Person-Centered Theory by Carl Rogers: Prepared By: Rachel Joyce Peleno David Neriel Olano

Person-Centered
Theory by
Carl Rogers
Prepared by:
Rachel Joyce Peleno
David Neriel Olano
Biography of Carl Ransom
Rogers
• Carl Ransom Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, in Park Oak,
Illinois, the fourth of six children born to Walter and Julia
Cushing Rogers.
• His parents were devoutly religious, and Carl became
interested in the Bible.
• He also learned the value of hard work– a value that unlike
religion, stayed with him throughout his life.
• Rogers had intended to become a farmer, and after he
graduated from high school, he entered University of
Wisconsin as an agriculture major.
• However, he soon became less interested in farming and more
devoted to religion.
Rogers
• In 1924, Rogers entered the Union Theological Seminary in
New York with the intention of becoming a minister.
• Finally, in the fall of 1926, he left the seminary to attend
Teachers College on a full-time basis with a major in clinical
and educational psychology. From that point on, he never
returned to formal religion. His life would now take a new
direction– toward psychology and education.
• During the last years of his life, he led workshops in such
countries as Hungary, Brazil, South Africa and the former
Soviet Union.
• He died February 4, 1987, following surgery for a broken hip.
Rogers
• The personal life of Carl Rogers was marked by change and
openness to experience.
• As an adolescent, he was extremely shy, had no close friends,
and was “socially incompetent in any but superficial contacts.”
• He did, however have an active life fantasy, which he later
believed would have been diagnosed as “schizoid.”
• His shyness and social ineptitude greatly restricted his
experiences with women.
• He had only enough courage to ask out a young lady whom he
had known in elementary school in Oak Park– Helen Elliot.
Helen and Carl were married in 1924 and had two children–
David and Natalie.
Person-Centered Theory
• Although Rogers’ concept of humanity remained
basically unchanged from the early 1940’s until his
death in 1987, his therapy and theory underwent
several changes in name. During the early years, his
approach was known as “non-directive,” an
unfortunate term that remained associated with his
name for far too long. Later, his approach was
variously termed “client-centered,” “person-centered,”
student-centered,” “group-centered,” and “person to
person.”
Person-Centered
Theory
Basic Assumptions
• What are the basic assumptions of person-centered
theory? Rogers postulated two broad assumptions—
the formative tendency and the actualizing tendency.
Formative Tendency
• Rogers believed that there is a tendency for all matter,
both organic and inorganic, to evolve from simpler to
more complex forms. For the entire universe, a
creative process, rather than a disintegrative one, is in
operation. Rogers called this process the formative
tendency.
Actualizing Tendency
• An interrelated and more pertinent assumption is the
actualizing tendency, or the tendency within all
humans (and other animals and plants) to move
toward completion or fulfillment of potentials. This
tendency is the only motive people possess.
The self and self-
actualization
• According to Rogers, infants begin to develop a vague concept
of self when a portion of their experience becomes
personalized and differentiated in awareness as “I” or “me”
experiences.
• Once infants establish a rudimentary self-structure, their
tendency to actualize the self begins to evolve. Self-
actualization is a subset of the actualization tendency and
therefore and is therefore not synonymous to with it.
• The actualization tendency refers to organismic experiences of
the individual. On the other hand, self-actualization is the
tendency to actualize the self as perceived in awareness.
The self-concept
• The self-concept includes all those aspects of one’s being and
one’s experiences that are perceived in awareness (though not
always accurate) by the individual. The self-concept is not
identical with the organismic self.
The ideal self
• The second subsystem of the self is the ideal self, defined as
one’s view of self as one wishes to be. The ideal self contains
all those attributes, usually positive, that people aspire to
possess.
• Incongruence
Awareness
• Without awareness the self-concept and the ideal self would
not exist. Rogers defined awareness as “the symbolic
representation of some portion of our experience.” He used
that term synonymously with both consciousness and
symbolization.
Levels of Awareness
• There are three (3) levels of awareness:
• First, some events are experienced the threshold of awareness
and are either ignored or denied.
• Second, hypothesized that some experiences are accurately
symbolized and freely admitted to self structure.
• A third level of awareness involves experiences that are
perceived in a distorted form.
Denial of Positive Experiences
• Compliments, even those genuinely dispensed, seldom have a
positive influence on the self-concept of the recipient. They
maybe distorted because the person distrusts the giver, or
they may be denied because the recipient does not feel
deserving of them
Becoming a Person
• Rogers discussed the processes necessary to becoming a
person. First, an individual must make contact– positive or
negative– with another person.
• The person develops a need to be loved, liked, or accepted by
another person, a need that Rogers referred to as positive
regard.
• Positive regard is a prerequisite for positive self-regard,
defined as the experience of prizing or valuing one’s self.
Barriers to Psychological
Health
• Not everyone becomes a psychologically health person.
Rather, most people experience conditions of worth,
incongruences, defensiveness, and disorganization.
Conditions of Worth
• Instead of receiving unconditional positive regard, most
people receive condition of worth; that is, they perceive that
their parents, peers, or partners love and accept them only if
they meet those people’s expectations and approval.
• Our perception of other people’s view of us are called external
evaluations.
Incongruence
• This incongruence between our self-concept and our
organismic experience is the source of psychological disorders.
Conditions of worth that we received during early childhood
lead to somewhat false self-concept, one based on distortions
and denials.
• Vulnerability – the greater the incongruence between our
perceived self and our organismic experience, the more
vulnerable we are.
• Anxiety and Threat – where as vulnerability exists when we
have no awareness of the incongruence within our self,
anxiety and threat are experienced as we gain awareness of
such incongruence.
Defensiveness
• In order to prevent this inconsistency between our organismic
experience and our perceived self, we react in a defensive
manner. Defensiveness is the protection of the self-concept
against anxiety and threat by the denial or distortion of
experiences inconsistent with it.
Disorganization
• Most people engage in defensive behavior, but sometimes
defenses fail and behavior becomes disorganized or psychotic.
Psychotherapy

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