Chapter 6
Humanistic Personality
Theories
Key themes
Humanistic personality theories
Maslow’s theory of self-actualisation
Carl Rogers and person-centred therapy
Evaluation of the humanistic theories of Maslow and Rogers
Learning outcomes
After studying this chapter you should:
Understand what is meant by humanistic theories in
psychology and how they evolved
Be familiar with the developmental experiences that influenced
the theorising of Maslow and Rogers
Appreciate the Maslow and Rogers conceptualisations of
human nature
Be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the motives
related to it
Understand the principles of personality development and the
causes of mental illness as described by Maslow and Rogers
Be familiar with Rogers’ conceptualisation of self-actualisation
and its importance in development
Understand the principles of Rogerian counselling, including
the importance of the core conditions of counselling
Be aware of an approach to measuring the self-concept and
the ideal self
Know how to critically evaluate the work of Maslow and
Rogers
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 127
What was your school like? Were you allowed to construct
your timetable, decide which subjects to study,
have no obligatory assessment? Were the teachers concerned
that you had enough time to play and enjoy
yourself? This was probably not your experience of
school. It is most likely to have had a set curriculum,
obligatory coursework, tests and examinations. The
theorists that we examine in this chapter suggest that
such educational conformity frequently stifles our individuality
and creativity as human beings and encourages
competition rather than cooperation. There is one
school in England that defies this educational conformity.
Summerhill was set up by the famous educationalist
A. S. Neil in 1923, in Lyme Regis. In 1927 the school
was moved to Suffolk, where it still operates today, run
by Neil’s son.
Neil believed that children must live their own lives,
not the lives that their parents or school teachers think
they should live. Neil believed that our aim in life is to
find happiness. By living different experiences, Neil felt,
we will find things that interest us; and this will make us
happy and provide us with the motivation to work at
these things. He strongly believed that traditional education
stifles creativity in most children, and that they
lose their love of learning and exploring new ideas. He
established Summerhill to provide the ideal learning environment,
giving children freedom to choose their interests
and to develop their personalities freely within a
democratically run community. The Summerhill philosophy
exemplifies many of the ideas expounded by the
personality theorists who are discussed in this chapter.
Introduction
There are scheduled lessons at Summerhill; but each
child is given a blank timetable, and they are free to
attend lessons as they choose. Many new pupils say
they have no intention of ever going to lessons again,
but such is the culture of the school that they are drawn
to participate in learning because the experiences are
fun. The basic belief in Summerhill, shared by the theorists
who we discuss in this chapter, is that as a species
we are inquisitive and want to learn – and that if we are
given the freedom to learn, then we will learn. There is
no compulsory coursework; there are no tests or examinations.
Neil believed that education must be a preparation
for life and that children will learn what they want
to learn and be happier as a result. He felt that only by
giving children the freedom to develop as they choose
will their true personalities develop. He believed that
assessment, examinations and prizes sidetrack proper
personality development. Children in conventional education,
he claimed, are socialised into developing in
ways that meet the expectations of others such as parents
and teachers, and the children’s true selves can
often be lost in the process.
This is obviously a very contentious stance and one
that you may want to discuss further with your fellow
students. Do you think it would have been a good experience
for you? We have included the web address for
Summerhill School at the end of the chapter for those of
you who want to know more. In 1999 the school received
an unfavourable Office for Standards in Education
(Ofsted) report from the government school
inspectors. The school was in danger of being closed,
Source: Image Source Black/Alamy.
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128 PART 1 PERSONALITY
Historical roots and key
elements of the humanistic
approach
In early twentieth-century American psychology, the two
main influences were the psychoanalytic tradition and the
learning theory approaches that we have covered in previous
chapters. Maslow and Rogers were initially educated in
the psychoanalytic tradition, and the dominant learning
theory approaches played a significant part in their early
education as psychologists. However, as neither theorist
was comfortable with these approaches, they developed
alternative approaches. These approaches drew on the
European tradition of existential philosophy, epitomised in
the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and
Jean-Paul Sartre. There is no one agreed-upon definition of
existential philosophy. It addresses what is called ontology,
defined as ‘the science of being’. Existential philosophers
are concerned with how we find meaning for our existence,
what motivates us to keep on living. They emphasise the
uniqueness of human beings and focus on issues of free
will and human responsibility. These existential themes
are incorporated into the work of both Maslow and Rogers.
Maslow and Rogers’ theories are often described as humanistic
personality theories. Several characteristics define
humanistic approaches. There is always an emphasis on
personal growth. Human beings are seen to be motivated by
a need to grow and develop in a positive way. Human nature
is conceptualised as being positive, unlike the Freudian
conception of human nature as innately aggressive and destructive.
The focus in humanistic theories is on the here
and now. Individuals are discouraged from focusing on the
past. While the past may have helped to shape the person
you are, you are seen as being able to change. Within
humanistic approaches, individuals are encouraged to
savour the moment without worrying overly about the past
or the future. There is also an emphasis on personal responsibility.
Borrowing from the existential philosophers,
there is an emphasis on human beings having free will in
terms of the choices they make in their lives; and consequently,
they are responsible for these choices. Sometimes
we assume that we do not have a choice, but the humanists
would suggest that this is because we find the alternatives
too hard to undertake. We saw some examples of this when
we discussed Albert Ellis’ Rational-Emotive Behaviour
Therapy in Chapter 5. Ellis’ theory, although classified as a
cognitive theory, also shares this humanistic bent.
The final defining feature of humanistic theories is an
emphasis on the phenomenology of the individual person.
Phenomenological approaches focus on trying to understand
individual experience and consciousness. The concept
of the uniqueness of each individual and their
experience is stressed. Individuals are conceptualised as
being the experts on themselves, and humanistic therapists
aim merely to help their clients understand what their
problems are and not to provide solutions. We will return
to this concept in more detail later in the chapter as we
consider the work of Maslow and then Rogers in detail.
Abraham Maslow and
self-actualisation
The first area we are going to concentrate on in Maslow’s
work is his view of human nature and human motivation.
Human nature and human motivation
An explanation of the influences that led Maslow to want
to focus on what human beings could achieve and what
would make them happy is given in the Profile box for
Maslow.
Maslow wanted to move from the early focus of psychology
on clinical populations and the related psychopathology
to explore how to make the average human
being happier and healthier. He began with the assumption
that human nature is basically good, as opposed to the
negative conceptualisation of humans provided by Freud.
Maslow described human beings as having innate tendencies
towards healthy growth and development that he
labelled instinctoid tendencies (Maslow, 1954). These
positive instinctoid tendencies were conceptualised by
Maslow as being weak and easily overcome by negative
environmental influences. If the instinctoid tendencies in
children are fostered, they will have the capacity to display
honesty, trust, kindness, love and generosity and will
but it took the government to court and actually won the
case. From the site you can access the Ofsted report
and details of the court case. Summerhill is of interest to
us as it practises many of the principles outlined by
Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, the two personality
theorists presented in this chapter, and we will return to
it later.
Both Maslow and Rogers were American psychologists,
but European psychology and philosophy heavily
influenced their ideas. In this chapter, we will examine
the historical roots of the approach that influenced both
theorists and helped define the key principles. Each theorist
is presented in turn and then the overall approach
is evaluated.
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 129
develop constructively into healthy individuals. Conversely,
if children grow up in an unhealthy environment
they can easily loose their positive instinctoid tendencies
and grow up to become destructive, aggressive and unloving
individuals, engaging in self-destructive and selfdefeating
behaviour (Maslow, 1954, 1965, 1968, 1970).
Maslow suggests that such individuals feature among
Freud’s case studies, and he acknowledges that psychoanalytic
theories and therapies provide useful tools for psychologists
having to deal with this disturbed population.
However, his wish was to focus on the positive possibilities
in human development; he felt that this approach, alongside
the work of the psychoanalysts, would then provide a
complete theory of human personality (Maslow, 1968).
Maslow’s interest was in trying to understand what motivates
us to go about our lives and make the choices that
we do. As we saw in Chapter 1, this is a fundamental area
for personality theories to address. In his early doctoral
studies, Maslow had become interested in the needs that
animals display, and he demonstrated that it was possible
to organise these needs into a hierarchy. The needs lower in
the hierarchy must be satisfied before we address higherlevel
needs. From his observations, he suggested that a
similar system existed for human beings. He described two
distinct types of human motivations. The first are
deficiency motives, that is, basic needs that we are driven
to fulfil. These include drives like hunger, thirst and the
need for safety and to be loved by someone. Maslow conceptualises
these needs as representing something that we
lack and are motivated to get. If we are hungry, once we
have obtained sufficient food, this need is met. The need
then ceases to be a motivator. Maslow gave examples of the
economic depression in America in the 1930s, when thousands
of people lost their jobs. Feeding their family became
the dominant need for many people, so they were happy to
get any job that would allow them to achieve their goal. He
compares this situation with economically affluent times
and suggests that when people are wealthier, their motivational
needs change. Hunger is no longer a threat, so they
are motivated to get a better house or car, or a more interesting
job and so on.
The second type of needs Maslow outlines are growth
motives, sometimes called being motives or B-motives.
These needs are unique to each individual and are conceptualised
as gaining intensity as they are met. He suggests
that these needs are about developing the individual’s
Profile
Abraham Maslow
Abraham Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York, in
1908, the first of seven children. His parents were
Russian-Jewish immigrants. He describes his childhood
as being very lonely, and he had a strong sense of not
belonging in his environment. He attributes this to his
family being the only Jewish family in the neighbourhood.
His parents, although uneducated themselves,
were keen for their children to be successful educationally
and pushed him hard. He describes himself as having
turned to books for solace, having few friends. He
initially studied law at the behest of his parents, but
soon dropped out as he found law uninteresting. He
was attracted to study psychology after reading about
behaviourism and the learning theory approach
(Chapter 4), and his doctoral studies were on the sexuality
of monkeys. However, the birth of his first child led
Maslow to question the behaviourist approach, feeling
that it was too simplistic to provide a real understanding
of the complexity of human life. This need to understand
human personality became his goal and remained so
throughout his life. He first turned to the psychoanalytic
tradition (see Chapters 2 and 3), reading widely, undergoing
psychoanalysis and interacting with many of the
major psychoanalysts such as Adler and Horney, many
of whom had emigrated to the United States to escape
Nazism. While finding aspects of psychoanalysis to be
interesting, Maslow found the negative view of humanity
emanating from Freud’s work to be unacceptable. He
was increasingly interested in showing that the human
race was capable of achieving great feats, and he began
his study of what he described as remarkable human
beings who had achieved much and were content with
their lives (Maslow, 1970). He began by studying two individuals
he had met who were high achievers and
seemed to have achieved a high level of satisfaction
with their lives. The first individual was the Jewish
German psychologist Max Wertheimer, who had come
to the States to escape the Nazis. Wertheimer had
achieved breakthroughs in our understanding of perception
and learning. The second object of study was
Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist who had
become famous for her work on the influence of culture
on individuals. Maslow described these individuals as
being self-actualised, and we will explore exactly what
he meant by this elsewhere in the chapter. He published
a major study of such self-actualised people in 1970,
shortly before he died from a heart attack.
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130 PART 1 PERSONALITY
potential. They include things like giving love unselfishly;
increases in drive, like curiosity and the thirst for knowledge;
developing skills and having new experiences. Maslow
felt that the personal growth involved in these B-motives
was exciting and rewarding for the individuals and served to
stimulate them further. This is a crucial difference between
deficiency motives and growth motives. Deficiency motives
create a negative motivational state that can be changed
only by satisfying the need; in contrast, growth motives can
be enjoyable, and satisfying these needs can act as further
motivation to achieve personal goals and ambitions. In this
way, deficiency motives are seen to ensure our survival,
while growth needs represent a higher level of functioning
that can result in us becoming happier, healthier and more
fulfilled as individuals. Maslow suggested that the psychoanalysts
had overemphasised drive reduction as a motivator
for human behaviour because this tended to be true of the
clinical populations that were their focus. He acknowledged
that human motives were complex and that behaviour
could be motivated by several needs. For example, an apparently
simple behaviour like eating might be motivated by
hunger, the need to be with others or as the need for emotional
comfort when a love affair goes wrong; and we are
sure you can think of other motives. If we ate only to fulfil
our hunger needs, obesity would not be such a health problem
in Western societies.
