PERSONALITY THEORY OF ROGERS
Carl Rogers recognized some of Freud’s ideas, but also disagreed sharply with many aspects of
his theory. Rogers thus provided a new theory of the person, which emphasized conscious
perceptions of the present, interpersonal experiences encountered across the course of life, and
people’s capacity to grow toward psychological maturity. He saw reality, as we describe it, as a
private world of experience, ‘I do not react to some absolute reality, but to my perception of this
reality’; a subjective construction. Inner psychological needs shape the subjective experiences
that we interpret as objectively real. Rogers takes a phenomenological approach to the study of
persons, which means that he investigates people’s conscious experiences and is interested in
how the person experiences the world. There are two key aspects that de ne his core view of the
person. The rst is that people are prone to a distinctive form of psychological distress. Because
we need the approval of others, we tell ourselves that their desires and values are our own. When
this happens, the individual thinks, but does not feel an attachment to his or her own values (‘I
don’t know myself’). The second key aspect is that Rogers sees the core of human nature as
essentially positive. According to him, our most fundamental motivation is toward positive growth.
He acknowledges that we can act destructive and evil, but when we are functioning freely, we are
able to move toward our potential as positive, mature beings. According to Rogers, we should
combine the person’s subjective experience of the world with objective science about personality.
STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY
Rogers presented a simple structured model that highlights what he felt was the central structure
in personality; the self / self-concept. The individual perceives external objects and experiences
and attaches meanings to them. The total system of these perceptions and meanings make up
the individual’s phenomenal eld. The subset of that eld that is recognized by the individual as
‘I’ or ‘me’ is the self. The self is an organized set of perceptions possessed by the individual, who
is ultimately responsible for his or her actions. There are two di erent aspects to the self: the
actual self and the ideal self.
• Actual self = the self that we are in the present
• Ideal self = the self-concept that an individual would eventually want to be
There are objective ways found to measure the self-concept:
• Q-sort technique = the test-taker has to sort cards with personality characteristics on them, in
the degree to which each statement is descriptive of themselves. They start in the middle and
eventually creating an order ( exible and xed measures). The Q-sort can be administered more
than once to assess both the actual self and the ideal self.
• Semantic di erential = the test-taker rates di erent concepts on a seven-point scale de ned
by polar adjectives (good-bad / active-passive). A classic illustration of how the semantic
di erential can be employed involves a case of multiple personality (three faces of Eve).
PROCESS OF PERSONALITY
• Self-actualization = a person’s tendency to grow from a simple entity to a complex one, to
move from dependence to independence, from xity and rigidity to a process of change and
freedom of expression > a forward-looking tendency toward personality growth.
➡Measured on a 15-item scale that measures the ability to act independently, self-acceptance
or self-esteem, acceptance of one’s emotional life, and trust in interpersonal relationships.
• Congruence / self-consistency = when a person has congruence between the self and
experience, they have congruence between what they feel and how they view themselves. This
is of great importance to personality functioning. By having consistent congruence between the
self and experience, the person is self-consistent.
• Incongruence = when someones experiences don’t match the view they have of themselves,
they have incongruence between the self and their experiences. This can cause distress for
people (‘this is not me’). Anxiety is the result of a di erence between experience and the
perception of the self. When incongruence occurs, the person will be motivated to defend the
self > defensive processes.
➡Subception = we don’t allow the incongruent experience to be conscious
➡Distortion = allows the experience into awareness but in a form that makes it congruent
with the self.
➡Denial = preserves the self-structure from threat by denying it conscious expression.
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, Self-esteem is an enduring personal judgement of worthiness regarding a person’s self. It is not a
momentary good or bad feeling resulting from a particular situation. Coopersmith conducted a
study on the self-esteem levels of children. Indicators of social prestige (wealth, job, education)
seemed to be not strongly related to children’s self-esteem scores. Instead, their self-esteem was
related more strongly to interpersonal conditions in the home and immediate environment.
Children appeared to develop self-views through a process of re ected appraisal in which they
used opinions of themselves that were expressed by others as a basis for their own self-
judgements. There are a few parental attitudes and behaviors that are important to the formation
of self-esteem:
• Degree of acceptance, interest, a ection and warmth expressed by parents toward the child >
close relationships with parents result in high self-esteem
• Permissiveness and punishment > clear demands for appropriate behavior by rewards result in
high self-esteem
• Whether the relationship is democratic of dictorial > enforced extensive rules for conduct (fairly
treated) result in high self-esteem
Coopersmith summarized his ndings as follows: the most general statement about the origins of
self-esteem can be given in terms of three conditions: total or nearly total acceptance of the
children by their parents, clearly de ned and enforced limits, and the respect and latitude for
individual actions that exist within the de ned limits. The important factor is the children’s
perception of the parents, not necessarily the speci c actions that the parents display.
