CARL ROGER’S THEORY

• The entire theory is built on a single "force of life" he calls the actualizing
tendency. It can be defined as the built-in motivation present in every life-form
to develop its potentials to the fullest extent possible.
• We’re not just talking about survival: Rogers believes that all creatures strive
to make the very best of their existence. If they fail to do so, it is not for a lack
of desire.
• 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.
Actualizing tendency,
• An interrelated and more pertinent assumption is the actualizing
tendency, or the tendency within all humans (and other animals and
plants) to move toward completion or fulfillment of potentials (Rogers,
1959, 1980). This tendency is the only motive people possess.
• Tendencies to maintain and to enhance the organism are subsumed
within the actualizing tendency. The need for maintenance is similar to
the lower steps on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
• Even though people have a strong desire to maintain the status quo,
they are willing to learn and to change. This need to become more, to
develop, and to achieve growth is called enhancement.
Actualizing tendencey
• Rogers believed that the actualizing tendency is part of human
nature.
• This belief is also reflected in another term he used: the organismic
valuing process.
• This term refers to the idea that the organism automatically evaluates
its experiences to tell whether they are enhancing actualization.
• If they aren’t, the organismic valuing process creates a nagging sense
that something isn’t right.
• According to Rogers, we are motivated by a single positive force: an
innate tendency to develop our constructive, healthy potentials. This
actualizing tendency includes both drive-reducing and drive-
increasing behavior.
• On the one hand, we seek to reduce the drives of hunger, thirst, sex,
and oxygen deprivation.
• Yet we also demonstrate such tension-increasing behavior as
curiosity, creativity, and the willingness to undergo painful learning
experiences in order to become more effective and independent:
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.
organismic valuing process
• Human organism generally provides the individual with trustworthy
messages and will naturally strive towards enhancing the self (Mearns
& Thorne, 1988)
• Children are often completely congruent with their organismic selves
• Child falls over = child feels pain = child begins to cry
The Organismic Valuing Process.

• The Organismic Valuing Process.

• According to Rogers, there is no need for us to learn what is or is not
actualizing.
• Included among the primarily unconscious aspects of experience is
an innate ability to value positively whatever we perceive as
actualizing, and to value negatively that which we perceive as
nonactualizing (the organismic valuing process).
• Thus the infant values food when hungry but promptly becomes
disgusted with it when satiated, and enjoys the life-sustaining physical
contact of being cuddled.
The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions
for Client Change
• The core of person-centered therapy is the six necessary and
sufficient conditions for bringing about personality or
psychotherapeutic change (Gillon, 2007; Kalmth-out, 2007; Rogers,
1957, 1959). Drawing from his clinical experience, Rogers felt thatif all
six of the following conditions were met, change would occur in the
client.
• 1. Psychological contact. There must be a relationship in which two
people are capable of having some impact on each other. Brodley
(2000) describes the concept of presence, which refers to the
therapist not just being in the same room with the client but also
bringing forth her abilities to attend to and be engaged by the client.
Incongruence.
• Incongruence.
• The client must be in a state of psychological vulnerability,that is,
fearful, anxious, or otherwise distressed.

• Implied in this distress is an incongruence between the person’s

perception of himself and his actual experience.
• Sometimes individuals are not aware of this incongruence, but as they
become increasingly aware, they become more open to the
therapeutic experience.
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF EXPERIENCE

