Carl Rogers (1902-1987) was a humanistic psychologist who agreed with the main assumptions

of Abraham Maslow, but added that for a person to "grow", they need an environment that
provides them with genuineness (openness and self-disclosure), acceptance (being seen with
unconditional positive regard), and empathy (being listened to and understood).

Without these, relationships and healthy personalities will not develop as they should, much like
a tree will not grow without sunlight and water.

Rogers believed that every person can achieve their goals, wishes and desires in life. When, or
rather if they did so, self actualization took place.  This was one of Carl Rogers most important
contributions to psychology and for a person to reach their potential a number of factors must be
satisfied.

"The organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain, and enhance the
experiencing organism” (Rogers, 1951, p. 487).

Rogers rejected the deterministic nature of both psychoanalysis and behaviorism and maintained
that we behave as we do because of the way we perceive our situation. "As no one else can know
how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves."

Carl Rogers (1959) believed that humans have one basic motive, that is the tendency to self-
actualize - i.e. to fulfill one's potential and achieve the highest level of 'human-beingness' we
can.  Like a flower that will grow to its full potential if the conditions are right, but which is
constrained by its environment, so people will flourish and reach their potential if their
environment is good enough.

However, unlike a flower, the potential of the individual human is unique, and we are meant to
develop in different ways according to our personality.  Rogers believed that people are
inherently good and creative.  They become destructive only when a poor self-concept or
external constraints override the valuing process.  Carl Rogers believed that for a person to
achieve self-actualization they must be in a state of congruence.

This means that self-actualization occurs when a person’s “ideal self” (i.e. who they would like
to be) is congruent with their actual behavior (self-image).  Rogers describes an individual who
is actualizing as a fully functioning person. The main determinant of whether we will become
self-actualized is childhood experience.

Rogers believed that every person could achieve their goals, wishes, and desires in life. When
they did so self-actualization took place. For Rogers (1961) people who are able be self-
actualize, and that is not all of us, are called fully functioning persons. This means that the
person is in touch with the here and now, his or her subjective experiences and feelings,
continually growing and changing.
In many ways Rogers regarded the fully functioning person as an ideal and one that people do
not ultimately achieve. It is wrong to think of this as an end or completion of life’s journey;
rather it is a process of always becoming and changing.

Rogers identified five characteristics of the fully functioning person:

1. Open to experience: both positive and negative emotions accepted. Negative feelings
are not denied, but worked through (rather than resorting to ego defence mechanisms).

2. Existential living: in touch with different experiences as they occur in life, avoiding
prejudging and preconceptions. Being able to live and fully appreciate the present, not
always looking back to the past or forward to the future (i.e. living for the moment).

3. Trust feelings: feeling, instincts and gut-reactions are paid attention to and trusted.
People’s own decisions are the right ones and we should trust ourselves to make the right
choices.

4. Creativity: creative thinking and risk taking are features of a person’s life. A person
does not play safe all the time. This involves the ability to adjust and change and seek
new experiences.

5. Fulfilled life: person is happy and satisfied with life, and always looking for new
challenges and experiences.

For Rogers, fully functioning people are well adjusted, well balanced and interesting to know.
Often such people are high achievers in society. Critics claim that the fully functioning person is
a product of Western culture. In other cultures, such as Eastern cultures, the achievement of the
group is valued more highly than the achievement of any one person.

Central to Rogers' personality theory is the notion of self or self-concept.  This is defined as "the
organized, consistent set of perceptions and beliefs about oneself".

The self is the humanistic term for who we really are as a person.  The self is our inner
personality, and can be likened to the soul, or Freud's psyche.  The self is influenced by the
experiences a person has in their life, and out interpretations of those experiences.  Two primary
sources that influence our self-concept are childhood experiences and evaluation by others.

According to Rogers (1959), we want to feel, experience and behave in ways which are
consistent with our self-image and which reflect what we would like to be like, our ideal-self. 
The closer our self-image and ideal-self are to each other, the more consistent or congruent we
are and the higher our sense of self-worth. 

