Chapter 14: Carl Rogers Flashcards
Actualizing Tendency/Self Actualization
The driving force in everyone’s life, causing the person to become more differentiated independent, and socially responsible. The master motive—“the organism has one basic tendency and striving—to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organizing” It is a tendency towards fulfillment.
Negative actions result from fear and defensiveness
Organizmic Valuing Process
All of the organism’s experiences can be evaluated using the actualizing tendency as a frame of reference. Those experiences that are in accordance with the actualizing tendency are satisfying and therefore are approached and maintained. Those experiences that are contrary to the actualizing tendency are unsatisfying and therefore are avoided or terminated. This creates a feedback system that allows people to trust their feelings.
Valuing feelings over intellect and believing in inherent goodness of humans puts Roger’s in the philosophical tradition of romanticism which has a close correspondence to humanistic psychology
Phenomenological Field
“The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you perfect and experience it at the moment…There are as many real worlds as there are people.” Shared this belief with Kelly.
Phenomenological reality- the unique subjective world that each individual lives in. It is this reality, rather than the physical world, that determines people’s behavior. How people interpret things is, for them, the only reality.
Experience- all that is going on within the organism’s environment at any given moment that is potentially available to awareness. When these potential experiences become symbolized they enter awareness and become part of the person’s phenomenological field. The symbols that act as vehicles for experiences to enter awareness are usually words, but they need not be. They can also be visual and auditory images. Certain conditions cause people to deny or distort certain experiences, thereby preventing them from entering awareness.
Emergence of the Self
When infants begin to gradually experience verbal labels such as “me” and “I,” a portion of their phenomenological field becomes differentiated as the “self.” This is the point at which a child can begin to reflect on themself as a distinct object of which they are aware.
Need for Positive Regard
Universal though not necessarily innate (might be learned). Receiving warmth, love, sympathy, care respect, and acceptance from the relevant people in one’s life (those who are most important to us).
Conditions of worth- specify the circumstances under which children will receive positive regard. Through repeated experiences with these conditions of worth, children internalize them making them part of their self-structure. Once internalized they become a conscience or superego that guides the child’s behavior
Need for self regard- from the need for positive regard, children develop a need for self-regard—a positive view of the self. Children first want others to feel good about them and then they want to feel good about themselves.
Unconditional Positive Regard
The only way not to interfere with children’s actualizing tendencies is to give them unconditional positive regard that allows them to experience positive regard no matter what they do. That means no conditions of worth develop and self-regard is unconditional which means self-regard would never be at odds with positive regard
Roger’s believed that conditions of worth are at teh heart of all human adjustment problems and that they should be avoided at all costs.
The best message to send to children who are misbehaving is: “we love you deeply as you are, but what you are doing is upsetting and therefore we would be happier if you would stop.
Incongruency
The cause of all human adjustment problems.
Incongruency occurs when people no longer use their oganismic valuing process as a means of determining if tehir experiences are in accordance with their actualizing tendency. IF ppl do not use their own valuing process for evaluating their experiences, then they must be using someone’s introverted values in doing so. Conditions of worth have replaced their own valuing process as the frame of reference for evaluating their experiences. This results in an alienation between the self and experience.
Subception
Anxiety
Defense
The detection of an experience before it enters full awareness
Results when ppl subceive an experience as being incompatible with their self-structure & its introverted conditions of worth
Consists of editing experiences using the mechanisms of denial & distortion to keep them in accordance w/the self-structure
The evolution of Roger’s approach to the therapeutic process
“Therapy is designed to eliminate incrongruity between experience and the self.”
First he referred to his approach as “nondirective therapy” which emphasized client’s ability to solve their own problems if they were given the proper atmosphere for doing so
Next, client-centered therapy- therapy regarded as joint venture deeply involving both client and therapist. Therapists job to attempt actively to understand the client’s phenomenological field or “internal frame of reference”
Next, “Experiential Stage”- therapist became as free as teh client. The deep personal feelings of both therapist and client were equally important and the therapeutic process was regarded as a struggle to put these feelings into words
Last stage: “person-centered state”- extended the theory to many areas beyond the therapeutic process (education, marriage, minority experiences, international relations). Emphasized the total person instead of looking at an individual in terms of some specific role.
Fully Functioning Person
What you call someone who is living in accordance with his or her oganismic valuing process, rather than conditions of worth and thus the defenses of denial and distortion are no longer necessary
Fully functioning people are:
1.) open to experience—exhibit no defensiveness
2.) self-structure is congruent with their experience & capable of changing to assimilate new experiences
3.) perceive themselves as the locus of evolution of their experiences (not their conditions of worth)
4.) they experience unconditional self-regard
5.) meet each situation w/ behavior that is unique and creative adaptation to the newness of that moment
6.) live in harmony with others bc of the rewarding nature of reciprocal unconditional positive regard
Q-Sort Technique
Method of quantifying the extent to which a client changed as a function of therapy. Developed by Roger’s colleague William Stephenson.
It’s assumed that the client can describe themself accurately (real self). Second, it’s assumed that a person can describe those attributes that they would like to possess but currently do not (ideal self)
Typically, when therapy begins there is a discrepancy btw real self and ideal self.
- Client given 100 cards that say things such as “I put on a false front” I despise myself” “I express my emotions freely,” etc.
- Self-Sort: sort the cards into 9 piles that are arranged to reflect the statements that are most like the client one one extreme to the statements least like the client on the other extreme (middle pile is neutral/cards teh client can’t decide about)
- Ideal sort: sort the cards the same way but to describe the person they would like to be
Rogers was the first therapist to…
Measure the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of therapy
Record and film therapy sessions
Rogers and Skinner Debate
They had a lot of similar beliefs. Main disagreements:
Determinism vs humanism/choice
Cultural engineering— Rogers concerned about Skinner’s idea for cultural engineering bc who will be in control and who will be controlled in order to build this new culture?
Education System
Believed the whole thing needs to be scrapped and rebuilt based on the whole person
Facilitators of education instead of “teachers”
Students more involved in their own learning
Whole-person-centric
Modern Marriage
Should only vow to continue working together on the changing process of our present relationship
No prescribed roles
Release of possessiveness of one another
Satellite relationships (polyamory) may be desirable and should be allowable if both partners are intellectually and emotionally on board
