’s level of adjustment.
• The more rigid and inflexible people’s self-concepts are, the less open
they will be to their experiences and the more maladjusted they will
become (Figure 13.10a).
• If there is a significant degree of incongruence between self and
experience and if the experiences are forceful enough, the defenses
used to deny and distort reality may collapse, resulting in extreme
anxiety and a temporary disorganization of the self-concept.
(a) Maladjustment occurs when a person faced with incongruities between self and experience

distorts or denies reality to make it consistent with the self-concept .

(b) In contrast, extremely well-adjusted, or fully functioning, people integrate
experiences into the self with minimal distortion, so that they are able to profitfully
from their experiences .
Fully functioning person
• Toward the end of his career, Rogers became particularly interested in
fully functioning persons, individuals who were close to achieving
self-actualization.
• As Rogers viewed them, such people do not hide behind masks or
adopt artificial roles.
• They feel a sense of inner freedom, self-determination, and choice in
the direction of their growth.
• They have no fear of behaving spontaneously, freely, and creatively.
• Because they are fairly free of conditions of worth, they can accept
inner and outer experiences as they are, without modifying them
defensively to suit a rigid self-concept or the expectations of others.
Thus, a fully functioning unmarried woman would be able to
• (1) state quite frankly that her career is more important to her than a
role as wife and mother (if she truly felt that way), even if others did
not approve of her choice,
• and (2) act comfortably on those feelings. In this sense, she could be
true to herself
Fully functioning
• One central assumption of Rogers’s theory was this: Left to their own
devices, human beings show many positive characteristics and move,
over the course of their lives, toward becoming fully functioning
persons.
• What are such persons like?
• Rogers suggested that they are people who strive to experience life
to the fullest, who live in the here and now, and who trust their own
feelings.
• They are sensitive to the needs and rights of others, but do not allow
society’s standards to shape their feelings or actions to an exces sive
degree. “If it feels like the right thing to do,” such people reason,
“then I should do it.”
• Fully functioning people aren’t saints; they can—and do—lose their
tempers or act in ways they later regret.
• But throughout life, their actions become increasingly dominated by
constructive impulses. They are in close touch with their own values
and feelings and experience life more deeply than most other persons.