Chapter 10 Carl Rogers: Life, Self, and Actualization

The Life of Rogers (1902-1987)

• Rogers was lonely as a child and felt his brother was favored.
• His parents were strict and religious.
• Moving to a farm invoked his interest in science.
• He studied for the ministry, then transferred to clinical and educational psychology.
• He worked with children with mental health challenges from families with limited economic resources
• He helped bring clinical psychology to the mainstream
• Rogers underwent a breakdown after struggling to help a disturbed client.
• He found himself after therapy.
• He discovered the ability to give and receive love.
• He formed deep emotional relationships with clients and others.

The Self and the Tendency Toward Actualization

• Self-insight is significant in the formation of personality.
• Actualization tendency is a basic human motivation to maintain and enhance self.
• The actualization process involves struggle and pain.
• Organismic valuing is the process of judging experiences in terms of hindering or fostering actualization and growth.
• Perception of experience influences behavior.

The Experiential World and the Development of the Self in Childhood

• Reliable reality depends on one's perception of experience, which changes with time, circumstance, and cultural norms.
• Experiences become the basis for judgments and behaviors.
• Higher levels of development sharpen our experiential world, ultimately leading to the development of the self.
• Infants develop a need for positive regard that guides behavior.
• Positive regard consists of acceptance, love, and approval from others, and is both universal and persistent.
• Unconditional Positive Regard is approval granted regardless of a person’s behavior.
• Positive Self-regard is the condition under which an individual grants themselves acceptance and approval.
• Conditions of worth is the belief that a person is worthy of approval when expressing desirable behaviors, and refraining from behavior that brings disapproval.
• Conditional Positive Regard involves approval, love, and acceptance for desirable behaviors and attitudes.
• Infants learn that parental affection has a price.
• Incongruence is a discrepancy between one’s self-concept and aspects of experience.
• Experiences incongruent with one’s self-concept become threatening.
• Psychological adjustment is a degree of compatibility between one’s self-concept and experiences.
• Psychologically healthy people perceive themselves, other people, and events in their world much as they really are.
• Psychologically healthy people develop and actualize all facets of the self and become a fully functioning person leading "the good life".

Characteristics of Fully Functioning Persons

• People who score high on full functioning experience higher levels of life satisfaction, positive thoughts and feelings, higher intrinsic motivation, lower negative thoughts feelings and anxiety.
• People who score high on full functioning have distinct personalities when it comes to moral character, scoring higher in enthusiasm, bravery, honesty and leadership.
• Fully functioning persons have an awareness of all experience and are open to positive as well as negative feelings.
• They have a freshness of appreciation for all experiences.
• They trust in one’s own thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
• They have freedom of choice, without inhibitions.
• They are creative and spontaneous.
• They have a continual need to grow, to strive to maximize one’s potential in a state of actualizing.
• Self-development is always in progress.
• If striving and growing cease, then the person loses spontaneity, flexibility, and openness.
• Being fully functioning involves continually testing, growing, striving, and using all of one’s potential, and requires a way of life that brings complexity and challenge.

Rogers' Person-Centered Therapy and Encounter Groups

• Person-Centered Therapy explores the client’s feelings and attitudes toward the self and toward other people.
• In Person-Centered Therapy, the client has inherent value and worth, and the therapist gives clients unconditional positive regard.
• Everything centers on the client, including responsibility for developing a more actualizing personality, and reevaluating relationships.
• Encounter Groups are a group therapy technique
• People learn about their feelings and how they relate to one another in encounter groups.
• Facilitators in encounter groups establish an atmosphere in which group members can express themselves and help members to gain insight.
• Large-scale analysis of studies revealed that Encounter Groups' results were comparable to traditional psychotherapies.

Assessment in Rogers' Theory

• Rogers introduced recording and filming of therapy sessions.
• He noted how greatly the self-concept changed from the period before therapy to the period following therapy.
• He applied the Q-sort technique, which determined how closely a client’s self-image or perceived self corresponded to the ideal self.
• A study by Rogers’s associates found that the discrepancy decreased over time during and following therapy; before r = –.01, after r =.31.
• Other psychologists devised tests to measure aspects of the experiential world based on Rogers’s theories.
• The experience inventory: self-report questionnaire is designed to assess openness or receptivity to experience, a characteristic of the fully functioning person.
• The experiencing scale measures people’s level of self-trust.
• A study found that people who made the greatest improvement during therapy grew in self-trust.

Questions About Human Nature and Reflections on Rogers's Theory

• He emphasized free will, more focus on nurture influence and was more inclined to the present.
• He recognized uniqueness and universality, growth process and was optimistic.
• Criticisms include disregard of unconscious factors that could influence behaviour, and subjective reports may be distorted.
• Letting the client lead their growth might encourage the subtle influence of the therapists’ own biases.
• Person-centered therapy was widely used to help veterans adjust to civilian life after World War II, and became popular and highly accessible
• Core concepts are accepted across different orientations in therapeutic work with clients.
• More than 200 training centers, mostly in Europe, promote Rogers’ form of therapy, and its emphasis on self-concept is widely recognized.