PerHum

1. Gordon Allport Functional autonomy: the past is only important if it is active in the present. Motives that were important in the past are not operating in the same way in the present.

Humanistic "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."

Psychology "The past has guided you to where you are today, but it is not an anchor."

Gordon Allport Proprium: Integrates experience of and conceptions of self -- body, identity, esteem, image, realistic problem-solver.

Gives consistency to thought and action, a sense of purpose, connects goals for the future with memories from the past.

Humanistic Self: I & Me.

2. Kurt Lewin Early perceptual psychologist.

Field theory:

1. Events (perceptions) determined by the total psychological situation of the moment, rather than past events or enduring traits.

2. Perceptions of each part of the field dependent upon the whole. Everything understood & interpreted within its current context.

Humanistic Personality should be understood as a whole; it cannot be understood when broken down into parts (e.g., traits), with each part studied separately.

Contemporaneity: Psychological environment includes only the present moment, not past or anticipated future. If the past is effecting behavior, it is only to the extent that it is present psychologically in the present.

Humanistic Personal choice and behavior change are best approached as responses to immediate, here-and-now, experiences and perceptions.

Carl Rogers

**Raised & trained in the U.S. Midwest: University of Wisconsin

**Started as a theology student, changed to psychology (and disappointed his parents)

**Worked as a clinician, a theoretician, and a researcher

**Won first ever Distinguished Scientific Contribution award from the American Psychological Association.

Personality Process

Holistic responding and the actualizing tendency:

*Humans as holistic responders. Humans are organisms that innately respond holistically to their environments. Perception, cognition, emotion, outward behavior: all respond in a unified way to environmental input.

**Holistic: means that all aspects of the organism are involved in its strivings for growth & enhancement. A full and complete understanding of inner experience gives the best information about what a person needs because that inner experience will be responding to the need and directed toward fulfilling the need.

**Actualizing tendency: the tendency of the organism to maintain, actualize, and enhance itself. As organisms, then, humans have an innate drive for growth.

**Environments provide, more or less, conditions for growth: Psychological environments vary to the extent that they foster or inhibit organismic growth.

Sufficient conditions for growth: positive regard from others who are genuine and empathic, and unconditional acceptance of the person (although not necessarily of her/his behavior).

An insufficient environment can thwart psychological growth.

The Self

The Organismic Self: The totality of what a person experiences, including experiences that are outside of awareness.

The perceiving/integrating self (the 'I'): receives and processes internal experience and external events; attempts to create congruence between organismic experience and self-concept.

The guardian at the gates of our awareness.

Awareness : "the symbolic representation (not necessarily in verbal symbols) of some portion of our experience." Synonymous with consciousness and symbolization.

Denial and Distortion: screen experiences outside of awareness. Prevents accurate perception of one’s own experience.

The perceived, describable self: (the 'me'), which is all those aspects of one's being which are perceived in awareness.

Self-concept: Answers the question "Who Am I?" and how/what do I do, think, feel, believe, and value? All within awareness.

The ideal self: which is how one would like to view oneself (not me, how I’d like to be).

Congruence

Incongruence: An unpleasant state; some experiences are denied & distorted & therefore outside of awareness. The self-concept, as a result, is at odds with organismic experience.

Congruence: When all aspects of organismic experience (behavior, emotions, perceptions, thoughts) are symbolized -- i.e., the person can make sense of them, put them into words or images or represent them in some way.

Strivings for congruence: Being in a state of incongruence runs counter to our actualizing tendency: it obstructs and inhibits growth. Therefore, we will experience it as unpleasant and under the right, corrective environmental conditions, will strive to correct it and become congruent.

Why incongruence? Why would our perceiving selves screen experiences out of our awareness?

*Conditions of worth: How does one end up with a self-concept that is so incongruent with organismic experience? Through growing up in a psychological environment that imposes conditions of worth. Conditional positive regard means that others regard us positively only under certain conditions.

We need positive regard from others. Because all people need positive regard from others, we may deny or distort our experience in order to make it appear congruent with the self that is acceptable to important others.