Hierarchy of needs
Maslow (1970) felt that it would be difficult to produce lists
of human needs given the complexity of human motivation
and the way that behaviour could be motivated by several
needs. However, he argued that needs vary significantly
in terms of their importance for ensuring our survival. To
this end, he developed what has become his famous hierarchy
of needs. Some needs have to be met before other needs
are acknowledged and begin to motivate our behaviour. We
saw this earlier in the economic depression example.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is displayed in Figure 6.1. It
begins with lower-level or survival needs, which have to be
satisfied first before we seek gratification of our higherorder
needs.
The physiological needs
Our physiological needs include hunger, thirst, sleep, oxygen,
the elimination of bodily waste and sex. Most of these
are deficiency needs; and once they are satisfied, the motivation
to pursue the activity ceases. If we are thirsty we
have a drink of water, and the need is satisfied. The exceptions
are sexual drive, the need for elimination and sleep;
these are considered to be growth needs (Maslow, 1968).
Sexual needs, for example, do not decrease with gratification
but frequently increase. Rarely in Western cultures are individuals
in the position of being motivated only by their
physiological needs; but we can imagine that if you were
starving, food would be your number one priority and all
your other needs for respect, love and the like would be of
little importance. Once our physiological needs are satisfied,
we then turn our attention to the next level of needs as
a source of motivation.
The safety needs
Needs at the next level of Maslow’s hierarchy include needs
for security, safe circumstances to live within, selfprotection,
law-abiding communities and a sense of order.
Although Maslow tended to focus on the positive aspects of
these drives, what emerges at this level are your fears and
anxieties about your own safety – and these motivate your
behaviour. If you live in a large estate where violence and
crime are rife, you can imagine being motivated to work
either at getting a house in a safer place or at changing the
environment to make it safer. Which you would choose is
likely to be influenced by other personality factors, such as
your levels of altruism and political and situational factors.
For others, the choice might be getting securer locks on
their doors or altering their behaviour to minimise the risk
of being harmed. All of these behaviours Maslow would
conceptualise as being motivated by our need for security.
Maslow (1970) pointed out that the safety needs can be
clearly observed in infants and young children where they
are upset by loud unexplained noises, rough handling or
major changes in their daily routine. He strongly believed
Self-
actualisation
Esteem needs
Belongingness needs
Safety needs
Physiological needs
Figure 6.1 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 131
that children need routines, consistently enforced rules and
limits imposed on their behaviour to meet their safety
needs. The absence of this safe, relatively predictable environment
would impact badly on a child’s development,
although Maslow did not specify the specific negative
effects likely to occur.
His contention was that we all prefer to live in stable
societies, where we feel safe and are not continually at risk
of being robbed or mugged or our homes burgled. This
may be one of the reasons that in general elections, voters
always seem to be interested in issues of law and order.
Maslow would say that such prospective voters are being
motivated by their safety needs to take an interest in such
things. Our safety needs also motivate us to buy insurance
and save for a pension or a rainy day, and they may motivate
us to train for a secure job where we are feel our skills
will always be in demand and we are unlikely to be made
redundant. Maslow (1968) pointed out that the downside
of safety needs is that they can stifle our growth by encouraging
us always to opt for the safe choice and thereby minimise
risk in our life.
Belongingness and love needs
Once our physiological and safety needs are largely taken
care of, Maslow states that our needs for belongingness and
love become more important motivators of our behaviour.
He is saying that we all need to feel that we are needed and
accepted by others. Human beings are conceptualised as
social beings, and we need to feel that we are rooted in
communities, with ties to family and friends. Our need for
belongingness motivates us to make friends, to join clubs
and other organisations where we can meet people and
socialise. Once our more basic needs have been met, we become
more aware of our loneliness, absence of companions
and friends, and we become motivated to do something
about it. Maslow defined two distinct types of love that
were based on different needs, D-love and B-love. The first
is D-love, which is based on a deficiency need, hence the
label. It is the love that we seek to meet the emptiness inside
ourselves. We want it for ourselves; the loved one is there to
meet our needs. In this way, it is a relatively selfish deficiency
need. Maslow defines this love as consisting of individual
yearning for affection, tenderness, feelings of elation
and sexual arousal. It does not always bring out the best in
individuals, as they may display all sorts of manipulative
behaviour to try to get the attention of the person they desire.
It can sometimes be observed in the young child competing
for their mother’s attention with their younger
sibling. Maslow contrasts this need for love and belongingness
for ourselves with the ability we have to love others.
He calls this latter type of love B-love and suggests that
once our basic needs for D-love have been met, we become
capable of attaining B-love. B-love or Being-love is about
being able to love others in a non-possessive, unconditional
way, simply loving them for being. It involves showing respect
for the other, accepting their individuality, putting
their needs before your own on occasion and valuing them.
B-love is a growth need, and Maslow sees it as representing
an emotionally mature type of love. It is possible only when
the basic needs have been sufficiently gratified. At this
stage, Maslow (1970) considers that the person is moving
towards self-actualisation. Maslow was concerned about
the high numbers of individuals living alone in Western
cultures and felt that while this lifestyle is valued by some
individuals, for most it creates loneliness as belongingness
and love needs may not be met sufficiently.
The esteem needs
Esteem needs are the last of our basic needs. Maslow (1970)
divided these into two types of needs. The first type of esteem
need is based on our need to see ourselves as competent,
achieving individuals. Secondly, there is the need for
esteem based on the evaluation of others. He claimed that
we have a need for respect and admiration from other people
but advises that this must be deserved. He suggests that
the incompetent individual who lies, cheats or buys their
way into a position of authority will still feel inferior and
will not enjoy their position, as their real esteem needs –
especially their need to see themselves as competent and
achieving – are not being met (Maslow, 1970).
The need for self-actualisation
The highest level of need is for self-actualisation. Maslow
(1968, 1970) argues that once our basic needs have been
met, we start to focus on what we want from life. Individuals
may be very successful financially and have enough
power and success that all their lower-level needs are being
met, but they may still not be happy and contented. They
are still searching for something. This restlessness comes
from their need for self-actualisation. Self-actualisation demands
that individuals develop themselves so that they
achieve their full potential. It is about maximising their talents
and finding meaning in life, so that they are at peace
with themselves. Maslow is eager to stress that this process
will be different for everyone depending on the individual’s
talents and interests. It is a growth need that emerges only
after the other basic needs have been addressed. For this
reason, Maslow (1968, 1970) describes it as coming to
prominence only in older people. This idea is similar to
Jung’s concept of individuation that we discussed in
Chapter 3.Young adults are seen as being taken up with addressing
their basic needs, such as getting an education and
finding work, somewhere to live, love and relationships.
Maslow (1964) is clear that not all individuals achieve selfactualisation,
although many strive to do so. Self-actualised
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132 PART 1 PERSONALITY
individuals are thought to be rare. He suggests that the
model of motivation we have just described does not fit
these self-actualised individuals. He suggests that the needs
of self-actualisers are qualitatively different; he describes
them as metaneeds. The foci of metaneeds are very different,
being concerned with higher aesthetic and moral
values such as beauty, truth, justice and ethics. We shall be
looking in some more detail shortly at the qualities of selfactualised
individuals after we have concluded the discussion
of Maslow’s model of motivation.
Discussion of basic needs
Maslow’s model appears very neat and simple at one level,
but he stressed that his hierarchical model is an oversimplification
of the actual relationship between needs and behaviour.
The reality is that while the order makes sense for
most people, there will be individual exceptions. The priority
of our needs will vary depending on our personal circumstances
across time, so that it is not a static model. At
any level, a need does not have to be totally gratified in
order for us to be motivated by higher-order needs. Maslow
estimated some average figures for need fulfilment in the
average American, suggesting that on average around
85 per cent of individual physical needs are met, 70 per
cent of safety needs, 50 per cent of belongingness and love,
40 per cent of self-esteem needs and 10 per cent of selfactualisation
needs. Thinking about percentage need in
this way helps to get across Maslow’s idea that the degree to
which a need is unfulfilled will influence the impact it has
on the individual’s behaviour. For example, if a long-term
relationship ends, the belongingness and love needs are
likely to be much less satisfied than they were previously.
This results in the individual becoming more motivated to
seek solace with others, and the person will derive some
comfort from being with friends and other relatives as this
helps increase their sense of belonging.
Maslow (1968, 1970) claimed that his model had universal
applicability, but that the means of gratification might
change within cultures. He felt that many of the basic needs,
such as physiological and safety needs, we share with other
animals, but the higher-order needs are distinctly human.
The higher apes display a need for love and belongingness,
but Maslow felt that self-actualisation is a uniquely human
pursuit.
He stressed that the motivation for behaviour is frequently
immensely complex and that many behaviours are
motivated by a variety of needs. Using the example of sexual
behaviour, Maslow pointed out that it can be motivated
by a physiological need for sexual release, or it can be a
need for love and affection, a wish to feel masculine or feminine
or to express a sense of mastery in a situation and so
on. Thus, the activities we engage in may also satisfy more
than one set of needs at any one time. Maslow (1970) also
acknowledges the importance of unconscious motivation.
He perceives the instinctoid tendencies as being quite weak
and easily overcome by situational factors, and consequently
we may often not be consciously aware of how they
affect our motivation. However, unlike Freud, who claims
that unconscious motives originating in our past experiences
cause our behaviour and also determine our goals,
Maslow sees human beings as being future oriented. For
Maslow, our ultimate goal is self-actualisation driven on by
our motivational needs. It is the instinctoid needs that he
conceptualises as frequently influencing us unconsciously.
There is some inconsistency in Maslow’s theorising here as
he also accepts the validity of the Freudian defence mechanisms
(see Chapter 2). He accepted that they play a crucial
role in preventing individuals knowing themselves and yet
the individual is unconscious of their effect. So, here we
have further evidence of unconscious motivation based on
past experiences influencing behaviour. In Maslow’s defence,
he wanted his focus to be on healthy individuals. He
was clear that the psychologically healthy individual needs
to use defence mechanisms much less, and therefore the
role of unconscious motivation based on past experiences
is also less.
Characteristics of self-actualisers
Maslow wanted his theory to be about human aspirations
and abilities. He did not want to focus on clinical populations
and their psychopathology, as is the case with so
many other personality theories. To meet this aim, he undertook
interview studies of individuals who appeared to
him to be self-actualised; he also conducted studies of famous
historical figures, using any documents about them
that he could find. Among those he studied were Albert
Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, William James, Thomas
Jefferson, Albert Schweitzer, Jane Addams and Baruch
Spinoza (Maslow, 1968). He described this research as undertaking
a holistic analysis, the aim of which was to
understand individuals in some depth. From this study, he
outlined the characteristics of self-actualising individuals.
At the outset we need to acknowledge, as Maslow (1970)
did, that this data was impressionistic and did not meet
conventional scientific standards in terms of reliability and
validity. However, Maslow published these studies as he felt
that the topic was so important.
Every healthy person studied was described by Maslow
as being creative. The creativity of the self-actualised was a
way of approaching life. It did not necessarily mean that
they painted pictures or produced poetry and so on, which
is how we tend to think conventionally about creativity.
Rather, they approached everyday tasks in novel ways. They
might be a conventionally creative person as well, but an
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 133
example he gave was of a woman who expressed her creativity
in producing very interesting meals and presenting
them beautifully in quite novel ways. Self-actualisers found
little everyday things interesting, and Maslow compares
them with young children who take such pleasure from
small discoveries. Self-actualisers have not lost their awe of
the world and their interest in the minutiae.
