The Humanistic Perspective (Self-Actualization Theory )

OVERVIEW
Humanistic theories emphasize our inborn potential for healthy growth and development. Psychopathology occurs when our healthy potentials are blocked by pathogenic parenting or other harmful environmental forces. Common symptoms include an inability to know what one really wants and to enjoy a meaningful life.

Carl Rogers Rejected Freuds pessimistic view of human nature and argued that our inner potentials are entirely positive. We have an innate tendency to develop these healthy capacities (actualization), and we are born with the ability to value positively (or negatively) that which will actualize (or not actualize) these potentials. However, we also have a powerful need for our parents love (positive regard). Psychopathology occurs when parents make their affection and nurturing conditional on the childs personality meeting their standards, which causes the child to give up the healthy drive for actualization in order to keep the parents positive regard.

The child therefore introjects the parents standards, and tries to satisfy these conditions of worth instead of actualizing his or her true potentials. The psychotherapist uses genuineness, empathy, and unconditional positive regard to establish a constructive personal relationship with clients, who learn to abandon their conditions of worth and replace them with their real needs and wishes.

 Rogers rejects the concept of a superior, prescient psychotherapist, on whom the patient passively depends for shrewd interpretations. Instead he emphasizes that only we can know, and choose, our proper directions in life. In accordance with this belief, Rogers originally named his approach client-centered therapy. Having subsequently expanded his ideas to include such nonclinical areas as parenting, education, and interracial relations, he now prefers the broader designation of person-centered theory.

ACTUALIZATION we are motivated by a single positive force: an innate tendency to develop our constructive, healthy potentials. Actualizing tendency includes both drive-reducing and drive-increasing behavior. On the one hand, we seek to reduce the drives of hunger, thirst, sex, and oxygen deprivation. Yet we also demonstrate such tension-increasing behavior as curiosity, creativity, and the willingness to undergo painful learning experiences in order to become more effective and independent.

 Persons have a basically positive direction, to expand, extend, become autonomous, develop, mature. The first steps [of a child learning to walk] involve struggle, and usually pain. Often it is true that the immediate reward involved in taking a few steps is in no way commensurate with the pain of falls and bumps. Yet, in the overwhelming majority of individuals, the forward direction of growth is more powerful than the satisfactions of remaining infantile. The child will actualize himself, in spite of the painful experiences in so doing.

 Rogerss theoretical optimism does not blind him to our capacity for cruel and destructive behavior, but he attributes this to external forces. There are many potential pitfalls along the path to actualization, and a pathogenic environment may cause us to behave in ways that belie our benign inner nature.

POSITIVE REGARD All of us need warmth, respect, and acceptance from other people, particularly such significant others as our parents. is innate, and remains active throughout our lives. POSITIVE SELF REGARD becomes partly independent of specific contacts with other people, leading to a secondary. That is, what significant others think of us strongly influences how we come to regard ourselves.

TELEOLOGY Rogers agrees that childhood events play a prominent role in forming the adult personality. But he prefers to emphasize currently active needs and our striving toward the goal of actualization. Behavior is not caused by something which occurred in the past. Present tensions and present needs are the only ones which the organism endeavors to reduce or satisfy

 Since actualization involves the total organism, Rogers sees little need to posit specific structural constructs. Yet his theory is not truly holistic, for he shares Horneys belief that we often suffer from painful intrapsychic conflicts. The great puzzle that faces anyone who delves at all into the dynamics of human behavior, [is] that persons are often at war within themselves, estranged from their own organisms

Experience Each of us exists at the center of our own private, everchanging world of inner experience (experiential field, phenomenal field), one that can never be perfectly understood by anyone else. includes everything that is available to your awareness at any given moment: thoughts; emotions; perceptions, including those that are temporarily ignored. Needs

Organismic Valuing Process According to Rogers, there is no need for us to learn what is or is not actualizing. Included among the primarily unconscious aspects of experience is an innate ability to value positively whatever we perceive as actualizing, and to value negatively that which we perceive as non actualizing (the organismic valuing process). Thus the infant values food when hungry but promptly becomes disgusted with it when satiated, and enjoys the life-sustaining physical contact of being cuddled.

 Actualizing tendency An innate tendency to develop our constructive, healthy potentials. The fundamental motive underlying all human behavior. Conditional positive Accepting and respecting another person only if that persons selfregard concept and feelings meet with ones approval. The typical way in which parents behave toward the child. Conditional positive Accepting and respecting oneself only if one satisfies the introjected self-regard standards of significant others (conditions of wo