We also need positive self-regard. When our environment provides unconditional positive regard, our positive self-regard encompasses a self-concept that is congruent with our organismic experience.

Rogers' model of mental health: The fully functioning person.

1. Open to experience: Fully congruent; aware of all their experiences; use defensive distortion to a minimum.

2. Existential living: Live richly & fully in each moment of existence.

3. Organismic trust: The person trusts their own organismic experiences, and knows they are in the service of their own growth.

4. Experiential freedom: The person feels free to respond to his/her needs as he/she sees fit, given the constraints of genetics, environment, and so forth.

5. Creativity: Because they are not weighed down with defensiveness, they are free to respond to the environment spontaneously, authentically, creatively, and appropriately. They can adapt when necessary, and shape their environments when possible.

ABRAHAM MASLOW

Maslow's theory of motivation and need fulfillment:

Need fulfillment is sought on a hierarchy, with some (lower) needs being more urgent than other, higher needs. Do lower needs have to be totally fulfilled in order for higher needs to be addressed?

D (deficiency) needs: are ?

B (being) needs: are ?

Self-actualized persons have B-love in addition to, or more than, D-love. What is the difference?

Maslow's hierarchy of needs places which needs first? Second? And later?

Does Maslow’s hierarchy presume that these basic 5 cover all human needs or that any needs can be fully fulfilled forever?

Maslow Studies Self-Actualizing People

What were the strengths of Maslow’s research on self-actualizing people?

What about the weaknesses? Why did his work not have more impact on psychology?

Humanistic Assessment

Self-Assessment: Rogers: it is not up to the psychologist to TELL the person what is going on with him or her, but rather for the person to TELL the psychologist.

Interviews: Interviews can reveal how a person interprets and understands him or herself. They do so better than written self-descriptions because interviewers, according to Rogers, can create a climate in which a maximum amount of information is revealed. This climate is dependent upon the conditions of growth discussed previously: warmth, empathy, positive regard, and lack of judgementalism.

Semantic differential: Studies the "meanings" people assign to things, events, people, themselves.

The semantic differential uses a series of written, bipolar adjective scales to assess the dimensions of a particular person's meaning about something.

Three dimensions of meaning have come out of factor analytic studies of the semantic differential over & over. They are: 1) evaluation (good-bad) which accounts for most of the variance, 2) potency (powerful-weak), and 3) activity (active-passive).

Q-Sort: Measures the self-concept. Experimenter gives subject a group of cards, each containing a statement concerning some personality characteristic such as "Makes friends easily" or "has trouble expressing anger." Person is asked to read these cards and sort them into piles according to which statements they feel are most descriptive of them and which are least descriptive. This technique can also be used to assess the ideal self. Comparisons between my ideal and myself allow an assessment of the discrepancy, which is one way to assess self-esteem.

APPLICATIONS to PSYCHOTHERAPY

Goal of Rogerian therapy is to help people achieve congruence between organismic self and self-concept.

Therapeutic process: the therapist's focus is to create a PROCESS that gets the client where he/she wants to go.

Here & now. It is here and now that the person will grow & make choices, and those choices will come out of whatever realities the person is facing here & now. Process is a very here & now phenomenon.

Therapeutic technique

Self-exploration: Important because of the need to enlarge the self-concept to include more aspects of the organismic self.

Awareness continuum. Full congruence is not possible without full awareness.

Encounter groups: People should expect more from life than just existence; they should go for JOY. The only way to find joy is to find all the other emotions that one experiences, so much of the focus of encounter groups was in stimulating people's emotions and helping them to cope with them more effectively, particularly in the context of relationships with others.

STRENGTHS & CRITICISMS OF HUMANISTIC PERSONALITY THEORY

Focused on person’s own experiences: a needed correction for current thinking.

Optimistic and concerned with joy.

Encourages empathy & understanding between people.

Here & now focus a needed correction for current thinking.

Wide applications: educators, psychotherapists, managers, and personal growth experts all use it.

BUT:

People are biased in their perceptions about themselves.

Vague concepts

Doesn’t adequately address treatment of serious mental illness