Self-actualisers also think differently, according to
Maslow (1962). He claimed that self-actualisers engage
more often in what he termed being cognition
(B-cognition). This is a non-judgemental form of
thought. It is about accepting oneself and the world and
just being and feeling at one with the world. Maslow
referred to B-cognition occurring at moments of experiencing
self-actualistaion in what he termed peak experiences;
and obviously, self-actualisers have more of these
peak experiences. More recently, Csikszentmihalyi (1999)
has defined this concept of peak experiences in some detail,
although he has renamed them optimal experiences. The
characteristics that Csikszentmihalyi describes as defining
such experiences are summarised in Table 6.1. This list will
give you a much better understanding of Maslow’s concept
of peak experience.
B-cognition is contrasted with the more normally
occurring deficiency cognition (D-cognition).
D-cognition is judgemental, and in it we see ourselves as
distinct from the world around us. It is about making
judgements about how well our experiences are meeting
our deficiency needs. Maslow (1962) stresses that B-cognition
states are transient even for self-actualisers. He points
out that it is dangerous to exist continually in a passive,
non-judgemental, non-intervening state.
In terms of their personal characteristics, self-actualisers
tend to have higher levels of self-acceptance. They also
accept others more easily, being less judgemental and more
tolerant of others. Maslow also claimed that they perceive
reality more accurately with fewer distortions. This is linked
to them being more in touch with themselves and being less
psychologically defended. The use of a defence mechanism
tends to distort reality. For example, if you failed to get a job
you really wanted, the defended individual might say that
the process was unfair, or deny that they wanted the job,
while the self-actualiser is more likely to be truthful.
Self-actualisers tend to have well-developed ethical and
moral standards and are more likely to accept responsibility
for their actions. They have greater self-knowledge and
tend to follow their codes of ethics. They also have a strong
wish to help others and are concerned about the welfare of
the communities they live in. This quality is the same as
Adler’s concept of social interest that we discussed in
Chapter 3, and Maslow acknowledges a debt to Adler for
this concept. Self-actualisers are good at focusing on problems
and seeing them through to resolution. They are often
more interested in the big picture than the minor details. In
their working lives, they are more likely to be motivated by
a desire to fulfil their inner potential than by promises of
more wealth or other trappings of success. They do things
because they want to rather than it being a way to get on at
work. In this way, they are more independent and less
influenced by cultural norms and much more likely to
make up their own minds about issues and act accordingly.
In their personalities, self-actualisers tend to have
deeper personal relationships, preferring to have a few
close friends rather than a wide circle of acquaintances.
Maslow also claimed that they are more likely to demonstrate
the non-possessive B-love. Their sense of humour is
also different. They find jokes based on superiority or
aggressive hostility offensive and prefer more philosophically
based humour.
Maslow’s description of self-actualising individuals
makes them sound like absolute paragons of virtue. However,
as Maslow (1968, 1970) points out, this is far from the
case. No one is a self-actualising individual all the time in
all their activities. Similarly, peak experiences come and go.
At times, self-actualising individuals can be as annoying
and irritating as anyone. Like Albert Ellis, as we saw in
Chapter 5, Maslow strongly believed that there are no perfect
human beings, but some are happier than others are.
1 The individual’s attention is totally absorbed by the activity.
2 The activity has clear objectives so that the person has a clear goal to work towards.
3 It is a challenging activity that requires the person’s full attention but is not so difficult that they cannot make meaningful
progress.
4 The person is able to concentrate fully on the task at hand, and other parts of their life do not impinge on what they are doing.
5 The individual feels in control of the activity.
6 The activity is so personally engrossing that the individual does not think about themselves while engaging in it.
7 All sense of time is lost while the person is engaged. Most commonly, time passes very quickly.
8 The activity tends to be one where feedback is clearly available, so that the person is aware of making progress even though
it may be based on only a personal evaluation.
Table 6.1 The characteristics of peak experiences.
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134 PART 1 PERSONALITY
Personality development
Maslow did not provide a great deal of detailed information
about personality development; rather, he outlined some
core principles. Firstly, he conceptualised children as having
an innate drive to develop. This is a positive drive fuelled by
the motivational needs outlined in his hierarchy of needs.
Maslow felt that as children become socialised, there is a
crucial time for their development. This is when they decide
whether they are going to listen to what he terms ‘their
inner voice’ and develop according to their own instinctoid
needs or whether they are going to follow their parental dictates.
Maslow concluded that parental expectations and cultural
expectations influence most children, but this is
because children are seldom given real choices. If you cast
you mind back to the material you read about Summerhill
School in the introduction to this chapter, Summerhill exemplifies
the sort of learning experience that Maslow felt
was the ideal for creating happy, fulfilled individuals. Children
are not coerced but given choices, and Maslow assumed
that their natural desire to grow will direct them
towards engaging in learning experiences. This is the reported
Summerhill experience. There are rules – indeed,
quite a large number of them – but they are formulated
with the pupils and enforced by the whole community.
Maslow is clear that children need rules and limits to meet
their safety needs. Like Adler, he felt that pampering is very
bad for children and that having some rules to come up
against is beneficial. Children need to be given considerable
freedom choice but they also need to be given responsibilities.
In this way, they are encouraged to always take responsibility
for their behaviour. The satisfaction of a child’s
needs, as specified in Maslow’s hierarchy, is the best way to
encourage healthy development – as long as this is done in a
disciplined way, and the child is not pampered.
Mental illness and its treatment in
Maslow’s approach
For Maslow (1970) there was one underlying cause for all
mental illness and psychological disturbance, and that was
the failure to satisfy the individual’s fundamental needs as
outlined in the hierarchy. He felt the lower the level of need
that is not being satisfied, the more profound the disturbance.
For example, someone who has failed to find any
place in the world and in relationships that makes them
feel safe is more disturbed than someone who is still
searching for love and respect. In this conceptualisation, it
is clear that the basic needs have a psychological aspect to
them and are not merely physical needs. Safety is not just
about a safe environment, although it is part of it. If you
feel unsafe where you live, you are more likely to be anxious,
and it will impact your psychological health. Similarly,
if you do not have any family or close relationships
that you feel secure in, you are going to be very anxious and
upset as your needs are not being met.
In terms of treatment, Maslow adopted an eclectic approach.
He was against all diagnostic labels and the medical
Rogers believed that we are the best experts on ourselves and that people are
capable of working out their own solutions to their own problems.
Source: Pearson Education Ltd. Jules Selmes
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 135
model that they implied. To improve their health, individuals
needed to be assisted towards self-actualisation. Maslow
was a trained psychoanalyst, and he used psychoanalysis on
occasion for severe problems following the method described
in Chapter 2. For less disturbed individuals, he
would use briefer therapies including behaviour therapy.
He was also a fan of group therapy and encounter groups
for healthy individuals to help them to self-actualise further.
We will discuss encounter groups in more detail later
in the chapter, when we look at the work of Carl Rogers.
Thus Maslow is seen as adopting an eclectic approach to
therapy – even utilising psychoanalysis, which is somewhat
at odds with his rejection of the medical model and his
conceptualisation of the causes of psychological disturbance.
This inconsistency did not appear to concern him.
Evaluation of Maslow’s theory
We will now evaluate Maslow’s theory using the eight criteria
we identified in Chapter 1: description, explanation,
empirical validity, testable concepts, comprehensiveness,
parsimony, heuristic value and applied value.
Description
Maslow provides a reasonable, if somewhat simplified,
description of human behaviour. The theory therefore is
high on face validity. However, he does present an extremely
positive and almost simplistic view of human nature
and human beings. This is somewhat at odds with his
acceptance of many Freudian defence mechanisms, as we
have discussed earlier in this chapter. Defence mechanisms,
as we saw in Chapter 2, refer to the complexity of human
motivation and the difficulties in explaining behaviour
even to ourselves. Maslow does not acknowledge these inconsistencies
in his theorising.
It seems somewhat simplistic to claim that blocks to
self-actualisation are at the roots of all human behavioural
problems. There is no mention of genetic susceptibilities to
mental illness and sociopathic conditions, for example. To
put so much emphasis on environmental influences is untenable,
as you will see from the biological evidence
reviewed in Chapters 8 and 9.
Explanation
While Maslow’s theory appears to present a neat, rational
explanation of human motivation, it does appear to suggest
that motivation is more clear-cut than it generally is,
and that the link between our needs and our behaviour is
obvious. The reality is that behaviour is frequently the result
of many different motivators. For example, if you take
the case of someone doing a menial job that is poorly paid,
the assumption from Maslow is that they are working to
earn money to meet their physiological and safety needs.
The job itself is not inherently satisfying; but they may
work with a good set of colleagues, and this may meet their
belongingness needs and compensate for the nature of the
work, so they are not motivated to seek more conducive or
better paid work. An example of this might be where a
member of a company cleaning staff shows a marked reluctance
to become a supervisor even though it paid more.
Though the job might bring extra money and be physically
easier, they might not consider this compensation for the
loss of comradeship from the other cleaners. Maslow has
provided useful insights into human motivational needs,
but perhaps not the whole picture.
Maslow’s work on defining types of needs and types of
love is interesting. It was a new, very creative approach to
these topics. In his work on general needs and types of love,
he presents a less positive perspective on human beings,
seeing us as capable of being manipulative, disrespectful of
others and very demanding in the way that we treat others.
This is somewhat at odds with his generally positive view of
human beings, but he does not really acknowledge these
inconsistencies in his theory.
Empirical validity
While self-actualisation is at the core of Maslow’s theory,
the research on which it is based is dubious. He selected a
very small sample of participants to investigate the concept.
These were not randomly selected; rather, Maslow
chose to examine individuals whom he believed to be selfactualisers.
He did not use any objective measures to assess
these individuals, and there was a lack of consistency in assessment
between individuals. In all, it was an extremely
subjective process, more descriptive than evaluative.
Testable concepts
Many of Maslow’s other concepts are also difficult to define
precisely and therefore difficult to test empirically. Examples
include peak experiences where it is unclear exactly
what is meant. Self-actualisers are thought to be rare individuals,
yet researchers such as Leiby (1997) report that
drug-induced peak experiences are common. This raises
the issue of whether and how these artificially induced experiences
relate to self-actualisation. Ravizza (1977) reported
that many athletes report peak experiences but are
not self-actualisers in any other aspects of their lives. Thus,
questions are raised about the relationship between peak
experiences and self-actualisation.
The basis for Maslow’s selection of the five basic needs is
also unclear. He does not provide a rationale for their selection,
and many other human needs can be identified. His
theorising embraces many assumptions about human
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136 PART 1 PERSONALITY
behaviour that are stated authoritatively, but the supporting
evidence is either absent or weak. He did argue against
the empiricism of existing psychological methodologies,
but this does not excuse his lack of attention to providing
objective support for this theory (Maslow, 1970).
Most of the concepts in Maslow’s theory are imprecisely
defined, so they are difficult to research. There have been
more systematic attempts to measure self-actualisation.
Shostrum (1966) developed a measure called the Personal
Orientation Inventory (POI). It is a self-report questionnaire
with 150 items that are answered positively or negatively.
It measures the degree to which individuals are inner
directed on one major scale and whether they use their
time effectively on the second major scale, both of which
are thought to relate to self-actualisation as we have seen.
There are 10 subscales measuring self-actualising values,
feeling reactivity, existentiality, self-regard, spontaneity,
self-acceptance, nature of humankind, synergy, acceptance
of aggression and capacity for intimate contact. While the
validity and the usefulness of the measure was established
using several samples (Dosamantes-Alperson and Merrill,
1980; Knapp, 1976), there are problems with it. Participants
do not like the forced-choice response mode, feeling
that it does not give an accurate reflection of their views,
and other researchers have reported that it correlates
poorly with other related measures such as the Purpose in
Life Test (PIL) devised by Crumbaugh and Maholick
(1969). Mittleman (1991) reviews much of this work on
self-actualisation and concludes that self-actualisation is
difficult to measure, but the most reliable aspect of it
relates only to possessing openness to experience.
