Carl Rogers Notes

Carl Rogers (1902-1987)

Core Concept

  • The fundamental drive of an organism is to actualize, maintain, and enhance itself.
    • Quote: "The organism has one basic tendency and striving---- to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism."

Overview

  • Humanistic psychologist known for:
    • Therapeutic relationship views.
    • Theories of personality.
    • Self-actualization.
  • Originator of client-centered (Rogerian) therapy.
  • Client-centered therapy:
    • Individuals possess the ability and responsibility to change and improve.
    • The therapist facilitates rather than directs the change.

Rogers' View of People

  • People are conscious and rational.
  • Governed by conscious perception of self and experiential world.
  • Rejects Freudian emphasis on unconscious forces.
  • Minimizes past events' controlling influence, emphasizing present feelings and emotions.

Phenomenological Approach

  • Personality is understood from an individual's subjective experience.
  • Deals with reality as perceived by the individual.
  • Perception may not always align with objective reality.

Overriding Motivation

  • Innate "tendency to actualize:"
    • Develop all abilities and potentials.
    • From biological to psychological aspects.

Self-Actualization

  • Ultimate goal.
  • To maintain and enhance the self.
  • To become a "fully functioning person".

Life of Rogers

  • Born: January 8, 1902, Oak Park, Illinois
  • Died: February 4, 1987, La Jolla, California
  • Father: Walter A. Rogers, civil engineer, Congregationalist.
  • Mother: Julia M. Cushing, homemaker, devout Baptist.
  • Fourth of six children.
  • Early aptitude for reading.
  • Pioneered client-centered psychotherapy.
    • Emphasized person-to-person relationship.
    • Client determines treatment course and duration.
  • Strict, fundamentalist religious upbringing.
    • Emphasized moral behavior and hard work.
    • Controlling parents who subtly influenced behavior
    • Restrictions included no dancing, card playing, movies, smoking, drinking, or sexual interest.

Family Life

  • Close-knit family with limited social interactions outside the home.
  • Teasing among siblings, Rogers felt his older brother was favored.
  • Solitary, dreamy boy who read extensively.
  • Relied on personal experience and worldview, shaping his personality theory.

Interest in Science

  • At age 12, Family moved to a farm near Chicago.
  • Moth fascination:
    • Captured, bred, and studied moths.
  • Learned scientific farming from his father.
    • Understood control groups, variable isolation, and statistical analysis.

Education and Career

  • Studied agriculture at the University of Wisconsin.
  • Attended a Christian conference in China changed his career path.
  • Graduated with a history degree in 1924.
  • Married and enrolled at Union Theological Seminary.
  • Transferred to Teachers College of Columbia University.
  • Ph.D. in 1931: dissertation on personality adjustment in children.
  • 1928-1940: Child Study Department, Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
    • Diagnosed and treated delinquent children.
    • Became director of Rochester Guidance Center in 1939.

Academic Career

  • 1940: Professor of Psychology at Ohio State University.
  • Formulated views on counseling and treatment of emotionally disturbed.
  • Integrated clinical psychology into mainstream psychology.
  • President of the American Psychological Association in 1946.
  • Received the APA's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award ten years later.

Actualization Tendency

  • The basic striving to maintain and enhance life.
  • Includes physiological and psychological needs.
  • More biologically than psychologically oriented.
  • Maintains the organism by meeting basic needs and defending against attack.

Growth and Enhancement

  • Supports the organism's development.
  • Guides growth and maturation.
  • Maturation: Genetically determined development.
  • Progress involves struggle and pain.
  • The drive to develop and grow overcomes regression.
  • Describes it as “struggle and pain”
  • Rogers emphasizes the "tenacity of life" and the "forward thrust of life."
    • Virtually irresistible forces allow adaptation, development, and growth even under harsh conditions.

The Experiential Field

  • Focuses on the individual's frame of reference or context.
  • Reality is based on personal perception.

Perception and Reality

*An individual's perception of their reality shapes their reality rather than objective reality.

  • Rogers quote: “reality of a person’s environment is how he or she perceives that environment. And one’s perception may not coincide with objective reality”

The Self and Self-Concept

  • Experience is the ultimate authority.
  • The self or self-concept develops from the experiential world.
  • Part of experience differentiates:
    • I, me, myself.
    • Distinguishes oneself from the external world.

Self-Concept Elaboration

  • "I" represents your self-concept (real vs. ideal self).
  • "Me" reflects how others perceive you (influences self-esteem).
  • "Myself" involves self-awareness and introspection.
  • Understanding differences promotes personal growth.

Positive Regard

  • Self-concept:
    • Picture of what one is, should be, and wants to be.
    • Ideally consistent.
  • Need for positive regard:
    • Acceptance, love, and approval.
    • Critical from the mother during infancy.

Unconditional Positive Regard

  • Lack of positive regard hampers self-actualization.
  • Perceived disapproval leads to ceasing striving.
  • Unconditional positive regard:
    • Love not conditional upon behavior.
    • Granted freely and fully.
  • Reciprocal nature of positive regard.

Internalization

  • Experiencing satisfaction when satisfying another's need for positive regard.
  • Sensitivity to others' attitudes and behaviors.
  • Self-concept develops through feedback.
  • Positive self-regard:
    • Comes from within.
    • Satisfied by conditions that brought regard from others.

Conditions of Worth

  • Derive from conditional positive regard.
  • Parents don't always react with positive regard.
  • Infant learns affection depends on behavior.
  • Develops conditions of worth:
    • Seeing oneself as worthy only under certain conditions.
    • Denying awareness of certain perceptions.

Incongruence

  • Develops between self-concept and experience.
  • Incongruent experiences cause threat and anxiety.

The Fully Functioning Person

  • Desired end product of psychological development.

Characteristics of Self-Actualizing Person

  1. Awareness of all experiences:
    • No distortion or denial.
    • Open to everything.
    • No defensiveness.
  2. Live fully in each moment:
    • No rigidity.
    • No imposed structure.
  3. Trusting of one’s own organism:
    • Trusting "feel" of reactions.
    • Not solely guided by external judgements.
    • Intellect data congruent with self-concept.
  4. Sense of freedom:
    • Free to move in any direction.
    • Personal power.
    • Not compelled to behave in one way.
    • Creative, spontaneous, and adaptable to new experiences.

Difficulties and Dynamics

  • Difficult to be self-actualizing:
    • Continual testing and growth.
    • Courage to be.
  • Self-actualization is a direction, not a destination.
  • Continual change and growth.
  • If growth stops, spontaneity, flexibility, and openness are lost.

Rogers Techniques

  • Client-centered therapy focuses on client well-being and conducive climate.
  • WARME:
    • Warmth
    • Acceptance
    • Regard
    • Empathy/Understanding

Rogers Image of Human Nature

  • Free choice in creating selves.
  • Emphasis on environment (nurture).
  • Innate self-actualization is influenced socially.
  • Universality in personality with uniqueness.
  • Ultimate goal: become a fully functioning person.