• Rogers’s theory is built on a deeply significant insight into the human

condition. In our daily living, we believe we experience an objective world of
reality. When we see something occur, we believe it exists as we saw it. When
we tell people about the events of our day, we believe we are telling them
what really happened.
• This phenomenal field —the space of perceptions that makes up our
experience—is a subjective construction.
• The individual constructs this inner world of experience, and the construction
reflects not only the outer world of reality but also the inner world of personal
needs, goals, and beliefs.
• Inner psychological needs shape the subjective experiences that we
interpretas objectively real.
PHENOMENOLOGY
• Rogers takes a phenomenological approach to the study of persons.
• Rogers, however, argues that personality psychology must address
subjective internal experiences.
• These experiences cannot be measured in the manner of objective
physical qualities.
• Instead, they have a subjective quality; their meaning rests on the
interpretations of the individual having the experience (the subject who
is experiencing things).
• In Rogers’s view, the most important point about our world of experience
is that it is private and thus can only be known completely to each of us.
SELF
• According to Rogers, the self must accommodate to the demands of the
environment.
• The self-concept, which Rogers defined as the organized set of
characteristics that we recognize as belonging to ourselves, develops
through these interactions. By interacting with others and the challenges of
life, we develop an awareness of who we are.
• The self-concept can also be described as the product of these experiences
and any values mediated by others that the individual may adopt.
• Accordingly, the self-concept includes our image of ourselves in relation to
our overall environment, “a fluid and changing gestalt,” as Rogers put it.
Self-concept
• Self-concept is defined as ‘that organisation of qualities that the
individual attributes to himself’ (Kinch, 1963)
• Configurations of self (Mearns et al., 2000)
• Self-concept is not a unified entity
• Individual may hold many different concepts of the self
• Most of us hold contrasting views of ourselves
• We might feel that we can be both spontaneous and cautious or
loving and angry
SELF CONCEPT
• Rogers proposed that the self-concept has both conscious and
unconscious elements.
• He also believed that an individual’s personality is based on
interaction with a “continually changing world of experience of which
(the person) is the center” (Rogers, 1951, p. 483).
• Moreover, we alone have complete access to our private world, which
exists through our conscious or unconscious interaction with our
phenomenal field.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SELF
• As infants gradually develop a more complex experiential fi eld from
widening social encounters, one part of their experience becomes
differentiated from the rest.
• This separate part, defined by the words I, me, and myself, is the self
or self-concept.
• The Self-Concept
• The self-concept includes all those aspects of one’s being and one’s
experiences that are perceived in awareness (though not always
accurately) by the individual.
Social experiences
• Social experiences will teach us about the person we ‘should’ be
• Many of the different configurations of the self-concept have been
created according to social influence.
• Children learn how they ‘should’ act, feel and think through
interaction with others in their environment
• Child falls over = child feels pain = child begins to cry = child is told
that ‘big
• boys don’t cry’ = child learns that pain should be buried and crying is
a sign of weakness
IDEAL/SOCIAL SELF
• The social self is the organized set of characteristics that the individual
perceives as being peculiar to himself or herself.
• The social self is primarily acquired through contact with others.
• Rogers believed that when we interact with significant people in our
environment—parents,brothers, sisters, friends, teachers—we begin to
develop a concept of self
• that is largely based on the evaluations of others; that is, we come to
evaluate ourselves in terms of what others think and not in terms of what
we actually feel.
• The reason we rely so heavily on the evaluation of others, accord-ing to
Rogers, is that we have a strong need for positive regard.
IDEAL SELF
• The second subsystem of the self is the ideal self, defined as one’s
view of self as one wishes to be.
• The ideal self contains all those attributes, usually positive, that
people aspire to possess.
• A wide gap between the ideal self and the self-concept indicates
incongruence and an unhealthy personality.
• Psychologically healthy individuals perceive little discrepancy
between their self-concept and what they ideally would like to be.
REAL SELF
• When we satisfy another’s needs, we experience satisfaction of our
own need for positive regard (Rogers, 1959, p. 223).
• As a consequence, the desire for positive regard from others may
becomemore compelling than our own organismic valuing process
(Rogers,1959, p. 224).
• If, for example, we feel that aggression against others is wrong, but
significant others place a positive value on it, we may ignore the
validity of the feelings of our true self and act in terms of their
expectations as a means of gaining their approval.
CONDITION OF WORTH
• This need to seek approval and avoid disapproval leads to a social
self-concept that is conditional on the performance of certain kinds of
behavior (Rogers, 1959, p. 209).
• Such a self-concept carries with it conditions of worth.
• We perceive experiences and behaviors as acceptable only if they
meet with approval from others; experiences and behaviors that meet
with disapproval we perceive as unacceptable.
NEED FOR POSITIVE REGARD
• As the self emerges, infants develop a need for what Rogers called
positive regard.
• This need is probably learned, although Rogers said the source was
not important.
• The need for positive regard is universal and persistent. It includes
acceptance, love, and approval from other people, most notably from
the mother during infancy.
POSITIVE REGARD
• Infants find it satisfying to receive positive regard and frustrating not to
receive it or to have it withdrawn.
• Because positive regard is crucial to personality development, infant
behavior is guided by the amount of affection and love bestowed. If the
mother does not offer positive regard, then the infant’s innate tendency
toward actualization and development of the self-concept will be hampered.
• Infants perceive parental disapproval of their behavior as disapproval of
their newly developing self.
• If this occurs frequently, infants will cease to strive for actualization and
development. Instead, they will act in ways that will bring positive regard
from others, even if these actions are inconsistent with their self-concept.
 UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE
REGARD
• The ideal condition for development of a healthy self-concept and
movement toward becoming fully functioning, in Rogers’s view, is
unconditional positive regard—a deep and genuine caring by others,
uncontaminated by judgments or evaluations of our
thoughts,feelings, or behaviors (Rogers & Sanford, 1984, p. 1379).
With unconditional positive regard, the self-concept carries no
conditions of worth, there is a congruence between the true self and
experience, and the person is psychologically healthy.
INCONGRUENCE
• Not only do children learn, ideally, to inhibit unacceptable behaviors, but
they also may come to deny or distort unacceptable ways of perceiving
their experiential world.
• By holding an inaccurate perception of certain experiences, they risk
becoming estranged from their true self.
• We come to evaluate experiences, and accept or reject them, not in
terms of how they contribute to the overall actualization tendency
through the organismic valuing process, but in terms of whether they
bring positive regard from others.
• This leads to incongruence between the self-concept and the
experiential world, the environment as we perceive it.
BARRIER’S TO PSYCHOLOGICAL
HEALTH
• Conditions of Worth
• Incongruence
• Vulnerability
• Anxiety and Threat