Comprehensiveness
Maslow’s theory is really focused on positive growth, and as
such it is not a comprehensive theory. His approach was
new and creative, making a welcome change to the previous
theories with their emphasis on psychopathology. He
did attempt some discussion of psychopathology and
adopted aspects of Freud’s model, but this was not done in
a systematic or comprehensive fashion. The explanation of
human motivation is also limited. There is much more emphasis
on self-actualisation, but even here the precise detail
is missing. Maslow does not spell out exactly how selfactualisation
can be achieved. Similarly, he talks only in
very general terms about the development of personality.
Parsimony
Maslow’s theory is very concise for a theory of human personality.
We have already discussed how his concept of motivation
is limited and how the selection of five basic needs
is somewhat arbitrary. The description of personality
development is lacking in detail. We have already discussed
the limitations of Maslow’s treatment of psychopathology
and how the adoption of Freudian concepts such as defence
mechanisms is inconsistent with the rest of his theory.
As a general theory, the conclusion must be that it is
too parsimonious.
Heuristic value
Although Maslow’s theory has many limitations, it undoubtedly
has had a major impact on many researchers,
both in psychology and other disciplines. He was one of the
first theorists to focus on the healthy side of human psychological
development. His focus on human achievement
and human values introduced new foci for psychologists.
By vehemently questioning the dominant laboratory study
approach to psychology, he caused psychologists to review
their research methodologies (Maslow, 1970). He stressed
the need to ask meaningful questions rather than pursue
more trivial research that could easily be addressed by the
existing laboratory-based practices. He wanted researchers
to think creatively about developing methodologies that
could address important real-life issues, although it might
mean losing some control of the laboratory-based studies.
He also influenced subsequent theorists such as Rogers, as
we shall see.
Applied value
The area where Maslow’s work has had most impact is in
business. His theory of motivation became and is still popular
with managers. It led to an increasing emphasis on the
need to offer development opportunities to employees.
Maslow stressed the importance of consulting with employees
and fostering a sense of belonging within companies,
and this concept has been embraced by generations of
business managers (Maslow, 1967). His influence also extended
to counselling and healthcare professional training,
as it provided a neat system for examining human motivational
needs. Maslow’s work also had a major impact on
educational programmes. He emphasised the importance
of student-centred learning, suggesting that individuals
want to learn and that the role of educators is to provide
the environment to facilitate such learning. As discussed in
the introduction, he saw schools like Summerhill as offering
this learning environment.
Carl Rogers and person-centred
therapy
In our review of Carl Rogers’ theory, we are going to first
outline the basic principles underlying the theory.
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 137
Basic principles underlying the theory
Carl Rogers, like most of the personality theorists we have
studied, based his theory on disturbed clinical populations.
His initial work was based mainly on his experience of
working with disturbed adolescents, as detailed in the Profile
box on page 138. Many of the therapists that Rogers
worked with initially at the American equivalent of the
National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
(NSPCC) were psychoanalytically trained, but he increasingly
felt uncomfortable working psychoanalytically. His
personality theory grew out of his theory of therapy. He acknowledged
that experience plays an important part in
personality development, but he could not accept the
Freudian notion that the early years largely dictate adult
development. He felt that individuals can play an active
role in shaping their own lives. He, like Maslow, saw human
beings as being future oriented and believed that our future
goals influence our current behaviour. In this way, he saw
individuals as having the power to shape their own lives.
This focus on the power of the individual to change their
lives is reflected in the title of his approach. He first named
it client-centred therapy. The term ‘patient’ was the norm at
the time among therapists and is very much associated with
the medical model of illness where the doctor/therapist is
the expert who provides treatment and hopefully a cure to
the patient. In this relationship, the therapist is the expert
and the patient is less powerful and receives the expert’s
knowledge. Therefore the medical model has traditionally
assigned a relatively passive role to the patient. Adopting an
existential humanistic stance, as we discussed in the introduction
to this chapter, Rogers (1951) felt that individuals
are the best experts on themselves, not the therapist. He selected
the term ‘client’ to suggest a more equal role, similar
to that of customer and provider. The term ‘client-centred’
reflects Rogers’ view that clients are the experts on themselves
and that the role of the therapist is to help the client
to better recognise their problems and formulate their issues.
In this way, the therapist acts more as a facilitator.
Once clients understood what the problem was, Rogers felt
that they would know how to solve it in a way that suited
their particular life situation. Later he changed the term to
‘person-centred’, feeling that the term ‘person’ is more
power neutral than the word ‘client’ is.
Rogers adopted a phenomenological position about the
nature of reality. He stressed that we all function within a
perceptual or subjective frame of reference (Rogers, 1956).
He denied the possibility of an objective reality that we all
share. Instead, we all perceive our own reality. Sometimes
students have a problem with this idea, as you may be having.
However, if you think about the unreliability of eyewitness
testimony, something that social psychologists have
spent some time studying (Kassin, Ellsworth and Smith,
1989; Loftus, 1979), the meaning will become clearer. We
know that even in experimental situations, there are significant
individual differences in terms of the interpretation
of events and the details seen by different observers. Rogers
points out that how we perceive a situation depends on our
mood, the type of person we are, our beliefs, our past experiences
and so on. We discussed this in some detail in
Chapter 5 when we explored the ABC model, used in
Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy, to conceptualise our
perceptual processes. Rogers, like Ellis, accepts that everyone
perceives situations differently; therefore, to understand
an individual, you have to try to understand how
they see the world. We will return to this later when we discuss
Rogers’ approach to counselling and therapy.
Self-actualisation
Rogers (1961) stressed the uniqueness of each individual.
He felt that clients are the best experts on themselves and
that people are capable of working out their own solutions
to their own problems. He believed that each person has a
natural tendency towards growth and self-actualisation.
His definition of self-actualisation is the same as
Maslow’s that we discussed earlier: it is an innate, positive
drive to develop and realise our potential. Individuals are
described as having an innate actualising tendency. It is our
single basic motivating drive, and it is a positive drive
towards growth. From birth, Rogers suggested we all have a
drive towards actualising our potential, to become what we
are capable of becoming.
Rogers (1959, 1977) claimed we can all cope with our
lives and remain psychologically healthy as long as our actualising
potential is not blocked. Blocks in our actualising
tendency are the cause of all psychological problems. This
role for the actualising tendency differs from Maslow’s conception.You
will recall that for Maslow, psychological problems
result from an individual’s needs not being met, and he
is specific about these needs. The role Rogers ascribed to
self-actualisation is less specific. It is a general positive motivator,
indeed our only motivator. There are two aspects to it.
The biological aspect includes the drive for satisfaction of
our basic needs such as food, water, sleep, safety and sexual
reproduction. The psychological aspect involves the development
of our potential and the qualities that make us
more worthwhile human beings (Rogers, 1959). Rogers
paid most attention to the psychological aspect, selfactualisation,
as he conceptualised it as being crucial for our
psychological health. It is a positive drive towards growth
for Rogers, just as it was for Maslow. Rogers (1977) suggested
that we develop our capacity for self-destructive,
aggressive, and harmful behaviour only under perverse
circumstances, such as growing up in a difficult environment
with few opportunities for self-actualisation or not
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138 PART 1 PERSONALITY
being given the freedom to develop according to our true
nature. In these circumstances, our self-actualisation is
blocked and problems occur. Individuals may become
psychologically distressed and/or demonstrate antisocial
behaviour.
Effect of society on self-actualisation
To understand fully the process of self-actualisation, we
need to examine Rogers’ conception of the self. Rogers
made a distinction between our real self and our selfconcept
(see Figure 6.2). The real self is defined as being our
underlying organismic self. This is, if you like, the genetic
blueprint for the person we are capable of becoming if our
development occurs within totally favourable circumstances.
If we had these ideal developmental experiences,
Rogers suggested, our behavioural choices would be guided
purely by our actualising tendency. Self-actualisation would
then be within everyone’s reach once you had lived long
enough to accrue sufficient life experiences to discover what
truly made you fulfilled. However, Rogers argued that this is
rarely if ever the case. The explanation for this is quite complex,
and we will go through it in stages.
He asserted that human beings as a species are social animals.
We all need to be liked/loved by other people. Rogers
was very clear about the nature of the emotional experience
that is necessary for optimum development, and he
termed it unconditional positive regard. He preferred
this to the term‘love’ as he asserted that love is seldom truly
unconditional. Unconditional positive regard means accepting
someone for who they are and valuing them just
for being. The term ‘regard’ means seeing oneself as making
a positive difference in someone else’s life. It is about
knowing that someone would truly miss you were you to
die tomorrow. They would feel that they had a gap in their
life that would always be there. It is an unselfish love, like
Maslow’s Belonging-love (B-love). You want what is best
for the other above what is best for you. However, Rogers
suggested that unconditional positive regard is rare and
that mostly what we experience is conditional positive regard.
As part of the socialisation process, we learn that we
Profile
Carl Rogers
Carl Ransom Rogers was born in 1902 into a very religious
family in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago in
the United States. He was the fourth child of six and described
his upbringing as warm and caring although the
family adhered to very strict religious principles, where
the work ethic and taking responsibility for your actions
were stressed. His father was a successful civil engineer
who also owned a farm. As a child, Rogers was encouraged
to breed animals on the farm, and he reported that
studying how to do this effectively introduced him to the
world of science and scientific method and later influenced
his approach to psychology. Rogers first set out
to study agriculture, but after graduating from agricultural
college, he enrolled in a seminary to study religion.
He became somewhat disillusioned with the religious
course in the seminary and enrolled instead at Columbia
University Teacher’s College to study psychology as he
had previously studied some psychology and enjoyed it.
While still a student, he married his childhood sweetheart
and had to take a job to support his family before
he had completed his doctoral studies. He then spent
12 years working for the American equivalent of the
National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
(NSPPC) dealing with very disturbed children. During
that time, he published a book entitled Measuring
Personality Adjustment in Children in 1931, followed by
The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child in 1939. It
was while working with disturbed children that Rogers
developed his approach to personality and his unique
approach to treatment, client-centred therapy. Following
the publication of his books, he obtained a professorship
at Ohio State University in the psychology
department. The next year, 1940, he first outlined his full
theory of client-centred therapy at a conference in
Minnesota. He went on to work at several other
American universities, setting up counselling centres,
before finally setting up his own Centre for the Study of
the Person in La Jolla, California. Rogers was a productive
writer, producing 16 books and over 200 journal
articles. He died of a heart attack at age 85. His books
continue to be published; several were reissued with
new introductions by Rogerian scholars, all attesting to
the popularity of the man and the lasting contribution he
has made to psychology.
Real organismic selfRea
Self-concept
Figure 6.2 Rogers’ two aspects of the self.
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 139
are loved/liked more when we do what others want us to
do. When we behave in ways that please our parents, for example,
they reward us with praise and this makes us feel
good. We have obtained positive regard from them. For the
most part, the positive regard we experience is not unconditional.
When we misbehave, or fail an examination or
refuse to do something that our parents desperately want
us to do, we are likely to have experienced a sense of having
disappointed our parents and being less loved and loveable
as a result. These experiences help us to learn what we need
to do in order to get positive regard from other people.
Even more crucially, we develop what Rogers called
conditions of worth related to these experiences. We
learn that we are loved more when we do things that make
our parents or other people in our social world happy. This
need for positive regard leads to us acquiring conditions of
worth, which we use to evaluate the impact that our behaviour
is likely to have on others. What is important about
conditions of worth is that they can distort the natural direction
of our actualising tendency. For example, if one of
my conditions of worth is that I am loved more when I am
helpful and agree to do things that my friends want, I am
going to find it difficult to say no to these friends when they
ask for my help. I may well find myself doing lots of things
that I do not really want to do. This is often the case with
individuals who lack assertiveness, for example. They always
agree to do things for others because their condition
of worth dictates that by doing so, they will be liked and
that conversely, if they refuse, they will be disliked. Conditions
of worth are important as they can keep us doing
things that do not meet our real needs, and this makes it
difficult for us ever to achieve self-actualisation.
