ASSIGNMENT

Contrast the Humanistic and Existential perspectives as they pertain to the concept of personality. Which philosophical assumptions were most important to Rogers? Using the Existential framework, how do times of change and crisis lead us to reconsider our values?

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READING

Personality Theory

Created July 7, 2017 by userMark Kelland

In contrast to both the often dark, subconscious emphasis of the psychodynamic theorists and the somewhat cold, calculated perspectives of behavioral/cognitive theorists, the humanistic psychologists focus on each individual’s potential for personal growth and self-actualization.  Carl Rogers was influenced by strong religious experiences (both in America and in China) and his early clinical career in a children’s hospital.  Consequently, he developed his therapeutic techniques and the accompanying theory in accordance with a positive and hopeful perspective.  Rogers also focused on the unique characteristics and viewpoint of individuals.

Abraham Maslow is best known for his extensive studies on the most salient feature of the humanistic perspective:  self-actualization.  He is also the one who referred to humanistic psychology as the third force, after the psychodynamic and behavioral/cognitive perspectives, and he specifically addressed the need for psychology to move beyond its study of unhealthy individuals.  He was also interested in the psychology of the work place, and his recognition in the business field has perhaps made him the most famous psychologist.

Henry Murray was an enigmatic figure, who seemingly failed to properly acknowledge the woman who inspired much of his work, and who believed his life had been something of a failure.  Perhaps he felt remorse as a result of maintaining an extramarital affair with the aforementioned woman, thanks in large part to the advice and help of Carl Jung!  Murray extended a primarily psychodynamic perspective to the study of human needs in normal individuals.  His Thematic Apperception Test was one of the first psychological tests applied outside of a therapeutic setting, and it provided the basis for studying the need for achievement (something akin to a learned form of self-actualization).

Carl Rogers and Humanistic Psychology

Carl Rogers is the psychologist many people associate first with humanistic psychology, but he did not establish the field in the way that Freud established psychoanalysis.  A few years older than Abraham Maslow, and having moved into clinical practice more directly, Rogers felt a need to develop a new theoretical perspective that fit with his clinical observations and personal beliefs.  Thus, he was proposing a humanistic approach to psychology and, more specifically, psychotherapy before Maslow.  It was Maslow, however, who used the term humanistic psychology as a direct contrast to behaviorism and psychoanalysis.  And it was Maslow who contacted some friends, in 1954, in order to begin meetings that led to the creation of the American Association for Humanistic Psychology.  Rogers was included in that group, but so were Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, both of whom had distinctly humanistic elements in their own theories, elements that shared a common connection to Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology (Stagner, 1988).  In addition, the spiritual aspects of humanistic psychology, such as peak experiences and transcendence, have roots in the work of Carl Jung and William James, and go even further back in time to ancient philosophies of Yoga and Buddhism.

In at least one important way, Rogers’ career was similar to that of Sigmund Freud.  As he began his clinical career, he found that the techniques he had been taught were not very effective.  So, he began experimenting with his own ideas, and developing his own therapeutic approach.  As that approach developed, so did a unique theory of personality that aimed at explaining the effectiveness of the therapy.  Rogers found it difficult to explain what he had learned, but he felt quite passionately about it:

…the real meaning of a word can never be expressed in words, because the real meaning would be the thing itself.  If one wishes to give such a real meaning he should put his hand over his mouth and point.  This is what I should most like to do.  I would willingly throw away all the words of this manuscript if I could, somehow, effectively point to the experience which is therapy.  It is a process, a thing-in-itself, an experience, a relationship, a dynamic… (pp. ix; Rogers, 1951)

Brief Biography of Carl Rogers

Carl Ransom Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, in Chicago, Illinois.  His parents were well-educated, and his father was a successful civil engineer.  His parents loved their six children, of whom Rogers was the fourth, but they exerted a distinct control over them.  They were fundamentalist Christians, who emphasized a close-knit family and constant, productive work, but approved of little else.  The Rogers household expected standards of behavior appropriate for the ‘elect’ of God:  there was no drinking of alcohol, no dancing, no visits to the theater, no card games, and little social life at all (DeCarvalho, 1991; Thorne, 2003).

Rogers was not the healthiest of children, and his family considered him to be overly sensitive.  The more his family teased him, the more he retreated into a lonely world of fantasy.  He sought consolation by reading books, and he was well above his grade level for reading when he began school.  In 1914 the family moved to a large farm west of Chicago, a move motivated primarily by a desire to keep the children away from the temptations of suburban city life.  The result was even more isolation for Rogers, who lamented that he’d only had two dates by the end of high school.  He continued to learn, however, becoming something of an expert on the large moths that lived in the area.  In addition, his father encouraged the children to develop their own ventures, and Rogers and his brothers raised a variety of livestock.  Given these interests, and in keeping with family tradition, Rogers enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study scientific agriculture (DeCarvalho, 1991; Thorne, 2003).

