Discover Your Understanding of Person-Centered Theory

Key Concepts of Person-Centered Theory by Carl Rogers

• Rogers believed in the formative tendency, which is the tendency for all matter to evolve from simpler to more complex forms.
• The actualizing tendency is the only motive people possess, and it is the tendency within all humans to move toward completion or fulfillment of potentials.
• Rogers believed that congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy are necessary and sufficient conditions for becoming a fully functioning or self-actualizing person.
• Infants gradually become aware of their own identity as they learn what tastes good and what feels pleasant or unpleasant.
• Self-actualization is a subset of the actualization tendency, and it is the tendency to actualize the self as perceived in awareness.
• The self-concept is all those aspects of one's being and experiences that are perceived in awareness by the individual and is not identical with the organismic self.
• The ideal self is one's view of self as one wishes to be and contains all those attributes that people aspire to possess.
• A wide gap between the ideal self and the self-concept indicates incongruence and an unhealthy personality.
• Awareness is necessary for the self-concept and the ideal self to exist, and it refers to the symbolic representation of some portion of our experience.
• Becoming a person requires an individual to make contact with another person, positive or negative, and to receive positive regard from others.
• Positive regard is the prerequisite for positive self-regard, which is the experience of prizing or valuing one's self.
• Once positive self-regard is established, it becomes autonomous and self-perpetuating.