We began this section by referring to two aspects of the
self: the real organismic self and the self-concept. Conditions
of worth, as we shall now see, impact on our selfconcept.
As children grow and become socialised, they
develop a sense of who they are as people. Rogers termed
this their self-concept. It is our perception of who we are
based largely on how other people have described us and
evaluated us. You may have been told in your family that
you are the clever one or the good-looking one, and you
will have internalised this description as part of who you
are. The easiest way to access your self-concept is to answer
the question, ‘Who am I?’ Most of us find it relatively easy
to produce a list of adjectives to describe ourselves, and this
is our self-concept. We use the conditions of worth that we
have acquired as our self-concept has developed, to evaluate
our own behaviour and to help us make choices in our
lives. We are conscious of the contents of our self-concept,
whereas our real organismic self may have become obscured
as a result of our developmental experiences of socialisation.
As we saw in our discussion of conditions of
worth, we may end up making choices that make other
people happy but do not meet the needs of our real self. In
the longer term, we are unlikely to be able to self-actualise;
if this is the case, we will experience feelings of being discontented
at least and perhaps even psychological illnesses
such as depression.
The conditions of worth linked to our self-concept can
be problematic as they keep us doing things that do not
meet our real needs. We also tend to perceive things so that
they fit our self-concept. For example, suppose you do not
think you are a very able student and then, in an assignment,
you get an A-grade.You are unlikely to say,‘I did that
piece of work well and I deserved that mark’. Instead, you
are more likely to explain your mark to your friends by saying
that you were lucky or that the instructor was a soft
marker and so on. This is because getting an A-grade does
not fit with your concept of yourself as a poor student academically.
In this way, our self-concept can serve to lower
our own levels of self-regard.
You may ask, why do we maintain a self-concept if aspects
of it are ineffective? There are several reasons, as follows.
Firstly, we use it and our related conditions of worth
to judge our own personal adequacy. This is potentially
problematic, as our self-concept will contain conditions
of worth that were applicable to us at an earlier age. These
conditions of worth are very deeply embedded and therefore
more resistant to change. As you will know from
learning theory, knowledge that we acquire early is more
resistant to change. Say, for example, you met an eminent
businessman, who from a modest start had become
wealthy and successful. All the evidence is that he is an
able man and obviously very bright to have achieved all
that he had achieved. On learning that you were at university,
he comments that he has always been ‘thick’. He tells
you that he failed the grammar school entrance examination
and was always useless at learning. He goes on to say
that this was a great disappointment to his parents. Obviously,
he had learnt a great deal to be as successful as he
was, but still he judged himself according to a condition
of worth he had acquired as a child. Rogers felt that conditions
of worth have the effect of lowering our sense of
worth and make it less likely that we will have the confidence
to attempt change. If we believe that we are uncoordinated,
for example, then we are unlikely to enrol for a
dancing class or take up gymnastics. In these ways, our
self-concept and conditions of worth are important; they
dictate the way in which we interact with people to meet
our own needs, and they influence the choices we make in
our lives.
Thus we can see that our self-concept is socially constructed.
To summarise, we tend to judge ourselves according
to what others think of us rather than on what we
ourselves feel. We behave this way because of our high
need for positive regard. This may result in us relying
more on other people’s judgements about our personal
worth than on our own views. Rogers (1959) suggested
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140 PART 1 PERSONALITY
that because of our high need for positive regard, our organismic
valuing processes may be overwhelmed. We are
out of touch with our real needs. Only if we are raised with
sufficient unconditional positive regard is there likely to be
congruence between the self and the self-concept, and the
better the match between the two, the more psychologically
healthy we will be as adults. Rogers believed that parents
and educational establishments can create helpful
environments. These are environments that foster creativity,
with democratic rules that enable us to be curious, selfreliant
and respectful of others and ourselves within safe
limits. This is very much the environment that is provided
at Summerhill, the school we discussed in the introduction.
Harrington, Block and Block (1987) used data from a longitudinal
study, set up by Block and Block in 1968 at the
University of California, to show that children raised in
such environments were more creative in later life than
were children in a matched control group that did not
experience a creative environment. This is a major study
documenting around 100 young people from age three.
The longitudinal study is still ongoing, with the participants
all in their thirties now. We have included the web
address at the end of the chapter for anyone wanting to
know more about this research.
Developmental impact on the child of
their parent’s self-concept
For Rogers, one important way that parents impacted on
their children related to the adequacy of the parents’ selfconcepts.
In his model, the healthy individual has experienced
significant amounts of unconditional positive regard
and consequently has relatively few conditions of worth.
Here two points are worth noting. Firstly, Rogers did not
specify precisely how much unconditional positive regard
qualifies as a significant amount. He is always very vague
about this, but the assumption is that none of us get
enough. Secondly, as a consequence, we all have some conditions
of worth.Individuals with fewer conditions of worth
are classified as high-functioning adults, while those with
more conditions of worth are classified as low functioning.
High-functioning adults are more accepting of themselves
and of others and therefore impose fewer conditions of
worth on their children, for example. Low-functioning individuals
have many more conditions of worth, are consequently
less accepting and more judgemental, and impose
more conditions of worth on their children. The ways that
the adequacy of parents’ self-concept affects how they relate
to their own children are summarised in Figure 6.3.
High-functioning Parent
Self-acceptance
Self-acceptance
Non-self-acceptance
Non-acceptance of children
(conditions of worth)
Proportion of children’s selfconcepts
based on
organismic valuing
Proportion of children’s selfconcept
based on
organismic valuing
Acceptance of children
Acceptance of children
Low-functioning Parent
Self-acceptance
Non-self-acceptance
Children’s conditions of worth
orgganismic valuingg
Proportion of children’s selfconcept
based on conditions
of worth
Acceptance of children
Non-acceptance of children
(conditions of worth)
Figure 6.3 Degree of self-acceptance of parents in relation to their acceptance of their
children, and the extent of conditions of worth imposed on their children.
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 141
From this discussion, you can see that having conditions
of worth makes us judgemental of both others and ourselves.
Being self-accepting means that you are less judgemental
of yourself and others. In psychological terms,
self-accepting individuals are less psychologically
defended, so that Rogers claimed they perceive the world
more accurately and have less need to distort situations to
fit with their self-concept. Take the example of someone
who is interviewed for a job that they really want. Although
they prepared well and thought that they performed well at
interview, they did not get the job. In Rogers’ view, the selfaccepting
person will accept that they were not right for the
position in some way. On the other hand, the individual
with low self-acceptance will defend their self-esteem by asserting
that they really did not want the job and had only
applied for the experience of being interviewed or something
similar. This exemplifies what Rogers meant by distorting
their perception of reality.
Rogers was keen that his ideas were tested, and Wylie
(1979) and Swann (1984) found some support among students
for this idea, although it is not completely clear how
well the measures they used actually assessed perceptual
distortions. They asked individuals to report how they
would react to various scenarios involving failure and then
asked a friend of the participant to assess how honest they
thought the person’s judgement was. Perceptual distortions
of this type are notoriously difficult to measure. You may
also recall from our discussion of Freudian defence mechanisms
in Chapter 2 that Freud suggested that distorting our
perception so that we rationalise our failures is a psychologically
adaptive response, as it serves to protect our selfesteem.
It is problematic only if it is taken to extreme in the
Freudian model.
Given Rogers’ emphasis on the importance of the subjective
worldview, it is quite strange to find him discussing
individual perceptual distortions of reality. His emphasis in
therapy, as we shall see, was to accept the individual’s perceptions
– distorted or otherwise. The point he made was
that the healthy individual has fewer distortions, and they
are more accepting of themselves. In the course of therapy,
Rogers would expect perceptual distortions to decrease as
the individual became more in touch with their organismic
values that can lead to self-actualisation. We will return to
this in more detail when we discuss Rogers’ approach to
therapy.
The role of the actualising tendency in
development
From infancy, Rogers claimed, we interact with the world in
terms of our self-actualising tendency. Towards this end, infants
are seen as engaging in an organismic valuing
process. This is defined as an innate bodily process for
evaluating which experiences are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ for the
person. Infants will value food when hungry and reject it
when full. Rogers (1959) and Rogers and Stevens (1967)
went further and suggested that infants ‘know’ instinctively
which foods are good for them and which are bad. As evidence,
Rogers quoted a study by Davis (1928). Davis studied
three infants aged between 8 and 10 months. Two of the babies
were on a particular diet for six months, and one was
on it for a year. Nurses interpreted the babies pointing to
various foods, and the babies were given this food. All the
babies remained healthy, and Rogers quoted this study as
supporting his hypothesis that even babies know what is
good for them. However, examination of the choices of
food available showed that all the food choices were healthy.
It would not have been ethical to present infants with a totally
unhealthy diet. There is now well-established evidence
showing that babies prefer sweet substances to nutritious
substances (Lipsitt, 1977). In Lipsitt’s study, infants under
four months were shown to suck longer and to have shorter
pauses between sucking when fed sugar-and-water solutions
then they did when fed nutritious, non-sweet solutions.
This finding lends no support to Rogers’ notion that
human beings instinctively always know what is good for
them. Rogers (1980) admitted that the valuing process is
more complex than he initially envisaged; but he still insisted
that if adults are to grow constructively, they must
trust their own bodies and their own intuitions. The idea is
that our sole motivator is the drive for self-actualisation.We
may lose sight of our real needs due to our need to please
others and meet our conditions of worth.
For Rogers (1961), as we have seen, parents play a significant
role in determining how in touch the child ultimately
is with their self-actualising tendency. To maximise the
chances of self-actualisation, the child needs to grow up
with relatively few conditions of worth. Rogers (1977) saw
schools and the wider society as having a crucial role to
play here also, as we have seen (Rogers, 1951, 1969, 1983;
Rogers and Freiberg, 1993). He advocated student-centred
teaching, where the role of the educational establishment is
to provide the conditions that facilitate the child’s learning.
As we have previously discussed, educational establishments
such as Summerhill meet Rogers’ principles. These
schools do not encourage competition and are relatively
non-judgemental. The rules that are enforced are democratically
agreed ones that ensure the children are in a safe,
humane environment. Rogers felt that if conditions of trust
develop, it is easier for individuals to work towards selfactualisation
guided by their actualising tendency (Rogers
and Freiberg, 1993). In a trusting, non-judgemental environment,
it is easier for children to evaluate their experiences
and have the confidence to select those that they
enjoy and find worthwhile. Rogers stated that such children
will be more in touch with their true selves and as such will
instinctively know which experiences are good for them.
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142 PART 1 PERSONALITY
Traditional schooling, in Rogers’ view, encouraged the development
of conditions of worth in the child and stifled
creativity. Children need to be respected and to have freedom
to make choices in their lives. This freedom also
brings with it responsibilities, and Rogers suggested that
children must also respect others and acknowledge that
others too have the right to make their own decisions. This
position is very similar to the rights and responsibilities
that Albert Ellis saw as the corollary of human free will. We
discussed these in Chapter 5.
There are no stages in the development of selfactualisation
in Rogers’ theory. The emphasis is on providing
the right environment for optimum growth to occur.
Rogers was keen to promote the development of what he
termed person-centred families, where his principles
would be applied, as well as person-centred educational establishments.
Personality development can be a lifelong
process, Rogers felt. Unlike Freud and many of the other
psychoanalysts that we have studied, Rogers does not see
childhood as determining the adult personality. Individuals
are always open to change in his model, and personality
growth can occur at any age.