A person is said to be in a state of incongruence if some of the totality of their experience is

unacceptable to them and is denied or distorted in the self-image.
The humanistic approach states that the self is composed of concepts unique to ourselves. The
self-concept includes three components:

Self worth (or self-esteem) – what we think about ourselves. Rogers believed feelings of
self-worth developed in early childhood and were formed from the interaction of the
child with the mother and father.

Self-image – How we see ourselves, which is important to good psychological health.

Self-image includes the influence of our body image on inner personality. At a simple
level, we might perceive ourselves as a good or bad person, beautiful or ugly. Self-image
has an effect on how a person thinks, feels and behaves in the world.

Ideal self – This is the person who we would like to be. It consists of our goals and
ambitions in life, and is dynamic – i.e. forever changing. The ideal self in childhood is
not the ideal self in our teens or late twenties etc.

Self Worth and Positive Regard

Carl Rogers (1951) viewed the child as having two basic needs: positive regard from other
people and self-worth.

How we think about ourselves, our feelings of self-worth are of fundamental importance both to
psychological health and to the likelihood that we can achieve goals and ambitions in life and
achieve self-actualization.

Self-worth may be seen as a continuum from very high to very low.  For Carl Rogers (1959) a
person who has high self-worth, that is, has confidence and positive feelings about him or
herself, faces challenges in life, accepts failure and unhappiness at times, and is open with
people.

A person with low self-worth may avoid challenges in life, not accept that life can be painful and
unhappy at times, and will be defensive and guarded with other people.
Rogers believed feelings of self-worth developed in early childhood and were formed from the
interaction of the child with the mother and father. As a child grows older, interactions with
significant others will affect feelings of self-worth.

Rogers believed that we need to be regarded positively by others; we need to feel valued,
respected, treated with affection and loved. Positive regard is to do with how other people
evaluate and judge us in social interaction. Rogers made a distinction between unconditional
positive regard and conditional positive regard.

Unconditional positive regard is where parents, significant others (and the humanist
therapist) accepts and loves the person for what he or she is.  Positive regard is not
withdrawn if the person does something wrong or makes a mistake. 

The consequences of unconditional positive regard are that the person feels free to try
things out and make mistakes, even though this may lead to getting it worse at times. 
People who are able to self-actualize are more likely to have received unconditional
positive regard from others, especially their parents in childhood.

Conditional positive regard is where positive regard, praise and approval, depend upon
the child, for example, behaving in ways that the parents think correct.  Hence the child is
not loved for the person he or she is, but on condition that he or she behaves only in ways
approved by the parent(s). 

At the extreme, a person who constantly seeks approval from other people is likely only
to have experienced conditional positive regard as a child.

A person’s ideal self may not be consistent with what actually happens in life and experiences of
the person. Hence, a difference may exist between a person’s ideal self and actual experience.
This is called incongruence.

Where a person’s ideal self and actual experience are consistent or very similar, a state of
congruence exists. Rarely, if ever, does a total state of congruence exist; all people experience a
certain amount of incongruence.
The development of congruence is dependent on unconditional positive regard. Carl Rogers
believed that for a person to achieve self-actualization they must be in a state of congruence.

According to Rogers, we want to feel, experience and behave in ways which are consistent with
our self-image and which reflect what we would like to be like, our ideal-self.

The closer our self-image and ideal-self are to each other, the more consistent or congruent we
are and the higher our sense of self-worth. A person is said to be in a state of incongruence if
some of the totality of their experience is unacceptable to them and is denied or distorted in the
self-image.

Incongruence is "a discrepancy between the actual experience of the organism and the self-
picture of the individual insofar as it represents that experience.

As we prefer to see ourselves in ways that are consistent with our self-image, we may use
defense mechanisms like denial or repression in order to feel less threatened by some of what we
consider to be our undesirable feelings.  A person whose self-concept is incongruent with her or
his real feelings and experiences will defend because the truth hurts.

