Humanistic Theories of Personality: Rogers and Maslow
Carl Rogers' Self-Actualization Theory
Carl Rogers (1902 – 1987)
Awarded the American Psychological Association's first Annual Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1956.
His personality theory led the Humanistic Psychology movement of the 1960s-1980s.
Person-Centered Therapy.
Humanistic Perspective
Emphasizes studying the individual as a whole.
People play an active role in realizing their potential.
People can be trusted to follow a positive course to realize their potential.
Person is the architect of their own life.
Healthy people are aware of their positive and negative attributes.
Constructive forces will triumph over destructive ones.
Emphasizes freedom and constructiveness of human nature.
Behavior is determined by choice.
Structure of Personality
The Organism
The total individual with all physical and psychological functions.
The central figure constantly interacts with a changing world.
The Phenomenal Field
The totality of a person’s perceptions and experiences, including:
Perceptions of objects/events outside the person and the attached meanings.
Inner experiences and meanings that relate to the person’s inner self.
Self-Concept
The differentiated part of the phenomenal field that concerns the person himself.
"The organized consistent conceptual gestalt composed of the characteristics of 'I/Me'."
The perception individuals have of themselves and the value they attach to themselves.
The person’s conscious experience of himself; ONLY conscious experiences are included.
Relatively stable, yet flexible and changeable.
Change in one part of the self-concept will change the whole.
Ideal self: The self-concept the person would most like to have.
Dynamics of Personality
Actualizing tendency: the basic motive that underlies all behavior.
Two other basic needs:
Need for positive regard.
Need for positive self-regard.
Congruent functioning: An individual’s self-concept corresponds to their potential.
Incongruent functioning: An individual’s self-concept does not correspond to their potential.
Self-concept plays a role in experience, perception, and influences behavior.
Congruence and Incongruence
Congruence:
The ideal in which the person is open to and aware of all their experiences and can incorporate these into the self-concept.
See themselves as they really are, and the self-concept corresponds with actual potential.
Incongruence:
Experiences contrary to the self-concept form part of the phenomenal field.
Individuals deny or distort incongruent experiences.
Conditional and Unconditional Positive Regard
Unconditional Positive Regard:
Acceptance by significant others.
Don’t have to fulfill specific requirements to gain the esteem of significant others.
Acceptance of needs, not measured against the needs of others and not forcing needs of others onto the individual.
Able to acknowledge all their needs and express all their feelings.
Self-concept and potential have congruence and include all experiences.
Unconditional acceptance therefore leads to complete actualization of potential.
Allows individuals to realize all their innate abilities.
Conditional Positive Regard:
Non-acceptance by others, causing the individual to feel they are only worthy when they have fulfilled certain conditions laid down by significant others.
Conditions of worth:
Gets distorted and incorporated into self-concept.
Values are based on the values of others.
Causes incongruence and impairs ability to actualize potential.
Empathy
Therapist is to put aside his own experiences and expectations and appreciate the personhood of the client.
"To sense the client’s private world as if it were the therapist’s own but without ever losing the “as if” quality."
Perceptions of the client’s own world are changed as a result of meaningful and therapeutic relationships.
Optimal Development: Fully Functioning Person
The wider the spectrum of experiences available.
These experiences are more integrated into the self-concept.
Thus, they know themselves better, are better able to use their talents, choose constructive action, and realize their full potential.
Characteristics of a Fully Functioning Person
Growing Openness to Experience
Moves away from defensiveness and is open to experience.
No need for subception, defense, or distortion.
Can experience everything consciously as part of themselves and the world.
Increasingly Existential Lifestyle
Tendency to live each moment fully.
Approach experience without preconception.
The experience itself forms and reforms the structure from moment to moment.
Self-concept emanates from experience.
Experience is not distorted to fit the self-concept.
Excitement/daring/adaptability/tolerance/spontaneity/lack of rigidity
Assumes an underlying foundation of trust.
Increasing Organismic Trust
They trust themselves when choosing behavior appropriate to a specific situation.
Does not depend on the judgment of others or social norms.
Openness to experience leads to a sense of what is right that becomes a reliable guide to satisfactory behavior.
Freedom of Choice
Make whatever choices they want in terms of the experiential field.