The endpoint of self-actualisation for Rogers was what
he called the fully functioning person. Such an individual
is described as being very open to experience and high
in self-acceptance, with few if any conditions of worth. As a
result, they have a positive self-concept and high selfesteem.
Their organismic valuing process guides the
choices they make in life, and other people’s expectations
and judgements of them do not influence them. If they
make mistakes, they are able to acknowledge them openly
and learn from them. Rogers suggested that such
individuals are true to their inner selves. He gave examples
of artists like El Greco, who painted in a style that was not
accepted at the time; even so, he did not deviate from it to
gain social acceptance or to make money, being convinced
that it was right for him and it was art. A summary of the
attributes of the fully functioning person is given in Table
6.2. Rogers saw individuals as continually growing, and he
suggested that we have a concept of how we wish to grow;
this description is also included in Table 6.2.
In terms of personal relationships, the fully functioning
individual respects the rights of others and cares deeply for
them. Such individuals display high levels of unconditional
positive regard for the other people in their lives and are capable
of forming deep relationships. Self-actualisation is
not conceptualised as the endpoint of development but
rather as a journey that the individual is on. It is a process
that the individual is continually engaged in, seeking out
satisfying experiences and discarding unsatisfying ones
whenever possible or compensating for them in other
ways. For example, the individual who undertakes a job
that they find dull and boring may continue to do the job
as no other option is readily available and they need money
to live, but they may experience self-actualisation in other
ways. Such an individual may find activities such as gardening
or other hobbies, or voluntary work in the community
or close relationships within their family that fulfil
their needs for self-actualisation. The self-actualising individual
is described as being congruent with the totality of
their lives. They feel satisfied with their life and believe that
they fit within it. From this it is clear that self-actualisation
is about an attitude to life, to oneself, and to others. It is
part of an ongoing process of living.
Overall goal Overall goals for development throughout life
The fully functioning (mature) person What Rogers terms the person of tomorrow
Table 6.2 Rogers’ goals for counselling and for living.
Personal qualities
• Open to experience and able to perceive realistically
• Rational and not defensive
• Engaged in existential process of living
• Trusts in their own organismic valuing process
• Construes experience in an existential manner
• Accepts responsibility for being different from others
• Accepts responsibility for own behaviour
• Relates creatively towards the environment
• Accepts others as unique individuals
• Prizes herself or himself
• Prizes others
• Relates openly and freely on the basis of immediate
experiencing
• Communicates rich self-awareness when desired
Personal qualities
• Openness to the world, both inner and outer
• Desire for authenticity
• Scepticism regarding science and technology
• Desire for wholeness as a human being
• The wish for intimacy
• Accepts other people as they are
• Cares for others
• Attitude of closeness towards nature
• Anti-institutional in approach
• Trusts their own internal authority
• Material things are unimportant
• A yearning for spiritual values and
experiences
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 143
Rogers’ conceptualisation of
psychological problems
The fully functioning person, as we have seen, is the ideal
and rarely achieved as most of us have conditions of worth
associated with our self-concept. The greater the conditions
of worth associated with an individual’s self-concept, the
less psychologically healthy they are in Rogers’ model. The
individual is alienated from their true self, and this situation
is expressed either in feelings of discontent, symptoms of
psychological illness or antisocial behaviour or combinations
of all three. Rogers avoided using diagnostic labels to
describe his clients as he felt that using labels served to stress
the expertise of the therapist and consequently disempowered
the client. We discussed this approach in some detail,
you will remember, in the introduction when we covered
Rogers’ objections to the medical model of illness and treatment.
Clients simply need to be provided with an empowering
environment that will allow them to get in touch with
their true selves. This will then provide the guidance necessary
for them to make helpful changes in the way that they
run their lives. This environment is provided through an
empowering relationship with the therapist, and we shall
examine this concept next.
The principles of Rogerian counselling
You may recall that, like all the theories we have examined
so far, Rogers’ theory of personality originated in his clinical
work with disturbed clients. His aim was to develop a
more effective method of helping individuals, and through
this his conceptualisation of what human beings are like
emerged. He believed that human nature is positive and
that we are motivated towards positive growth and continual
development. The disturbed individual has deviated
from this positive path, as they have not had sufficiently
growth-enhancing relationships, experiences and environments.
The aim of therapy is to provide the client with the
experience of a good relationship in a safe environment.
This focus becomes even more apparent when we examine
Rogers’ goals for counselling in Table 6.2 and see that the
goals for counselling are identical to his goals for living.
The aim in counselling is to provide a safe environment
and experience of a good relationship as Rogers believed
that this will be sufficient to allow the individual to get in
touch with their true organismic self and rediscover their
way to self-actualisation. It is about finding their true
selves. This may sound like ‘hippie’ sentiments; and Rogerian
counselling and derivatives of it were very popular in
the 1960s and 1970s with the general public, especially the
young. Group sessions based on Rogerian principles were
common and led to what became known as the encounter
group experience. These were groups set up to allow people
to explore aspects of themselves in a psychologically safe
environment. Through these encounters with themselves
and others, they would find their true selves (Rogers,
1970). We will now examine in more detail Rogers’
approach to therapy and the provision of a psychologically
safe, empowering environment.
The aim of therapy was to facilitate a reintegration of the
self-concept. To understand what this means, we need to
Ideas of how we see and reflect on ourselves are very important in Rogers’ theory.
Source: Pearson Education Ltd. Tudor Photography
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144 PART 1 PERSONALITY
return to conditions of worth and what they imply. If you
have many conditions of worth, you are very aware of having
imperfections as you have an image of the ideal person
that you should be. If you were this ideal, then you would be
more loveable and more admired than you currently are. It
might involve being smarter, kinder, more organised,
healthier or whatever. This would be our ideal self. We use
this ideal self to judge ourselves. When we do not meet the
criteria in our ideal self, our self-esteem is lowered, making
us feel even worse about ourselves. To put it simply, the individual
with few conditions of worth accepts themselves as
they are, and the gap between their ideal self and real self is
a narrow one. The person with many conditions of worth
has a much wider perceptual gap between how they see
themselves and how they would like to be; their ideal self.
The existence of this gap leads to unhappiness and discontent
and in extreme conditions, depression. The aim of
therapy is to reduce this gap and to reintegrate the selfconcept
with the real self. The individual then becomes
more accepting of who they are and are happier consequently.
At this point, many students then ask, ‘But what if
the client appears to be a thoroughly rotten individual?
Does Rogerian therapy still involve helping the person feel
good about themselves?’ The answer to this question lies in
Rogers’ conception of human nature and the source of
human motivation. If you recall from earlier in the chapter,
Rogers asserted that human nature is basically benign. As a
species, we want to do good things; and our actualising tendency,
the sole source of motivational energy, is a positive
drive towards growth. So, to return to the question posed,
Rogers did not accept the idea that individuals are rotten.
The apparently rotten individual had their actualising tendency
blocked at some point due to poor relationship
and/or environmental experiences. Counselling aims to
allow the individual to rediscover their actualising tendency,
and in doing so, they will be able to solve their problems
and choose a more constructive way forward. This will then
maximise their chances of happiness. Rogers, like Ellis in
the last chapter, saw human beings as a hedonistic species,
with happiness/contentment as our ultimate goal.
The role of the therapist or counsellor
To achieve successful counselling, Rogers emphasised that
the relationship between client and therapist is crucial. The
clients have the ability to change within themselves, and the
counsellor’s role is to facilitate the process. To achieve a
successful outcome, the counsellor needs to possess certain
qualities and the client needs to be in a certain psychological
state so that a relationship that facilitates growth in the
client is created. These conditions have come to be labelled
the core conditions of counselling and will now be described
in turn. None of the conditions are considered
more important than the others; Rogers (1959) stated that
all need to be present.
The core conditions of counselling which
facilitate personal growth
a Both the client and the therapist must be in psychological
contact. By this condition, Rogers meant that counselling
is about more than simply chatting to someone. It is not
about exchanging pleasantries, although counsellors
may do so initially to help put clients at their ease. It is
about discussing inner feelings focused on the self.
Rogers (1961) suggested that clients frequently go
through stages in their conversations with their therapist
before they are making true deep psychological contact
(Figure 6.4). These stages are described as follows:
Stage 1 – The client’s talk is about other people
mostly, not themselves. Clients may make general
statements or discuss their children or work colleagues
and so on.
Stop and think
Rogers’ approach to treatment
It may have registered that when discussing Rogers’ approach
to treatment, sometimes we talk about the treatment
as counselling and sometimes as therapy. Rogers
himself does this also in places in his writing; when he
talks about the core conditions of counselling, for example,
and then when he talks about client-centred therapy.
To clarify, both counselling and therapy refer to very
similar processes and there is a huge overlap in terms of
what actually happens in treatment sessions. However,
counselling tends to deal with less severe psychological
problems than does therapy. Consequently, counselling
generally takes less time than therapy. Many therapists
begin their training as counsellors, and we believe that
this practice has added to the confusion. Therapy is
about utilising additional theory-based techniques that
go beyond core counselling skills. For example, the psychoanalytic
therapist may use dream analysis, free association
or interpretation in addition.
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 145
Stage 2 – Although the client begins to talk about
feelings, they do not refer these feelings to themselves.
They are still general statements about how
people feel.
Stage 3 – Now the client begins to talk about themselves,
usually about things they have done in the
past. At this point, psychological contact is becoming
properly established.
Stage 4 – Here the client begins to express how they
feel now, but very tentatively. Clients still express
their feelings at a fairly descriptive level.
Stage 5 – At this point, the client begins to live their
feelings within the counselling session. Emotions
are expressed spontaneously, and the client is
focused on the present. They may still be a little tentative
in recognising fully how they feel.
Stage 6 – Now the client can accept their feelings
fully and explores them freely.
Stage 7 – This is the final stage, where the client has
come to accept their own feelings and is also more
open to the feelings of others. The person is in touch
with themself psychologically and can also relate to
others in the same way.
Obviously, there will be individual differences in
how long this process takes. Some individuals may establish
psychological contact within the first session,
while for others it will take longer as they adjust to the
process.
b The client is in a state of incongruence and feels anxious
about it. By this condition, Rogers meant that the client
is emotionally upset. It is this emotional upset that
provides the motivation for clients to come for
Stage 1. The client's talk is about other people mostly, not
themselves.
Stage 2. Although the client begins to talk about feelings, they
do not refer these feelings to themselves.
Stage 3. Now the client begins to talk about themselves, usually about
things they have done in the past.
Stage 4. Here the client begins to express their feelings very tentatively
about the present, but at a fairly descriptive level.
Stage 5. The client begins to live their
feelings within the counselling session.
Stage 6. The client accepts their feelings fully
and explores them freely.
Stage 7. The is the final stage where the client has come to
accept their own feelings and is also more open to the
feelings of others.
Figure 6.4 The seven stages clients frequently go through before they make true
deep psychological contact with their therapist.
M06_MALT2908_02_SE_C06.QXD 10/21/09 12:30 PM Page 145
counselling. If you are happy and your life is going well,
you are unlikely to feel the need to seek out a counsellor.
c The counsellor is congruent in the relationship. Rogers
said that the counsellor must be genuine and not simply
role-playing. Counsellors must be aware of their
own feelings and be at ease with them. They must also
be able to communicate their feelings if this is appropriate.
To facilitate this congruence, most schools of
counselling now require trainee counsellors to undertake
personal counselling or therapy as part of their
training. Counsellors are also required to have their
work supervised regularly by another trained counsellor.
This is a further check that they are dealing honestly
with any feelings that the clients may provoke in
them.
d The therapist experiences unconditional positive
regard for the client. This is one of the crucial qualities
required by counsellors, according to Rogers (1951,
1961). Experiencing unconditional positive regard requires
the therapist not to judge the client, but to value
them as another human being. They have worth simply
because they exist within Rogers’ humanistic perspective,
and all human beings should be treated with
respect and dignity.
e The therapist experiences an empathic understanding
of the client’s internal frame of reference. This
condition is about accepting that there is no external
reality, but that we all have a subjective view of the
world. We discussed taking this phenomenological
perspective in the introduction to humanistic theories
at the start of the chapter. The role of the therapist is
to try to understand the client’s view of the world, so
that they can better understand why the client feels as
they do. Empathy is a concept that is often misunderstood
and is frequently confused with sympathy.
