The Self and the Tendency toward Actualization

During his trip to China, Rogers came to recognize the importance of an autonomous self as a factor in his own
development. His early research reinforced the importance of the self in the formation of the personality. In the
1930s, he developed a method for determining whether a child’s behavior was healthy and constructive or unhealthy
and bring clinical psychology into the mainstream of contemporary psychological thought. He spent the years 1945
to 1957 at the University of Chicago, teaching and developing the Counseling Center.
A Breakdown and Therapy Finding himself unable to help a severely disturbed client, he became so upset that he
fell ill himself, suffering what was then called a nervous breakdown. His self-confidence was shattered. He wrote
that he felt “deeply certain of my complete inadequacy as a therapist, my worthlessness as a person, and my lack of
any future in the field of psychology” (1967, p. 367).
He and his wife left Chicago and set out for their cabin in upstate New York, where Rogers remained secluded for
the next 6 months. When he felt well enough to return to the university, he also began undergoing therapy for
himself, becoming aware of just how deep his feelings of insecurity were. He said he believed that “no one could
ever love me, even though they might like what I did” (quoted in Milton, 2002, p. 131).
Finally Finding Himself Rogers’s therapy was apparently successful, and he emerged with a newfound ability to
give and receive love and to form deep emotional relationships with other people, including his clients. He taught at
the University of Wisconsin from 1957 to 1963. During those years, he published many articles and books that
brought his personality theory and personcentered therapy to a wide audience. His clinical experience while in
academia was mostly with college students in the counseling centers. Thus, the kind of person he treated during that
time—young, intelligent, highly verbal, and, in general, facing adjustment problems rather than severe emotional
disorders—was vastly different from the kind of person treated by the Freudians or by clinical psychologists in
private practice.
In 1964, Rogers became a resident fellow at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in California, working to
apply his person-centered philosophy to international problems such as the reduction of tension between Protestants
and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. He served as president of the American
Psychological Association in 1946 and received that organization’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award
and Distinguished Professional Contribution Award.
The Self and the Tendency toward Actualization
During his trip to China, Rogers came to recognize the importance of an autonomous self as a factor in his own
development. His early research reinforced the importance of the self in the formation of the personality. In the
1930s, he developed a method for determining whether a child’s behavior was healthy and constructive or unhealthy
and destructive. He investigated the child’s background and had the child rated on factors he believed would
influence behavior. These factors included the family environment, health, intellectual development, economic
circumstances, cultural influences, social interactions, and level of education. All of these factors are external, that
is, part of the child’s environment.
Rogers also investigated a potential internal influence, the child’s self-understanding or self-insight. Rogers
described self-insight as an acceptance of self and reality, and a sense of responsibility for the self. But he continued
to believe that the external factors were of greater importance in shaping one’s personality.
Self-Insight
Ten years later, William Kell, one of Rogers’s students, attempted to predict the behavior of delinquent children.
Rogers predicted that the factors of family environment and social interactions (external factors) would correlate
most strongly with delinquent behavior, but he was wrong. The factor that most accurately predicted later behavior
was self-insight. Surprised to learn that family environment did not relate highly to later delinquent behavior, Rogers
wrote, “I was simply not prepared to accept this finding, and the study was put on the shelf” (1987, p. 119). Two
years later, Helen McNeil replicated the study using a different group of subjects and got results similar to those of
Kell. A person’s level of self-insight was the single most important predictor of behavior. This time, faced with such
an accumulation of data, Rogers accepted the findings and, on reflection, came to appreciate their significance. If
one’s attitude toward the self was more important in predicting behavior than the external factors widely thought to
be so influential in childhood, then counselors and social workers were emphasizing the wrong things in trying to
treat delinquent children and adolescents! Counselors traditionally focus on external factors such as a poor family
environment and alter the circumstances by removing children from a threatening home situation and placing them
in foster care. Instead, they should be trying to modify the children’s selfinsight. That realization was important to
Rogers personally.
This experience helped me decide to focus my career on the development of a psychotherapy that would bring about greater
awareness of self-understanding, self-direction, and personal responsibility, rather than focusing on changes in the social
environment. It led me to place greater emphasis on the study of the self and how it changes. (Rogers, 1987, p. 119) Thus, the
idea of the self became the core of Rogers’s theory of personality, as it had become the core of his own life.
Actualizing Tendency
Rogers believed people are motivated by an innate tendency to actualize, maintain, and enhance the self. This drive
toward self-actualization is part of a larger actualization tendency, which encompasses all of our physiological and
psychological needs. By attending to basic requirements, such as the needs for food, water, and safety, the
actualization tendency serves to maintain the organism, providing for sustenance and survival. Rogers believed that
the actualization tendency begins in the womb, facilitating human growth by providing for the differentiation of the
physical organs and the development of physiological functioning. It is responsible for maturation—the genetically
determined development of the body’s parts and processes—ranging from the growth of the fetus to the appearance
of the secondary sex characteristics at puberty. These changes, programmed into our genetic makeup, are all brought
to fruition by the actualization tendency.