We might wonder if it is healthier to see oneself as essentially the same person across situations,
or to see oneself as quite di erent in various social roles. Several studies have been done to
assess this issue. The following results came from di erent studies:
• Individuals with highly variable role identities were more likely to be anxious, depressed and low
in self-esteem.
• High variability in the self-concept can be bad for mental health because it can be indicative of
an unintegrated ‘core’ self.
• Poorly adjusted individuals, in particular, attempt to deny awareness to threatening stimuli.
• People are better able to recall adjectives they feel are descriptive of themselves than they are
of adjectives that feel most unlike themselves.
• If people are tempted to cheat, they will more likely do so if their self-esteem is low than if it is
high > it is inconsistent with high self-esteem.
• Your self-concept may be maintained by behaviors of others that were in uenced in the rst
place by your own self-concept > people often behave in ways that lead others to con rm the
perception they have of themselves, a self-ful lling prophecy.
The self continues to grow in complexity throughout life. Roger’s work suggested that
developmental factors must be considered at two levels of analysis.
• Parent-child interactions
➡Whether the environment that the parents create is optimal for psychological growth >
optimal is where the parents provide unconditional positive regard.
• Internal psychological structures
➡Whether individuals experience congruence between self and daily experience or, distort
aspects of their experience in order to attain other people’s regard and a consistent self-
concept.
The major developmental concern for Rogers, is whether the child is free to grow, to be self-
actualizing, or whether conditions of worth cause the child to become defensive and operate out
of a state of incongruence.
All persons possess a basic psychological need; the need for positive regard, they need to be
accepted and respected by others. Sometimes, the expression of positive regard by a signi cant
other can become so compelling, that a person becomes more attuned with the positive regard of
such others than toward experiences which are of positive value in actualizing the organism.
People can then lose touch with their own true feelings and values, which leads to incongruence
and feelings of detachment from the person’s true self. The need for positive regard is particularly
central to child development; their parents provide information on what is good and bad. When
parents show greater respect and love for the child only if the child expresses some forms of
behavior and not others, the child will form conditions of worth. This leads to them needing to
balance their own natural tendencies with their need for positive regard from the parents. The
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Carl Rogers recognized some of Freud’s ideas, but also disagreed sharply with many aspects of
his theory. Rogers thus provided a new theory of the person, which emphasized conscious
perceptions of the present, interpersonal experiences encountered across the course of life, and
people’s capacity to grow toward psychological maturity. He saw reality, as we describe it, as a
private world of experience, ‘I do not react to some absolute reality, but to my perception of this
reality’; a subjective construction. Inner psychological needs shape the subjective experiences
that we interpret as objectively real. Rogers takes a phenomenological approach to the study of
persons, which means that he investigates people’s conscious experiences and is interested in
how the person experiences the world. There are two key aspects that de ne his core view of the
person. The rst is that people are prone to a distinctive form of psychological distress. Because
we need the approval of others, we tell ourselves that their desires and values are our own. When
this happens, the individual thinks, but does not feel an attachment to his or her own values (‘I
don’t know myself’). The second key aspect is that Rogers sees the core of human nature as
essentially positive. According to him, our most fundamental motivation is toward positive growth.
He acknowledges that we can act destructive and evil, but when we are functioning freely, we are
able to move toward our potential as positive, mature beings. According to Rogers, we should
combine the person’s subjective experience of the world with objective science about personality.
STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY
Rogers presented a simple structured model that highlights what he felt was the central structure
in personality; the self / self-concept. The individual perceives external objects and experiences
and attaches meanings to them. The total system of these perceptions and meanings make up
the individual’s phenomenal eld. The subset of that eld that is recognized by the individual as
‘I’ or ‘me’ is the self. The self is an organized set of perceptions possessed by the individual, who
is ultimately responsible for his or her actions. There are two di erent aspects to the self: the
actual self and the ideal self.
• Actual self = the self that we are in the present
• Ideal self = the self-concept that an individual would eventually want to be
There are objective ways found to measure the self-concept:
• Q-sort technique = the test-taker has to sort cards with personality characteristics on them, in
the degree to which each statement is descriptive of themselves. They start in the middle and
eventually creating an order ( exible and xed measures). The Q-sort can be administered more
than once to assess both the actual self and the ideal self.
• Semantic di erential = the test-taker rates di erent concepts on a seven-point scale de ned
by polar adjectives (good-bad / active-passive). A classic illustration of how the semantic
di erential can be employed involves a case of multiple personality (three faces of Eve).