"When I look at the world I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic."

"The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to
judge it" (Rogers, 1961, p. 351).
"I have gradually come to one negative conclusion about the good life. It seems to me that the
good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or
nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted or fulfilled or
actualized. To use psychological terms, it is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction,
or homeostasis" (Rogers, 1967, p. 185-186).

"The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination" (Rogers, 1967,
p. 187).

Rogers, C. (1951). Client-centered therapy: Its current practice, implications and theory.
London: Constable.

Rogers, C. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships as developed

in the client-centered framework. In (ed.) S. Koch, Psychology: A study of a science. Vol. 3:
Formulations of the person and the social context. New York: McGraw Hill.

Rogers, C. R. (1961). On Becoming a person: A psychotherapists view of psychotherapy.

Houghton Mifflin.

Rogers, C. R., Stevens, B., Gendlin, E. T., Shlien, J. M., & Van Dusen, W. (1967). Person to
person: The problem of being human: A new trend in psychology. Lafayette, CA: Real People
Press.

Saul Bellow
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Saul Bellow
 Solomon Bellows
Born 10 June 1915
Lachine, Quebec, Canada

5 April 2005 (aged 89)

Died
Brookline, Massachusetts, United States

Occupation Writer

Nationality Canadian/American

University of Chicago
Alma mater Northwestern University
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Nobel Prize in Literature

1976
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Notable 1976
awards National Medal of Arts
1988
National Book Award
1954, 1965, 1971

Spouse Anita Goshkin (1937–56) (1916-1986),

Alexandra (Sondra) Tschacbasov (1956–
 59), Susan Glassman (1961–64), Alexandra
Bagdasar Ionescu Tulcea (1974–85), Janis
Freedman (1989–2005)

Signature

Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 June 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-American
writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for
Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.[1] He is the only writer to win the National Book
Award for Fiction three times[2] and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal
for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.[3]

In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich
picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic
episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a
commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications
that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age."[4]
His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King,
Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded
as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a "huge literary influence."[5]

Bellow said that of all his characters Eugene Henderson, of Henderson the Rain King, was the
one most like himself.[6] Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid, a "thick-necked" rowdy, and an
immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal
characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle "to overcome not just ghetto
conditions but also ghetto psychoses."[7][8] Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all
wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde, the dean in "The Dean's December") called "the big-
scale insanities of the 20th century." This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" (a phrase
from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a "ferocious assimilation of
learning" (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility.
Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows[9][10] in Lachine, Quebec, two years after his parents,
Lescha (née Gordin) and Abraham Bellows,[11] emigrated from Saint Petersburg, Russia. [9][10]
Bellow's family was Lithuanian-Jewish;[12][13] his father was born in Vilnius. Bellow celebrated
his birthday in June, although he may have been born in July (in the Jewish community, it was
customary to record the Hebrew date of birth, which does not always coincide with the
Gregorian calendar).[14] Of his family's emigration, Bellow wrote:

The retrospective was strong in me because of my parents. They were both full of the notion that
they were falling, falling. They had been prosperous cosmopolitans in Saint Petersburg. My
mother could never stop talking about the family dacha, her privileged life, and how all that was
now gone. She was working in the kitchen. Cooking, washing, mending... There had been
servants in Russia... But you could always transpose from your humiliating condition with the
help of a sort of embittered irony.[15]

A period of illness from a respiratory infection at age eight both taught him self-reliance (he was
a very fit man despite his sedentary occupation) and provided an opportunity to satisfy his
hunger for reading: reportedly, he decided to be a writer when he first read Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