Even though such changes are genetically determined, progress toward full human development is neither automatic
nor effortless. To Rogers, the process involves struggle and pain. For example, when children take their first steps,
they may fall and hurt themselves. Although it would be less painful to remain in the crawling stage, most children
persist. They may fall again and cry, but they persevere despite the pain because the tendency to actualize is stronger
than the urge to regress simply because the growth process is difficult.
The Experiential World
In developing his theory, Rogers weighed the impact of the experiential world in which we operate daily. This
provides a frame of reference or context that influences our growth. We are exposed to countless sources of
stimulation every day. Some are trivial and some important, some threatening and others rewarding. He wanted to
know how we perceive and react to this multifaceted world of experiences to which we are constantly exposed.
Rogers answered the question by saying that the reality of our environment depends on our perception of it, which
may not always coincide with reality. We may react to an experience far differently from the way our best friend
does. You may judge the behavior of your roommate in a dramatically different way than does someone decades
older. Our perceptions change with time and circumstances. Your own opinion of what you consider to be
acceptable behavior for college students will probably change by the time you are 70.
As the actualization tendency in infancy leads us to grow and develop, our experiential world broadens. Infants are
exposed to more and more sources of stimulation and respond to them as they are subjectively perceived. Our
experiences become the only basis for our judgments and behaviors. Rogers wrote, “Experience is, for me, the
highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience” . Higher levelsof development sharpen our
experiential world and ultimately lead to the developmentof the self.
The Development of the Self in Childhood
As infants gradually develop a more complex experiential field from widening social encounters, one part of their
experience becomes differentiated from the rest. This separate part, defined by the words I, me, and myself, is the
self or self-concept. The formation of the self-concept involves distinguishing what is directly and immediately a
part of the self from the people, objects, and events that are external to the self. The self-concept is also our image of
what we are, what we should be, and what we would like to be.
Ideally, the self is a consistent pattern, an organized whole. All aspects of the self strive for consistency. For
example, people who are disturbed about having aggressive feelings and choose to deny them dare not express any
obvious aggressive behaviors.To do so would mean behaving in ways that are inconsistent with their self-concept,
because they believe they should not be aggressive.
Positive Regard
As the self emerges, infants develop a need for what Rogers called positive regard. It includes acceptance, love, and
approval from other people, most notably from the mother during infancy. This need is probably learned, although
Rogers said the source was not important. The need for positive regard is universal and persistent. Infants find it
satisfying to receive positive regard and frustrating not to receive it or to have it withdrawn. Because positive regard
is crucial to personality development, infant behavior is guided by the amount of affection and love bestowed. If the
mother does not offer positive regard, then the infant’s innate tendency toward actualization and development of the
self-concept will be hampered. Infants perceive parental disapproval of their behavior as disapproval of their newly
developing self. If this occurs frequently, infants will cease to strive for actualization and development. Instead, they
will act in ways that will bring positive regard from others, even if these actions are inconsistent with their self-
concept.
Unconditional Positive Regard Even though infants may receive sufficient acceptance, love, and approval,
some specific behaviors may bring punishment. However, if positive regard for the infant persists despite the
infant’s undesirable behaviors, the condition is called unconditional positive regard. By this, Rogers meant that the
mother’s love for the child is granted freely and fully; it is not conditional or dependent on the child’s behavior. An
important aspect of the need for positive regard is its reciprocal nature. When people perceive themselves to be
satisfying someone else’s need for positive regard, they in turn experience satisfaction of that need themselves.
Therefore, it is rewarding to satisfy someone else’s need for positive regard. Because of the importance of satisfying
the need for positive regard, particularly in infancy, we become sensitive to the attitudes and behaviors of other
people. By interpreting the feedback we receive from them (either approval or disapproval), we refine our
self-concept. Thus, in forming the self-concept we internalize the attitudes of other people.
Positive Self-Regard In time, positive regard will come more from within us than from other people, a condition
Rogers called positive self-regard. Positive self-regard becomes as strong as our need for positive regard from
others, and it may be satisfied in the same way. For example, children who are rewarded with affection, approval,
and love when they are happy will come to generate positive self-regard whenever they behave in a happy way.
Thus, in a sense, we learn to reward ourselves. Positive self-regard can be defined as a feeling of contentment with
oneself and is related to positive mental health (Leising, Borkenau, Zimmermann, Roski, Leonhardt, & Schutz,
2013). Like positive regard, positive self-regard is reciprocal. When people receive positive regard and develop
positive self-regard, in turn they may provide positive regard to others.
Conditions of Worth
Conditions of worth evolve from this developmental sequence of positive regard leading to positive self-regard.
Positive self-regard is Rogers’s version of the Freudian superego, and it derives from conditional positive regard.
We noted that unconditional positive regard involves the parents’ love and acceptance of the infant without
conditions, independent of the child’s behavior.
Conditional positive regard is the opposite. Parents may not react to everything their infant does with positive
regard. Some behaviors annoy, frighten, or bore them and for those behaviors they may not provide affection or
approval. Thus, infants learn that parental affection has a price; it depends on behaving in certain acceptable ways.
