Carl Rogers

Actualizing tendency.

Innate tendency in all humans to maintain and enhance themselves.

Anxiety

Results when a person perceives or subceives an experience as being incompatible with his or her self-structure and it’s introverted conditions of worth.

Awareness

Characterizes the events in one’s experience that have been symbolized and therefore have entered consciousness.

Client-centered therapy.

Description of Rogers's second approach to therapy in which the therapist makes an active effort to understand the client's subjective reality.

Conditions of worth.

Conditions under which an incongruent person will experience positive regard.

Defense.

Effort to change a threatening experience through distortion or denial.

Denial.

Refusal to allow threatening experiences to enter awareness.

Distortion.

Modification of a threatening experience so it is no longer threatening.

Experience.

All the events of which a person could be aware at any given moment.

Experiential stage.

Third stage in the evolution of Rogers's approach to therapy in which the feelings of the therapist become as important as the feelings of the client.

Facilitator of education.

Term that Rogers thought was better than teacher because it suggests someone who is helpful and uncritical and who will provide the freedom that is necessary for learning to take place.

Fully functioning person.

Person whose locus of evaluation is his or her own organismic valuing process rather than internalized conditions of worth.

Ideal self.

Client's description of how he or she would like to be.

Ideal-sort.

Statements chosen by a client as best describing the person he or she would most like to be. Part of the Q-sort technique.

Incongruency.

Exists when a person is no longer using the organismic valuing process as a means of evaluating experiences. The person, under these conditions, is no longer acting honestly toward his or her self-experiences.

Internal frame of reference.

Subjective reality, or phenomenological field, according to which a person lives his or her life.

Introjected values.

Conditions of worth that are internalized and become the basis for one's self-regard.

Need for positive regard.

Need to receive warmth, sympathy, care, respect, and acceptance from the relevant people in one's life.

Need for self-regard.

Need a person develops to feel positively about himself or herself.

Nondirective therapy.

Description of Rogers's first approach to therapy in which the emphasis was on the client's ability to solve his or her problems.

Openness to experience.

One of the chief characteristics of a fully functioning person.

Organismic valuing process.

Frame of reference that allows an individual to know if his or her experiences are in accordance with his or her actualizing tendency. Those experiences that maintain or enhance the person are in accordance with this process; other experiences are not.

Person-centered stage.

Final stage in Rogers's thinking in which the emphasis was on understanding the total person, not on understanding the person merely as a client.

Phenomenological field.

That portion of experience of which an individual is aware. It is this subjective reality, rather than physical reality, that directs a person's behavior.

Phenomenological reality.

Person's private, subjective perception or interpretation of objective reality.

Psychotherapy.

To Rogers, an experience designed to help an incongruent person become congruent.

Q-sort technique.

Method Rogers used to determine how a client's self-image changed as a function of therapy. See also Ideal-sort and Self-sort.

Real self.

Client's description of how he or she currently views him-or herself.

Rogers-Skinner debate.

Debate held in 1955 between Rogers and Skinner over how best to use the principles discovered by the behavioral sciences.

Satellite relationships.

Close relationship with individuals other than one's spouse.

Self.

That portion of the phenomenological field that becomes differentiated because of experiences involving terms such as I, me, and mine.

Self-sort.

Statements chosen by a client as best describing the person as he or she actually is at the moment. Part of the Q-sort technique.

Subception

Detection of an experience before it enters full awareness.

Symbolization.

Process by which an event enters an individual's awareness.

Teacher.

Term that Rogers believed was unfortunate because it connotes an authoritarian figure who dispenses information to passive students.

Threat.

Anything that is thought to be incompatible with one's self-structure.

Unconditional positive regard.

Experience of positive regard without conditions of worth. In other words, positive regard is not contingent on certain acts or thoughts.