When Bellow was nine, his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood on the West Side
of Chicago, the city that formed the backdrop of many of his novels.[10] Bellow's father,
Abraham, had become an onion importer. He also worked in a bakery, as a coal delivery man,
and as a bootlegger.[10] Bellow's mother, Liza, died when he was 17. He was left with his father
and brother Maurice. His mother was deeply religious, and wanted her youngest son, Saul, to
become a rabbi or a concert violinist. But he rebelled against what he later called the "suffocating
orthodoxy" of his religious upbringing, and he began writing at a young age.[10] Bellow's lifelong
love for the Bible began at four when he learned Hebrew. Bellow also grew up reading William
Shakespeare and the great Russian novelists of the 19th century.[10] In Chicago, he took part in
anthroposophical studies at the Anthroposophical Society of Chicago.[16] Bellow attended Tuley
High School on Chicago's west side where he befriended fellow writer Isaac Rosenfeld. In his
1959 novel Henderson the Rain King, Bellow modeled the character King Dahfu on Rosenfeld.
[17]

Bellow attended the University of Chicago but later transferred to Northwestern University. He
originally wanted to study literature, but he felt the English department was anti-Jewish. Instead,
he graduated with honors in anthropology and sociology.[18] It has been suggested Bellow's study
of anthropology had an influence on his literary style, and anthropological references pepper his
works.[citation needed] Bellow later did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Paraphrasing Bellow's description of his close friend Allan Bloom (see Ravelstein), John
Podhoretz has said that both Bellow and Bloom "inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us
breathe air."[19]

In the 1930s, Bellow was part of the Chicago branch of the Works Progress Administration
Writer's Project, which included such future Chicago literary luminaries as Richard Wright and
Nelson Algren. Many of the writers were radical: if they were not members of the Communist
Party USA, they were sympathetic to the cause. Bellow was a Trotskyist, but because of the
greater numbers of Stalinist-leaning writers he had to suffer their taunts.[20]

In 1941 Bellow became a naturalized US citizen, after discovering upon attempting to enlist in
the armed forces that he had immigrated to the United States illegally as a child.[21] [22] In 1943,
Maxim Lieber was his literary agent.

During World War II, Bellow joined the merchant marine and during his service he completed
his first novel, Dangling Man (1944) about a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted for the
war.

From 1946 through 1948 Bellow taught at the University of Minnesota, living on
Commonwealth Avenue, in St. Paul, Minnesota.[23]

In 1948, Bellow was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to move to Paris,
where he began writing The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Critics have remarked on the
resemblance between Bellow's picaresque novel and the great 17th Century Spanish classic Don
Quixote.[citation needed] The book starts with one of American literature's most famous opening
paragraphs,[24] and it follows its titular character through a series of careers and encounters, as he
lives by his wits and his resolve. Written in a colloquial yet philosophical style, The Adventures
of Augie March established Bellow's reputation as a major author.

In 1958, Bellow once again taught at the University of Minnesota. During this time, he and his
wife Sasha received psychoanalysis from University of Minnesota Psychology Professor Paul
Meehl.[25]

In the spring term of 1961 he taught creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico at Río
Piedras.[26] One of his students was William Kennedy, who was encouraged by Bellow to write
fiction.

Return to Chicago and mid-career

Bellow lived in New York City for a number of years, but he returned to Chicago in 1962 as a
professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The committee's
goal was to have professors work closely with talented graduate students on a multi-disciplinary
approach to learning. Bellow taught on the committee for more than 30 years, alongside his close
friend, the philosopher Allan Bloom.

There were also other reasons for Bellow's return to Chicago, where he moved into the Hyde
Park neighborhood with his third wife, Susan Glassman. Bellow found Chicago vulgar but vital,
and more representative of America than New York.[27] He was able to stay in contact with old
high school friends and a broad cross-section of society. In a 1982 profile, Bellow's
neighborhood was described as a high-crime area in the city's center, and Bellow maintained he
had to live in such a place as a writer and "stick to his guns."[28]
Bellow hit the bestseller list in 1964 with his novel Herzog. Bellow was surprised at the
commercial success of this cerebral novel about a middle-aged and troubled college professor
who writes letters to friends, scholars and the dead, but never sends them. Bellow returned to his
exploration of mental instability, and its relationship to genius, in his 1975 novel Humboldt's
Gift. Bellow used his late friend and rival, the brilliant but self-destructive poet Delmore
Schwartz, as his model for the novel's title character, Von Humboldt Fleisher.[29] Bellow also
used Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, anthroposophy, as a theme in the book, having attended a
study group in Chicago. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1969.[30]