They come to understand that sometimes they are prized, and sometimes they are not. If a parent expresses
annoyance every time the infant drops an object out of the crib, the child learns to disapprove of himself or herself
for behaving that way. External standards of judgment become internal and personal. In a sense, then, children come
to punish themselves as their parents did. Children develop self-regard only in situations that have brought parental
approval, and in time the self-concept, thus formed, comes to function as a parental surrogate. As a result, children
develop conditions of worth. They come to believe they are worthy only under certain conditions, the ones that
brought parental positive regard and then personal positive self-regard. Having internalized their parents’ norms and
standards, they view themselves as worthy or unworthy, good or bad, according to the terms their parents defined.
A study of adolescents found that when their mothers used conditional positive selfregard to reward them for
academic achievement, and punish them for nonachievement, their feelings of self-worth became erratic. When they
got good grades, for example, they behaved in self-aggrandizing ways. But when they did not get good
grades, they felt shame and tend to downplay or devalue their sense of self-worth (Assor & Tai, 2012). Children thus
learn to avoid certain behaviors and no longer function freely. Because they feel the need to evaluate their behaviors
and attitudes so carefully, and refrain from taking certain actions, they are prevented from fully developing or
actualizing the self.
They inhibit their development by living within the confines of their conditions of worth.
Incongruence
Not only do children learn, ideally, to inhibit unacceptable behaviors, but they also may come to deny or distort
unacceptable ways of perceiving their experiential world. By holding an inaccurate perception of certain
experiences, they risk becoming estranged from their true self. We learn to evaluate experiences, and to accept or
reject them, not in terms of how they contribute to our overall actualization tendency, but in terms of
whether they bring positive regard from others. This leads to incongruence between the self-concept and the
experiential world, the environment as we perceive it.
Experiences that are incongruent or incompatible with our self-concept become threatening and are manifested as
anxiety. For example, if our self-concept includes the belief that we love all humanity, once we meet someone
toward whom we feel hatred, we are likely to develop anxiety.
Hating is not congruent with our image of us as loving persons. To maintain our selfconcept, we must deny the
hatred. We defend ourselves against the anxiety that accompanies the threat by distorting it, thus closing off a
portion of our experiential field. The result is a rigidity of some of our perceptions.
Congruence and Emotional Health
Our level of psychological adjustment and emotional health is a function of the degree of congruence or
compatibility between our self-concept and our experiences. Psychologically healthy people are able to perceive
themselves, other people, and events in their world much as they really are. They are open to new experiences
because nothing threatens their self-concept. They have no need to deny or distort their perceptions because as
children they received unconditional positive regard and did not have to internalize any conditions of worth. They
feel worthy under all conditions and situations and are able to use all their experiences. They can develop and
actualize all facets of the self, proceeding toward the goal of becoming a fully functioning person and leading what
Rogers called “the good life.”
Characteristics of Fully Functioning Persons
To Rogers, the fully functioning person is the most desirable end result of psychological development and social
evolution (Rogers, 1961). He described several characteristics of fully functioning (self-actualizing) people .
Fully functioning persons are aware of all experiences No experience is distorted or denied; all of it filters
through to the self. There is no defensiveness because there is nothing to defend against, nothing to threaten the self-
concept. Fully functioning persons are open to positive feelings such as courage and tenderness, and to negative
feelings such as fear and pain. They are more emotional in the sense that they accept a wider range of positive and
negative emotions and feel them more intensely.
Fully functioning persons live fully and richly in every moment All experiences are potentially fresh and
new. Experiences cannot be predicted or anticipated but are participated in fully rather than merely observed.
Fully functioning persons trust in their own organism By this phrase Rogers meant that fully functioning
persons trust their own reactions rather than being guided by the opinions of others, by a social code, or by their
intellectual judgments. Behaving in a way that feels right is a good guide to behaving in a way that is satisfying.
Rogers did not suggest that fully functioning persons ignore information from their own intellect or from other
people. Rather, he meant that all data are accepted as congruent with the fully functioning person’s self-concept.
Nothing is threatening; all information can be perceived, evaluated, and weighed accurately. Thus, the decision
about how to behave in a particular situation results from a consideration of all experiential data. Fully functioning
persons are unaware of making such considerations, however, because of the congruence between their self-concept
and experience, so their decisions appear to be more intuitive and emotional than intellectual.
Fully functioning persons feel free to make choices without constraints or inhibitions This brings a
sense of power because they know their future depends on their own actions and not present circumstances, past
events, or other people. They do not feel compelled, either by themselves or by others, to behave in only one way.
Fully functioning persons are creative and live constructively and adaptively as environmental
conditions change Allied with creativity is spontaneity. Fully functioning persons are flexible and seek new
experiences and challenges. They do not require predictability, security, or freedom from tension.
Fully Functioning Persons are in a State of Actualizing Rogers used the word actualizing, not actualized, to
characterize the fully functioning person. The latter term implies a finished or static personality, which was not
Rogers’s intent. Self-development is always in progress. Rogers wrote that being fully functioning is “a direction,
not a destination”
. If striving and growing cease, then the person loses spontaneity, flexibility, and openness. Rogers’s emphasis on
change and growth is neatly captured in theword becoming in the title of his book, On Becoming a Person (1961).