During his first year of college, Rogers attended a Sunday morning group of students led by Professor George Humphrey.  Professor Humphrey was a facilitative leader, who refused to be conventional and who encouraged the students to make their own decisions.  Rogers found the intellectual freedom very stimulating, and he also began to make close friends.  This increased intellectual and emotional energy led Rogers to re-examine his commitment to Christianity.  Given his strong religious faith, he decided to change his major to history, in anticipation of a career as a Christian minister.  He was fortunate to be chosen as one of only twelve students from America to attend a World Student Christian Federation conference in Peking, China.  He traveled throughout China (also visiting Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, and Hawaii) for 6 months, surrounded by other intelligent and creative young people.  He kept a detailed journal, and wrote lengthy letters to his family and Helen Elliott, a childhood friend whom he considered to be his “sweetheart.”  His mind was stretched in all directions by this profound cross-cultural experience, and the intellectual and spiritual freedom he was embracing blinded him to the fact that his fundamentalist family was deeply disturbed by what he had to say.  However, by the time Rogers was aware of his family’s disapproval, he had been changed, and he believed that people of very different cultures and faiths can all be sincere and honest (Kirschenbaum, 1995; Thorne, 2003).  As a curious side note, Rogers’ roommate on the trip was a Black seminary professor.  Rogers was vaguely aware that it was strange at that time for a Black man and a White man to room together, but he was particularly surprised at the stares they received from the Chinese people they met, who had never seen a Black person before (Rogers & Russell, 2002).  After his return from China, Rogers graduated from college, and 2 months later he married Helen.  Again his family disapproved, believing that the young couple should be more established first.  But Rogers had been accepted to the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and both he and Helen wanted to be together.  His family may have wanted them to wait because Union Theological Seminary was, perhaps, the most liberal seminary in America at the time (DeCarvalho, 1991; Rogers & Russell, 2002; Thorne, 2003).

Rogers spent 2 years at the seminary, including a summer assignment as the pastor of a small church in Vermont.  However, his desire not to impose his own beliefs on others, made it difficult for him to preach.  He began taking courses at nearby Teachers’ College of Columbia University, where he learned about clinical and educational psychology, as well as working with disturbed children.  He then transferred to Teachers’ College, and after writing a dissertation in which he developed a test for measuring personality adjustment in children, he earned his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology.  Then, in 1928, he began working at the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (DeCarvalho, 1991; Thorne, 2003).

Rogers was immersed in his work in Rochester for 12 years.  He found that even the most elaborate theories made little sense when dealing with children who had suffered severe psychological damage after traveling through the courts and the social work systems.  So Rogers developed his own approach, and did his best to help them.  Many of his colleagues, including the director, had no particular therapeutic orientation:

When I would try to see what I could do to alter their behavior, sometimes they would refuse to see me the next time.  I’d have a hard time getting them to come from the detention home to my office, and that would cause me to think, “What is it that I did that offended the child?”  Well, usually it was overinterpretation, or getting too smart in analyzing the causes of behavior…So we approached every situation with much more of a question of “What can we do to help?” rather than “What is the mysterious cause of this behavior?” or “What theory does the child fit into?”  It was a very good place for learning in that it was easy to be open to experience, and there was certainly no pressure to fit into any particular pattern of thought. (pg. 108; Rogers & Russell, 2002)

Eventually Rogers wrote a book outlining his work with children, The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child (Rogers, 1939), which received excellent reviews.  He was offered a professorship at Ohio State University.  Beginning as a full professor gave Rogers a great deal of freedom, and he was frequently invited to give talks.  It has been suggested that one such talk, in December 1940, at the University of Minnesota, entitled “Newer Concepts in Psychotherapy,” was the official birthday of client-centered therapy.  Very popular with his students, Rogers was not so welcome amongst his colleagues.  Rogers believed that his work was particularly threatening to those colleagues who believed that only their own expertise could make psychotherapy effective.  After only 4 years, during which he published Counseling and Psychotherapy (Rogers, 1942), Rogers moved on to the University of Chicago, where he established the counseling center, wrote Client-Centered Therapy (Rogers, 1951) and contributed several chapters to Psychotherapy and Personality Change (Rogers & Dymond, 1954), and in 1956 received a Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association.  Then, in 1957, he accepted a joint appointment in psychiatry and psychology at the University of Wisconsin to study psychotic individuals.  Rogers had serious doubts about leaving Chicago, but felt that the joint appointment would allow him to make a dramatic contribution to psychotherapy.  It was a serious mistake.  He did not get along with his colleagues in the psychology department, whom he considered to be antagonistic, outdated, “rat-oriented,” and distrustful of clinical psychology, and so he resigned.  He kept his appointment in the psychiatry department, however, and in 1961 published perhaps his most influential book, On Becoming a Person (Rogers, 1961).