Nobel Prize and later career

Propelled by the success of Humboldt's Gift, Bellow won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976. In
the 70-minute address he gave to an audience in Stockholm, Sweden, Bellow called on writers to
be beacons for civilization and awaken it from intellectual torpor.[29]

While sales of Bellow's first few novels were modest, that turned around with Herzog. Bellow
continued teaching well into his old age, enjoying its human interaction and exchange of ideas.
He taught at Yale University, University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton
University, University of Puerto Rico, University of Chicago, Bard College and Boston
University, where he co-taught a class with James Wood ('modestly absenting himself' when it
was time to discuss Seize the Day). In order to take up his appointment at Boston, Bellow moved
in 1993 from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he died on 5 April 2005, at age 89. He
is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir HeHarim of Brattleboro, Vermont.

Bellow was married five times, with all but his last marriage ending in divorce. His son by his
first marriage, Greg Bellow, became a psychotherapist; Greg Bellow published Saul Bellow’s
Heart: A Son’s Memoir in 2013, nearly a decade after his father's death.[34] Bellow's son by his
second marriage, Adam, published a nonfiction book In Praise of Nepotism in 2003. Bellow's
wives were Anita Goshkin, Alexandra (Sondra) Tsachacbasov, Susan Glassman, Alexandra
Ionescu Tulcea and Janis Freedman. In 1999, when he was 84, Bellow had his fourth child and
first daughter, with Freedman.[35]

While he read voluminously, Bellow also played the violin and followed sports. Work was a
constant for him, but he at times toiled at a plodding pace on his novels, frustrating the
publishing company.[29]

His early works earned him the reputation as a major novelist of the 20th century, and by his
death he was widely regarded as one of the greatest living novelists.[36] He was the first writer to
win three National Book Awards in all award categories.[2] His friend and protege Philip Roth
has said of him, "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two
novelists—William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.

Awards and honors

 1948 Guggenheim Fellowship
  1954 National Book Award for Fiction
 1965 National Book Award for Fiction
 1971 National Book Award for Fiction
 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature
 1980 O. Henry Award
 1986 St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates[52][53]
 1988 National Medal of Arts
 1989 PEN/Malamud Award
 1989 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
 1990 National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American
Letters

Bibliography
For a complete list of works, see Saul Bellow bibliography.

Novels and novellas

 Dangling Man (1944)

 The Victim (1947)
 The Adventures of Augie March (1953), National Book Award for Fiction[54]
 Seize the Day (1956)
 Henderson the Rain King (1959)
 Herzog (1964), National Book Award[55]
 Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), National Book Award[56]
 Humboldt's Gift (1975), winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction[57]
 The Dean's December (1982)
 More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
 A Theft (1989)
 The Bellarosa Connection (1989)
 The Actual (1997)
 Ravelstein (2000)

Short story collections

 Mosby's Memoirs (1968)

 Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984)
 Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (1991)
 Collected Stories (2001)

Plays

 The Last Analysis (1965)

Library of America editions

  Novels 1944–1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March (2003)
 Novels 1956–1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog (2007)
 Novels 1970–1982: Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, The Dean’s December (2010)
 Novels 1984–2000: What Kind of Day Did You Have?, More Die of Heartbreak, A Theft, The
Bellarosa Connection, The Actual, Ravelstein (2014)

Translations

 Gimpel the Fool (1945) by Isaac Bashevis Singer (trans. by Bellow in 1953)

Non-fiction

 To Jerusalem and Back (1976), memoir

 It All Adds Up (1994), essay collection
 Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor (2010), correspondence
 There Is Simply Too Much To Think About (Viking, 2015), collected non-fiction