Feel responsible for own choices and determine own behavior.
Aware of their own strong and weak points and are free to exercise any choice based on their own evaluation.
Creativity
Can adapt constructively to society without being a conformist.
Can adjust to changing circumstances in a creative way.
Basic Reliability and Constructiveness
Can be trusted to act positively and constructively.
Someone who accepts all their needs and can maintain a balance among them.
No danger of their aggressive needs getting out of hand (all that’s needed is control, and a fully functioning person has that).
Strongly objects to the belief that people are essentially irrational.
A Rich, Full Life
Experience all of life intensely.
"Stretching and growing and becoming more and more of one’s potentialities."
The Fully Functioning Therapist
Therapists are real; their inner experience and outer expression of that experience match.
Counselors open their mind to the emotive experience that takes place in the counseling, leading to therapy moving forward.
Psychotherapy
Purpose: To provide clients with the opportunity to know themselves fully and to realize their potential.
Person-centered therapy.
Emphasis is not just on a method/technique but on the relationship in the therapeutic situation.
The therapist provides unconditional acceptance.
Maslow's Humanistic Psychology
Maslow rejected Freud’s ideas
Psychoanalysis based on what went wrong.
Theories based on clinically ill patients.
Repressing strong sexual urges.
Animal passions.
“Why pick the wolf?”
Humanistic Psychology
Positive instincts to fulfill human potential.
Theories based on study of successful, healthy people (interviews).
Examples: Albert Schweitzer, Eleanor Roosevelt.
Strong motivating force to do good.
Be the best that they could be.
Self-actualization.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Needs are Hierarchical
Needs arranged according to potency and strength. Lower needs are stronger and more urgently felt.
Lower needs appear earlier in development. Babies are concerned with biological needs, toddlers with safety, and seniors are more likely to be self-actualized.
Needs are filled sequentially, lowest to highest.
Maslow did not believe that people had to completely satisfy each level before moving to a higher one.
Example: Work for safety when 60% of physiological needs are met.
Physiological Needs
Bodily needs.
Hunger, thirst, shelter.
For regions where people’s needs are mostly met, this may still take dominance in emergencies, e.g., natural disasters, war.
Safety Needs
Security in our environment.
Stability and protection.
Job security, insurance, retirement plans.
Pathologies: OCD sense of insecurity, PTSD, and panic attacks.
Love and Belongingness
Friends, life partner, children, social clubs, religious communities.
Stunting of this need leads to most behavior problems.
Importance of social bonds.
Some question whether you can love others until you love yourself (Esteem needs).
Esteem Needs
Two levels:
Lower level – need for respect from others (recognition, attention, appreciation).
Higher level – self-respect (confidence, competence, mastery).
Pathologies: Inferiority complex, depression.
Question: Can others respect you if you don’t respect yourself?
Portrait of Self-Actualizers
Small group according to Maslow.
1-2% of the adult population.
Generally 60+ years old.
Reality and problem-centering.
Enjoy solitude and have deep personal relationships with a few close friends.
Autonomous, resisted enculturation.
Acceptance of self and others.
Strong ethics, spiritual, seldom religious.
Prefer spontaneity and simplicity.
Unhostile sense of humor.
Failure to Actualize
Growth tendency is weaker than deficiency motives. Hard to transcend hunger.
Normal culture downplays the importance of the inner life (voice). Just trying to gain control of our impulses.
Growth requires taking risks that many are unwilling to do.
Maslow’s New Hierarchy of Needs
Self-Transcendence
Self-Actualization
Sense of Meaning
Esteem
Love/Belonging
Safety
Physiological
Evaluation of Humanistic Theories
Strengths
Focused on important aspects of human existence.
Stresses holistic, integrated aspects of personality.
Bring fewer biases and preconceptions to personality study.
Limitations
Excludes from investigation of certain critical variables.
Lacks objective measures of behavior beyond self-report.
Lacks systematic research.
Maslow’s Critics
Need hierarchy is wildly popular in education, management, psychotherapy, and nursing.
Is there any research to suggest it’s true?
Maslow’s research consisted of case studies. Others have done studies of larger and more diverse groups.
Growth motivation is more widespread than Maslow believed.
Carl Rogers: “Every person has one basic tendency and striving – to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experienced self.”