ROGERS’S PERSON- CENTERED THEORY

QUICK REVIEW:

The Master Motive: Self-Actualizing Tendency

• Self-actualizing tendency: active, controlling drive toward fulfillment of our potentials that enables us to maintain and enhance ourselves

Personality Development:

• Valuing processing in infants: infants engage in an organismic valuing process, in which they use their actualization tendency as a criterion in making judgments about the worth of a given experience
• The fully-functioning person: if people are able to utilize their organismic valuing processes fully, they will inevitably begin to experience personal growth and movement toward realization of their potentials; fully functioning people are self-actualizing people
• Characteristics of fully functioning people include:
  • Openness to experience
  • Existential living
  • Trust of their organisms
  • Creativity
  • Leading an enriched life

• Emerging persons: people of the future whose interpersonal relationships are characterized by honesty, cooperation, and concern for others; they avoid sham, facades, and hypocrisy; they welcome change and opt for growth even when it is painful to do so
• Emerging people are characterized by:
  • Honesty and openness
  • An indifference to material possessions
  • Caring for others
  • A deep mistrust of cognitively-based science
  • A trust of their own experience and a profound mistrust of all external authority
  • Courage to change

The Social Self and the True Self:

Social self: self-concept based largely on the expectations of others

• We have a strong need for positive regard and want to please others

True self: self-concept based on our actual feelings about our experiences

• Conditions of worth: stipulations upon which our sense of self-worth depends; belief that we are only worthwhile if we perform behaviors that others think are good and refrain from actions that others think are bad
• Ideal condition for development of a healthy self-concept and movement toward becoming fully functioning is unconditional positive regard: deep and genuine caring by others, uncontaminated by judgments or evaluations of our thoughts, feelings, or behaviors
  • Congruence: state of harmony that exists when there is no discrepancy between the person’s experiencing and his or her self-concept

Assessment Techniques:

Q-Sort: self-report procedure designed to measure the discrepancy between a persons actual and ideal self.

Theory’s Implications for Therapy:

Therapeutic conditions that facilitate growth

• Client and therapist are in psychological contact
• Client is in a state of incongruence
• Therapist is congruent
• Therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client
• Therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s internal frame of reference
• Client perceives the therapist’s unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding

Theory’s Implications for Education:

According to Rogers, the educational establishment is authoritarian and bases its program on a number of faulty assumptions:

• Students cannot be trusted to pursue their own educational goals
• Creative people develop from passive learners
• Evaluation is education; education is evaluation

Rogers’s recommendations to counter this nonproductive orientation:

• Students should be able to choose their own goals and to pursue them with the help and encouragement of faculty

Theory’s Implications for Marriage:

According to Rogers, marriage is a failing institution.  Rogers opposed  traditional marriage, in which the husband is the ultimate authority and the wife occupies a more subservient role.  Rogers’ recommendations for a healthy marriage:

• Difficulties between the partners are discussed openly
• Communication is honest and authentic, with mutual listening
• Partners appreciate the value of separateness
• Women’s growing independence is valued
• Roles and role expectations fade away, replaced by people making their own choices about their behavior
• Either partner may form satellite relationships, which are relationships formed outside the marriage that may or may not involve sexual intimacy

Evaluative Comments:

• Comprehensiveness: increasingly broad in scope
• Precision and testability: hard-earned precision and adequate testability
• Parsimony: fails to meet the parsimony criterion; too simplistic
• Empirical validity: empirical support is generally supportive
• Heuristic value: theory has been very stimulating and provocative to clinicians, counselors, and researchers in a number of disciplines; strong heuristic value
• Applied value: strong applied value in education, race relations, family relationships, leadership, and counseling

 

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References:
Bernstein, D.A. & Nash, P.W. (2008). Essentials of psychology (4th ed.) Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Feldman, R. (2013). Essentials of understanding psychology (11th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Friedman, H.S. & Schustack, M.W. (2012), Personality: classic theories and modern research (5th ed). Boston: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.
Ryckman, R. M. (2013). Theories of personality (10th ed.). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.