Comparing the two concepts is a useful way of increasing
our understanding of them. Sympathy is
what we usually give to our friends when they are having
problems. We agree that what has happened to
them is awful, and we say that we understand how
they are feeling. What we are actually doing is saying
that we know what they are going through, yet Rogers
would say that we can never truly understand what
someone else is going through. Further, when expressing
sympathy we are agreeing with the individual’s
negative interpretation of the event. We are reinforcing
their perception of the event as awful. However,
the role of the counsellor is to help the client feel better
about what has happened, so reinforcing the
client’s negative worldview of the event is not a good
starting point. To be empathic, the counsellor is required
simply to try to understand what the client is
experiencing and feeling and not to judge or evaluate
the experience. The counsellor, by listening carefully
and asking questions to help them really understand
what has happened, also helps the client to become
clearer in their own mind about their situation. In this
way, the counsellor is facilitating the client’s
understanding of their situation.
By not judging the client, the therapist also introduces
the client to the idea of not judging themselves.
Rogers believes that continually judging oneself is
unhelpful. It implies that you are comparing yourself
with an ideal self, as we have already discussed. Selfacceptance
is the goal for counselling and for living in
Rogers’ model. It is accepted that as human beings we
will make mistakes, but the aim is to help people
learn from their mistakes. This position is very similar
to that advocated by Albert Ellis in his RationalEmotive
Behaviour Therapy that we covered in the
last chapter. Rogers went further in that he felt that if
individuals are in touch with their real organismic
self, then they are less likely to make mistakes in their
lives (Rogers, 1961).
f The client perceives the counsellor’s unconditional positive
regard for them and the counsellor’s empathic understanding
of their difficulties. Rogers (1959)
emphasised that it is crucial for the counsellor to be
able to convey their empathy and unconditional positive
regard to the client. The client needs to experience
this feeling of being valued and of someone
really trying to understand them, accepting them and
valuing them as another human being. This is the
positive emotional environment that Rogers said we
all need to optimise our chances of self-actualising. It
is acceptance and valuing with no conditions of
worth attached. For many clients, it may be their first
experience of such a relationship where they feel valued
and understood. This then is the relationship
that Roger claimed will facilitate change and
growth.
Rogers (1959) claimed that if a good therapeutic relationship
is established, which involves meeting all the six
core conditions of counselling, then clients will change in
the following ways:
Clients will have more realistic perceptions of their world.
They will also be more open to new experiences.
Clients will behave more rationally. They are more in
touch with their actualising tendency, which guides
them to grow in positive ways. They will engage more in
developing themselves.
The level of personal responsibility that they take for
their own behavioural choices will increase. They will
trust their own organismic valuing process. They will
have learnt how to help themselves, and they will have a
146 PART 1 PERSONALITY
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 147
clearer understanding of the nature of the choices they
make.
Clients’ levels of self-regard will increase. They will have
lost many of their conditions of worth and have a much
higher degree of unconditional self-acceptance. Their
feelings about themselves are now based on their own
values rather than on the praise and needs of others in
their lives. Fundamentally, they will know that as people
they are sound although sometimes they may behave in
mistaken ways. This is similar to the distinction Ellis
made between judging behaviour, but not the person
(Chapter 5).
Clients will also have an increased capacity for good
personal relations. If you are self-accepting, as we saw
earlier in the discussion of conditions of worth and parenting,
then you are more likely to accept others without
conditions of worth attached. Rogers (1959) clearly
defined what he meant by good personal relationships.
He felt that such relationships involve accepting others
as unique individuals, prizing them, relating openly and
freely to them, communicating appropriately and being
genuine in your feelings.
Rogers believed that self-actualisation resulted in the
individual living ethically. The individual is seen as a
trustworthy person who does not infringe on the rights
of others and can distinguish between good and evil.
Rogers suggested that the following qualities within the
individual contribute to this change:
– They trust in their own internal feelings rather than
relying on external authority to do what is right. This
is based on Rogers’ positive view of human nature
and human motivation.
– Their value system will focus more on people and
relationships, and they will be fairly indifferent to
material things.
– They will develop more of a closeness and a reverence
for nature. They will feel more at one with the world.
– Rogers suggests that they will also have a yearning for
values to guide their lives and for spiritual experiences.
These were very substantial claims to make about the
benefits of Rogerian counselling, and Rogers was keen to
provide research to assess its validity. Much of his early research
involved the case study approach, where he would
provide a detailed account of a client’s progress (Rogers,
1954). To improve on the evaluation of the effects of
counselling, Rogers adopted the Q-sort to measure
clients’ self-concepts. The detail of the Q-sort is outlined
in Stop and think: Q-sort measurement of the selfconcept
on page 148.
At the start of counselling, the correlation between the
client’s current self-concept and ideal self is low. What this
means is that the individual does not accept themselves as
they are; they may wish to be cleverer, more reliable or
whatever. After counselling, the correlation between the
self and the ideal self tends to be much higher. What this
means in practice is that individuals are selecting the same
items to describe how they are and how they would like
to be. Rogers and his colleagues carried out ambitious
research projects to assess the effectiveness of clientcentred
therapy. Truax and Carkhuff (1967) provide a
detailed review of this work. The studies quoted provide
some support for the effectiveness of Rogerian counselling,
but not all the studies are unproblematic. Many of
the measures of improvement are not objectively based;
rather, they are self-report ratings completed by the client
and/or therapist. Obviously, if clients and therapists have
invested significant amounts of time and perhaps money
on therapy, they are unlikely to rate the experience as having
been worthless. More objective measures of changes in
the client’s behaviour would be preferable for measuring
the effectiveness of therapy. There is also a lack of longterm
follow-up studies to assess how lasting any changes
obtained are.
Evaluation of Rogers’ theory
We will now evaluate the Rogers theory using the eight criteria
we identified in Chapter 1: description, explanation,
empirical validity, testable concepts, comprehensiveness,
parsimony, heuristic value and applied value.
Description
Rogers, like Maslow, is criticised for his overly optimistic
conceptualisation of human beings. As a total description
of human behaviour, Rogers’ theory is limited. His initial
focus is on abnormal development and psychopathology
and its treatment. However, his concept of conditions of
worth provides a very valuable way of describing the mechanisms
that we use to evaluate our own behaviour. His description
of how the self is construed is innovative, and his
comparison of self and ideal self is valuable. Intuitively,
these concepts seem to provide useful descriptions and are
therefore high in face validity.
His phenomenological approach represents a real attempt
to engage with the world as individuals experience
it. However, such an approach with its focus on
conscious experience excludes what many will conceptualise
as the rich world of the unconscious. We previously
explored this concept in Chapters 2 and 3.
Another danger of Rogers’ approach is that it may rely
so much on individual observations that objective
measurement is ignored and no knowledge is generated
that is applicable to the wider science of psychology.
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148 PART 1 PERSONALITY
Stop and think
Q-sort measurement of the self-concept
The Q-sort technique is used to measure an individual’s
self-concept. It was developed by an American psychologist,
Stephenson, and published in 1953. It is administered
in many formats, depending on the approach
of the psychologist using it; but the basic principles remain
the same (Block, 1961; Rogers and Dymond,
1954). A list of around 100 adjectives or short statements
describing personality attributes of individuals is
generated. Each statement is printed on a separate
card. Some typical examples are given here:
I am ambitious. I am generally happy.
I am a worrier. I am a weak person.
I am enthusiastic. I am pessimistic.
I am careless. I am a procrastinator.
Individuals are asked to sort the cards into nine categories,
according to how well the phrase on the card
describes who they are. Category 1 includes the descriptions
that are most like the individual, and category
9 includes those that are least like the individual. The
scale looks as follows:
At the start of therapy, clients do the task described
earlier, which gives a measure of their current
self-concept. It is not an easy task to complete, and
clients normally begin by putting the cards into piles
that are like them or not like or not applicable to them.
Then they make finer distinctions within each pile,
comparing attributes to determine what represents
them best. Stephenson argued that the effort involved
adds to the reliability of the method as a representation
of an individual’s self-concept. Once this step is
completed and recorded, the pack of cards is shuffled
and clients are asked to sort the pack again to match
their ideal self.
The hypothesis is that an individual’s self-concept
should change over the course of therapy. Individuals
should be more in touch with their organismic self and
more accepting of themselves. Used in the manner described,
the Q-sort allows measurement of the discrepancy
between a client’s actual and ideal selves. This
was the way that Rogers used it. However, it can be
used with a range of personality variables or to measure
preferences of any sort. Variations of the Q-sort technique,
as it has become labelled, are still utilised quite
widely within psychology.
Rogers was very aware of this, and his utilisation of
measures such as the Q-sort was his attempt to overcome
this shortcoming.
Explanation
Rogers attempted to explain a vast range of human behaviour
ranging from what we require for optimum individual
development to the nature of the society that would
promote psychological health. However, he used the same
principles that he developed for counselling troubled individuals
to propose solutions for societies and indeed for
the world’s problems. This ignores the social, historical and
political factors that play a crucial role in developing and
maintaining these problems and leads to his explanations
being limited in scope and somewhat reductionist in nature.
His underlying thesis was that if individuals communicated
better, then society’s problems would be solved.
While good communication is helpful, it is unrealistic and
overly optimistic to see it as the solution to what are very
complex problems.
Empirical validity
Rogers was very aware of the need to provide empirical evidence
to validate his theory. There is a lot of research on
his therapy in particular. The results are generally positive,
but all of this research is heavily reliant on self-report
measures. Clients self-assess their progress, but this is
hardly objective evidence given that they have invested
considerable time and frequently money in their treatment,
so are unlikely to evaluate it as a negative undertaking.
Similarly, therapists provide reports of clients’
progress, and here the tendency must surely be to provide a
positive assessment. There is a need for more objective
measures of therapeutic progress using standardised instruments
and/or involving significant others of the client
in the assessment of progress.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Most Least
like me like me
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 149
As we saw earlier, Rogers’ idea about human beings
knowing intuitively what is good for them received little
research support. We know from work on the relationship
between attitudes and behaviour that knowing
some behaviour is harmful is not a good predictor of
whether we practise that behaviour. If this were not so,
we would not currently be having problems with binge
drinking, obesity, smoking and many other health issues
in our society.
Testable concepts
As mentioned already, Rogers was keen to construct a
testable theory, and he did encourage research on his concepts.
Despite this, some of his concepts are not easy to define.
The concept of empathy has been researched, and
reliable measures are available. However, concepts like unconditional
positive regard and genuineness are more difficult
to define and have proved difficult to measure. Rogers
does need to be commended for his attempts to produce a
testable theory and a therapy that can be evaluated.
Traditionally his counselling approach has been described
as being non-directive, in that the therapist does not claim
to know what is best for the client. Clients produce their
own solutions. This idea that Rogerian therapists are somehow
less directive than other therapists is contentious. As
videos of his therapy sessions show, Rogers himself made
considerable use of non-verbal signals when interacting
with his clients. In this way he is likely to have influenced
clients. This claim of non-directiveness can thus be seen to
be difficult to objectively assess.
Comprehensiveness
Most of Rogers’ work focuses on understanding psychopathology
and developing an intervention that could
be used as an effective treatment. This meant that his early
work was not very comprehensive. Later in his life, he expanded
his interests to look in more detail at development,
education and the effect of culture and society’s institutions
on mental health. In this way, his approach became
more comprehensive. His work on social and political
structures, while interesting, is very speculative.
Parsimony
Rogers has chosen to take a broad approach to human behaviour;
but despite this, his theory utilises very few concepts.