In 1963, Rogers moved to California to join the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, at the invitation of one of his former students, Richard Farson.  This was a non-profit institute dedicated to the study of humanistically-oriented interpersonal relations.  Rogers was leery of making another major move, but eventually agreed.  He became very active in research on encounter groups and educational theory.  Five years later, when Farson left the institute, there was a change in its direction.  Rogers was unhappy with the changes, so he joined some colleagues in leaving and establishing the Center for Studies of the Person, where he remained until his death.  In his later years, Rogers wrote books on topics such as personal power and marriage (Rogers, 1972, 1977).  In 1980, he published A Way of Being (Rogers, 1980), in which he changed the terminology of his perspective from “client-centered” to “person-centered.”  With the assistance of his daughter Natalie, who had studied with Abraham Maslow, he held many group workshops on life, family, business, education, and world peace.  He traveled to regions where tension and danger were high, including Poland, Russia, South Africa, and Northern Ireland.  In 1985 he brought together influential leaders of seventeen Central American countries for a peace conference in Austria.  The day he died, February 4, 1987, without knowing it, he had just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (DeCarvalho, 1991; Kirschenbaum, 1995; Thorne, 2003).

Placing Rogers in Context:  A Psychology 2,600 Years in the Making

Carl Rogers was an extraordinary individual whose approach to psychology emphasized individuality.  Raised with a strong Christian faith, exposed to Eastern culture and spirituality in college, and then employed as a therapist for children, he came to value and respect each person he met.  Because of that respect for the ability of each person to grow, and the belief that we are innately driven toward actualization, Rogers began the distinctly humanistic approach to psychotherapy that became known as client-centered therapy.

Taken together, client-centered therapy and self-actualization offer a far more positive approach to fostering the growth of each person than most other disciplines in psychology.  Unlike the existing approaches of psychoanalysis, which aimed to uncover problems from the past, or behavior therapies, which aimed to identify problem behaviors and control or “fix” them, client-centered therapy grew out of Rogers’ simple desire to help his clients move forward in their lives.  Indeed, he had been trained as a psychoanalyst, but Rogers found the techniques unsatisfying, both in their goals and their ability to help the children he was working with at the time.  The seemingly hands-off approach of client-centered therapy fit well with a Taoist perspective, something Rogers had studied, discussed, and debated during his trip to China.  In A Way of Being, Rogers (1980) quotes what he says is perhaps his favorite saying, one which sums up many of his deeper beliefs:

If I keep from meddling with people, they take care of themselves,
If I keep from commanding people, they behave themselves,
If I keep from preaching at people, they improve themselves,
If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves.
Lao Tsu, c600 B.C.; Note: This translation differs somewhat from the one
cited in the References.  I have included the translation Rogers quoted,
since the difference likely influenced his impression of this saying.

Rogers, like Maslow, wanted to see psychology contribute far more to society than merely helping individuals with psychological distress.  He extended his sincere desire to help people learn to really communicate, with empathic understanding, to efforts aimed at bringing peace to the world.  On the day he died, he had just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.  Since a Nobel Prize cannot be awarded to someone who has died, he was not eligible to be nominated again.  If he had lived a few more years, he may well have received that award.  His later years were certainly committed to peace in a way that deserved such recognition.

Basic Concepts

Rogers believed that each of us lives in a constantly changing private world, which he called the experiential field.  Everyone exists at the center of their own experiential field, and that field can only be fully understood from the perspective of the individual.  This concept has a number of important implications.  The individual’s behavior must be understood as a reaction to their experience and perception of the field.  They react to it as an organized whole, and it is their reality.  The problem this presents for the therapist is that only the individual can really understand their experiential field.  This is quite different than the Freudian perspective, in which only the trained and objective psychoanalyst can break through the defense mechanisms and understand the basis of the patient’s unconscious impulses.  One’s perception of the experiential field is limited, however.  Rogers believed that certain impulses, or sensations, can only enter into the conscious field of experience under certain circumstances.  Thus, the experiential field is not a true reality, but rather an individual’s potential reality (Rogers, 1951).

The one basic tendency and striving of the individual is to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing of the individual or, in other words, an actualizing tendency.  Rogers borrowed the term self-actualization, a term first used by Kurt Goldstein, to describe this basic striving.

The tendency of normal life is toward activity and progress.  For the sick, the only form of self-actualization that remains is the maintenance of the existent state.  That, however, is not the tendency of the normal…Under adequate conditions the normal organism seeks further activity. (pp. 162-163; Goldstein, 1934/1995).