PROCESS OF PERSONALITY
• Self-actualization = a person’s tendency to grow from a simple entity to a complex one, to
move from dependence to independence, from xity and rigidity to a process of change and
freedom of expression > a forward-looking tendency toward personality growth.
➡Measured on a 15-item scale that measures the ability to act independently, self-acceptance
or self-esteem, acceptance of one’s emotional life, and trust in interpersonal relationships.
• Congruence / self-consistency = when a person has congruence between the self and
experience, they have congruence between what they feel and how they view themselves. This
is of great importance to personality functioning. By having consistent congruence between the
self and experience, the person is self-consistent.
• Incongruence = when someones experiences don’t match the view they have of themselves,
they have incongruence between the self and their experiences. This can cause distress for
people (‘this is not me’). Anxiety is the result of a di erence between experience and the
perception of the self. When incongruence occurs, the person will be motivated to defend the
self > defensive processes.
➡Subception = we don’t allow the incongruent experience to be conscious
➡Distortion = allows the experience into awareness but in a form that makes it congruent
with the self.
➡Denial = preserves the self-structure from threat by denying it conscious expression.
ff fiff flfi fi ff fi ff fi ff fi fi
, Self-esteem is an enduring personal judgement of worthiness regarding a person’s self. It is not a
momentary good or bad feeling resulting from a particular situation. Coopersmith conducted a
study on the self-esteem levels of children. Indicators of social prestige (wealth, job, education)
seemed to be not strongly related to children’s self-esteem scores. Instead, their self-esteem was
related more strongly to interpersonal conditions in the home and immediate environment.
Children appeared to develop self-views through a process of re ected appraisal in which they
used opinions of themselves that were expressed by others as a basis for their own self-
judgements. There are a few parental attitudes and behaviors that are important to the formation
of self-esteem:
• Degree of acceptance, interest, a ection and warmth expressed by parents toward the child >
close relationships with parents result in high self-esteem
• Permissiveness and punishment > clear demands for appropriate behavior by rewards result in
high self-esteem
• Whether the relationship is democratic of dictorial > enforced extensive rules for conduct (fairly
treated) result in high self-esteem
Coopersmith summarized his ndings as follows: the most general statement about the origins of
self-esteem can be given in terms of three conditions: total or nearly total acceptance of the
children by their parents, clearly de ned and enforced limits, and the respect and latitude for
individual actions that exist within the de ned limits. The important factor is the children’s
perception of the parents, not necessarily the speci c actions that the parents display.
We might wonder if it is healthier to see oneself as essentially the same person across situations,
or to see oneself as quite di erent in various social roles. Several studies have been done to
assess this issue. The following results came from di erent studies:
• Individuals with highly variable role identities were more likely to be anxious, depressed and low
in self-esteem.
• High variability in the self-concept can be bad for mental health because it can be indicative of
an unintegrated ‘core’ self.
• Poorly adjusted individuals, in particular, attempt to deny awareness to threatening stimuli.
• People are better able to recall adjectives they feel are descriptive of themselves than they are
of adjectives that feel most unlike themselves.
• If people are tempted to cheat, they will more likely do so if their self-esteem is low than if it is
high > it is inconsistent with high self-esteem.
• Your self-concept may be maintained by behaviors of others that were in uenced in the rst
place by your own self-concept > people often behave in ways that lead others to con rm the
perception they have of themselves, a self-ful lling prophecy.
The self continues to grow in complexity throughout life. Roger’s work suggested that
developmental factors must be considered at two levels of analysis.
• Parent-child interactions
➡Whether the environment that the parents create is optimal for psychological growth >
optimal is where the parents provide unconditional positive regard.
• Internal psychological structures
➡Whether individuals experience congruence between self and daily experience or, distort
aspects of their experience in order to attain other people’s regard and a consistent self-
concept.
The major developmental concern for Rogers, is whether the child is free to grow, to be self-
actualizing, or whether conditions of worth cause the child to become defensive and operate out
of a state of incongruence.
All persons possess a basic psychological need; the need for positive regard, they need to be
accepted and respected by others. Sometimes, the expression of positive regard by a signi cant
other can become so compelling, that a person becomes more attuned with the positive regard of
such others than toward experiences which are of positive value in actualizing the organism.
People can then lose touch with their own true feelings and values, which leads to incongruence
and feelings of detachment from the person’s true self. The need for positive regard is particularly
central to child development; their parents provide information on what is good and bad. When
parents show greater respect and love for the child only if the child expresses some forms of
behavior and not others, the child will form conditions of worth. This leads to them needing to
balance their own natural tendencies with their need for positive regard from the parents. The
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