He fails the parsimony criteria by using too few
concepts and assumptions. This results in imprecision, as
his concepts are applied very widely to explain very different
phenomena. A good example is his explanation of psychopathology.
This is too simplistic to explain the full
range of psychopathologies that have been documented
and results in a reductionist approach.
Heuristic value
Rogers’ work has provoked a great deal of controversy
within psychology and continues to provoke debate. This
in itself is a valuable contribution to make to a science.
His humanistic and phenomenological stance has led to a
re-evaluation of the importance of the individual and
their subjective worldview. His emphasis on the concepts
of self and ideal self also led to more attention being paid
to these concepts and significant amounts of research
being undertaken. His ideas about the core conditions of
counselling also led therapy and counselling trainers to
reflect on the educational training of counsellors, and
useful debates ensued.
Applied value
Rogers’ theory has been applied widely. This is certainly
one of its strengths. His views of therapy have helped define
the training of most counsellors. The recent trend, to
encourage counselling psychologists to be trained in several
schools of counselling, generally results in trainee
counsellors beginning their education with Rogerian therapy.
This means that most counsellors are familiar with the
core conditions and develop active listening skills and empathy
for their clients.
Rogers was also extremely influential in the development
of group approaches to psychological treatments.
The development of encounter groups in the 1960s and
1970s was attributable to Rogers’ influence. These were
group experiences designed to help individuals explore
their true inner selves and thereby set them on the road to
self-actualisation.
Final comments
Now you should understand what is meant by humanistic
theories in psychology and how they evolved. You should
be familiar with the developmental experiences that influenced
the theorising of Maslow and Rogers and appreciate
the Maslow and Rogers’ conceptualisations of human nature.
You should also be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy
of needs and the motives related to it, understand the principles
of personality development and the causes of mental
illness as described by Maslow and Rogers, be familiar with
Rogers’ conceptualisation of self-actualisation and its importance
in development and understand the principles of
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150 PART 1 PERSONALITY
Summary
Rogerian counselling, including the importance of the core
conditions of counselling. You should also be able to outline
the Q-sort method of measuring the self-concept and
the ideal self. You should also be able to critically evaluate
the work of Maslow and Rogers.
Maslow and Rogers’ theories were based upon the
European tradition of existential philosophy. Existential
philosophy is concerned with ontology, defined
as ‘the science of being’.
Maslow and Rogers’ theories are humanistic personality
theories. They emphasise personal
growth. Human nature is conceptualised as being
positive; the focus is on the here and now, not the
past.
Both theorists adopt a phenomenological approach
focusing on the uniqueness of each individual and
aiming to understand their experience. Humanistic
therapists aim merely to help their clients understand
what their problems are and do not provide
solutions.
Human beings have innate tendencies towards
healthy growth and development that Maslow labelled
instinctoid tendencies. These are weak
positive tendencies that can easily be overcome by
negative environmental influences. Healthy development
depends on the fostering of the instinctoid tendencies
in children.
Maslow described two types of human motives: deficiency
motives (D-motives) that are needs we are
driven to fulfil and growth motives, called being
motives (B-motives). Satisfaction of B-motives
brings pleasure and acts as further motivation to
achieve and develop.
Maslow outlined a hierarchy of needs to describe
human motivation. These begin with physiological
needs, then safety needs, belongingness and love
needs, esteem needs and the need for selfactualisation.
Individuals require that their lowerlevel
needs be met before higher-level needs come
into play.
Self-actualisation is the ultimate goal that is not
achieved by everyone. Self-actualisers are unique
individuals with metaneeds that are different from
the normal hierarchy of needs. Self-actualisers
think differently, engaging more in being cognitions
(B-cognitions), and are distinguished by
having peak experiences linked to their B-
cognitions.
Maslow does not produce much detail about development
in childhood other than to stress the importance
of children being given the freedom to develop
according to their inner selves.
Maslow argued that mental illness was the result of
the individual’s inner needs not being met.
Client-centred therapy refers to Rogers’ feeling that
clients are the best experts on themselves and have
the power to solve their own problems. The therapist
merely facilitates the process by providing a good relationship
experience for the client in an empowering
environment.
Individuals have an innate drive to self-actualise. This
is our sole motivating drive in Rogers’ model. As long
as our actualising tendency is not blocked, healthy
development is assured. Blocks to self-actualising
result in psychopathology.
The concept of self is crucial in Rogers’ model. He
distinguishes between the real organismic self and
the self-concept.
In ideal circumstances, Rogers suggested, individuals
receive unconditional positive regard. This is
being valued simply for existing, with no conditions.
Few individuals experience just this. Most parents
and educational experiences impose conditions of
worth. This results in us developing conceptualisations
of our ideal selves that we compare with our
real selves.
How parents relate to their children will be heavily influenced
by the adequacy of the parents’ own selfconcepts
and the number of conditions of worth that
they themselves have.
Rogers felt that individuals intuitively know what is
good for them, but there is no evidence to support
this contention.
The fully functioning person emerges as a result of
self-actualisation, and Rogers provided descriptions
of such individuals.
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 151
Connecting up
You might wish to look back at Chapter 3 and Jung’s discussion
of individuation and compare and contrast these
ideas with Maslow’s ideas of self-actualisation.
Critical thinking
Discussion questions
Is the distinction between B-love and D-love a valuable
one in helping us understand human relationships?
How do you feel about the concept of peak or optimal
experiences? Does it seem a useful concept and a
description of the ultimate human experience?
What would you see as the strengths and weaknesses of
self-actualisers?
Is it as difficult to find your goals in life and life satisfaction
as Maslow and Rogers imply?
Compare the conceptualisations of human nature
posited by Maslow, Rogers and Freud. Is there anything
in the biographical experiences of the three theorists
that might help explain these differences?
Do you consider conditions of worth to be a valuable
concept? Can you identify any of your own conditions
of worth? Do they play a useful role in your psyche?
Is there any evidence to support Rogers’ organismic
valuing process?
Is Rogers’ distinction between what is generally termed
‘love’ and unconditional positive regard a valid one? If
so, is it an important distinction in your view?
How realistic is it to describe Rogers’ approach to
therapy as non-directive?
Rogers is adamant that all self-evaluation is bad, even
positive evaluations. Can you explain why he takes this
view? Do you agree?
How adequately do humanistic theorists explain human
motivation?
Essay questions
Critically discuss Rogers’ theory and practice of personcentred
therapy.
Critically discuss Maslow’s theory of self-actualisation.
Discuss how developmental experiences influenced the
theorising of Rogers.
Compare and contrast Maslow’s and Rogers’ theory of
self-actualisation.
Critically discuss Rogers’ contribution to our understanding
of human personality.
Critically discuss Maslow’s contribution to our understanding
of human personality.
Rogers’ theory originated in his clinical work, and a
lot of his writing related to the development of his approach
to counselling and therapy.
The aim of therapy was to facilitate a reintegration of
the self-concept. Most clients have many conditions
of worth, so they have an idealised self and their current
self falls very short of this ideal. The aim of therapy
is to reduce this gap and to reintegrate the
self-concept with the real self.
Rogers stressed that the relationship between the
therapist and the client is crucial. He outlined the
core conditions of counselling to describe the nature
of the relationship. Rogers claimed that all that is required
for positive change to occur is that these core
conditions of counselling be met.
Rogers was very aware of the importance of trying to
provide research evidence to evaluate his approach,
and he endeavoured to do this. While there is some
support, the methodologies he used tend to rely very
heavily on self-report measures.
Finally, guidelines for evaluating both theories are
provided.
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152 PART 1 PERSONALITY
Film and literature
A Christmas Carol (or to give its full title, A Christmas
Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas) by
Charles Dickens (1843) tells a story of self-actualisation.
The story tells of Mr Scrooge who is a financier
who has devoted his life to the accumulation of wealth
and has a disregard for friendship and love. Over the
course of Christmas Eve, he has a number of ghostly
visitations, and Scrooge finds out that he will end up
walking the Earth forever as an invisible and lonely
ghost. Following this experience, Scrooge changes his
life and reverts to being generous, kindhearted and
finding joy in others.
Going further
Books
Maslow, A. (1987). Motivation and personality (3rd
edn). New York: Harper & Row. This book presents an
easily readable account of the main aspects of his theory.
It is Maslow’s most comprehensive description of
his theory and his research on healthy individuals.
Maslow, A. (1968). Toward a psychology of being. Princeton,
NJ: Van Nostrand. In this book, Maslow addresses
the concept of self-actualisation and offers strategies for
personal growth.
Thorne, B. (1992). Carl Rogers. London: Sage. This book
is an excellent introduction to Rogers’ work and life. It is
written in an accessible style. Thorne is a Rogerian therapist
and adds a useful clinical perspective to the theory.
Rogers, C. R. (1980). A way of being. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin. This book, written by Rogers, covers a lot of
material. It includes personal reflections on his own life,
his professional work and a final section on education.
This latter section includes his thoughts about the
changes needed in society to create psychologically enhancing
cultures.
Barrett-Lennard, G. T. (1998). Carl Rogers’ helping system:
Journey and substance. London: Sage. This text
presents a fairly comprehensive coverage of Rogers’
ideas with a useful review and discussion of research on
Rogerian concepts.
Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist’s
view of psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. This is
perhaps Rogers’ classic book on his theory. It is easy to
read and thought provoking. He addresses the topic of
personal growth and how it can be facilitated in some
detail. The role of research in his theory and in therapy
generally is addressed as well as reflections on society
and how it impacts on our lives. Recent editions can be
found, e.g. Rogers, C. R. (2004). On becoming a person.
London: Constable.
Rogers, C. R. and Freiberg, H. J. (1993). Freedom to learn
(3rd edn). New York: Merrill. As current consumers of
the mainstream Western educational system, you may
well find this text relevant and thought provoking. It is a
re-edit of Rogers’ 1983 text, Freedom to learn for the 80s
(Columbus, OH: Merrill). Unless an author has a difficult
writing style, our preference is for you to read the text by
the original author. This is our advice here, as Rogers is
easy to read. However, you may find it easier to access the
later re-edited text, and this is why we include it here.
Journals
The Journal of Humanistic Psychology is published by Sage
Journals and is an interdisciplinary publication for
contributions, controversies and diverse statements
pertaining to humanistic psychology. Apart from the
journal being available being online, with subscription, at
http://www.sagepub.com you may find that your library
subscribes to the online database Expanded Academic
ASAP and you may find many articles from the journal
there.
Web links
A site on Rogers written by his daughter, Natalie Rogers, is
available online (http://www.nrogers.com/carlrogers
.html).
A site that lists all Maslow’s publications is available
online (http://www.maslow.com/).
Summerhill School (http://www.summerhillschool
.co.uk/), which we mention in the chapter. If you follow
the links, you can also get the Ofsted report on the
school and a report on the legal case that the school won
when it looked as if the government were trying to close
the school in 2000.
The Block and Block longitudinal study is available
online (http://review.ucsc.edu/summer.97/29_years
.html).
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CHAPTER 6 HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORIES 153
Explore the website accompanying this text at www.pearsoned.co.uk/maltby for further resources to help
you with your studies. These include multiple-choice questions, essay questions, weblinks and ideas for
advanced reading.
Shirley Valentine and Educating Rita, both powerful plays
by Willy Russell, outline a woman’s self-actualisation. Both
plays were made into films (Educating Rita, 1983; Shirley
Valentine, 1989) and were directed by Lewis Gilbert.
Other films that depict elements of self-actualisation,
but with slightly different overtones are Thelma and
Louise (1991, directed by Ridley Scott) and Vanilla Sky
(2001, directed by Cameron Crowe). Both films portray
emerging aspects of personality and strengths.
Carl Rogers on Empathy (Educational Resource Film;
British Association for Counselling). Carl Rogers discusses
the concept of empathy. Central for understanding
the person-centred therapy process. Concord Video and
Film Council.
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