For Rogers, self-actualization was a tendency to move forward, toward greater maturity and independence, or self-responsibility.  This development occurs throughout life, both biologically (the differentiation of a fertilized egg into the many organ systems of the body) and psychologically (self-government, self-regulation, socialization, even to the point of choosing life goals).  A key factor in understanding self-actualization is the experiential field.  A person’s needs are defined, as well as limited, by their own potential for experience.  Part of this experiential field is an individual’s emotions, feelings, and attitudes.  Therefore, who the individual is, their actual self, is critical in determining the nature and course of their self-actualization (Rogers, 1951).  We will examine Maslow’s work on self-actualization in more detail below.

What then, is the self?  In Rogers’ (1951) initial description of his theory of personality, the experiential field is described in four points, the self-actualizing tendency in three points, and the remaining eleven points attempt to define the self.  First and foremost, the self is a differentiated portion of the experiential field.  In other words, the self is that part of our private world that we identify as “me,” “myself,” or “I.”  Beyond that, the self remains somewhat puzzling.  Can the self exist in isolation, outside of relationships that provide some context for the self?  Must the self be synonymous with the physical body?  As Rogers’ pointed out, when our foot “goes to sleep” from a lack of circulation, we view it as an object, not as a part of our self!  Despite these challenging questions, Rogers tried to define and describe the self.

Rogers believed the self is formed in relation to others; it is an organized, fluid, yet consistent conceptual pattern of our experiential interactions with the environment and the values attached to those experiences.  These experiences are symbolized and incorporated into the structure of the self, and our behavior is guided largely by how well new experiences fit within that structure.  We may behave in ways inconsistent with the structure of our self, but when we do we will not “own” that behavior.  When experiences are so inconsistent that we cannot symbolize them, or fit them into the structure of our self, the potential for psychological distress arises.  On the other hand, when our concept of self is mature enough to incorporate all of our perceptions and experiences, and we can assimilate those experiences symbolically into our self, our psychological adjustment will be quite healthy.  Individuals who find it difficult to assimilate new and different experiences, those experiences that threaten the structure of the self, will develop an increasingly rigid self-structure.  Healthy individuals, in contrast, will assimilate new experiences, their self-structure will change and continue to grow, and they will become more capable of understanding and accepting others as individuals (Rogers, 1951).

The ability of individuals to make the choices necessary for actualizing their self-structure and to then fulfill those choices is what Rogers called personal power (Rogers, 1977).  He believed there are many self-actualized individuals revolutionizing the world by trusting their own power, without feeling a need to have “power over” others.  They are also willing to foster the latent actualizing tendency in others.  We can easily see the influence of Alfred Adler here, both in terms of the creative power of the individual and seeking superiority within a healthy context of social interest.  Client-centered therapy was based on making the context of personal power a clear strategy in the therapeutic relationship:

…the client-centered approach is a conscious renunciation and avoidance by the therapist of all control over, or decision-making for, the client.  It is the facilitation of self-ownership by the client and the strategies by which this can be achieved…based on the premise that the human being is basically a trustworthy organism, capable of…making constructive choices as to the next steps in life, and acting on those choices. (pp. 14-15; Rogers, 1977)

Discussion Question:  Rogers claimed that no one can really understand your experiential field.  Would you agree, or do you sometimes find that close friends or family members seem to understand you better than you understand yourself?  Are these relationships congruent?

Personality Development

Although Rogers described personality within the therapist-client relationship, the focus of his therapeutic approach was based on how he believed the person had arrived at a point in their life where they were suffering from psychological distress.  Therefore, the same issues apply to personality development as in therapy.  A very important aspect of personality development, according to Rogers, is the parent-child relationship.  The nature of that relationship, and whether it fosters self-actualization or impedes personal growth, determines the nature of the individual’s personality and, consequently, their self-structure and psychological adjustment.

A child begins life with an actualizing tendency.  As they experience life, and perceive the world around them, they may be supported in all things by those who care for them, or they may only be supported under certain conditions (e.g., if their behavior complies with strict rules).  As the child becomes self-aware, it develops a need for positive regard.  When the parents offer the child unconditional positive regard, the child continues moving forward in concert with its actualizing tendency.  So, when there is no discrepancy between the child’s self-regard and its positive regard (from the parents), the child will grow up psychologically healthy and well-adjusted.  However, if the parents offer only conditional positive regard, if they only support the child according the desires and rules of the parents, the child will develop conditions of worth.  As a result of these conditions of worth, the child will begin to perceive their world selectively; they will avoid those experiences that do not fit with its goal of obtaining positive regard.  The child will begin to live the life of those who set the conditions of worth, rather than living its own life.