The Humanistic

Perspective
- The third force
Carl Rogers

(1902–1987)
• Carl Rogers developed person-centered
counseling and psychotherapy in the United
States roughly between 1940 and 1990

• His approach was born in an era when science

pervaded Western thinking, when
psychoanalysis dominated clinical psychology

• Concurrently with the emergence of

behaviorism
• He had to fight the behaviorism of academic
psychology as well as the psychoanalysis that ruled
the clinical world

• However, one of his biggest battles was with

psychiatry, a battle that he described as “an all-out
war” (Rogers, 1980, p. 55).
• One of the most influential figures in
revolutionizing the direction of counseling
theory and practice

• 2006 survey conducted by Psychotherapy

Networker (“The Top 10,” 2007) identified Carl
Rogers as the single most influential
psychotherapist of the past quarter century

• Founder of psychotherapy research - strong

interest in research—he was the first person to
tape-record actual therapy sessions
• Carl R. Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, in Oak
Park, Illinois

• Four of six siblings

• Brought up in a conservative Protestant family

 Idea of human nature
 Freud made Id the locus of most powerful motivation in
the personality, inherently selfish, antisocial and
primitive.
 Rogers believed that one of the most basic principles of
Human nature is that human motivations and tendencies
are positive
 We are essentially forward looking, sensitively humane
and good.
 Negative emotions in us are a result of frustration of our
needs/desires and are not at the core of human nature.
 Basic constructs and postulates
• All human being have and are motivated by a
positive force, an innate growth potential termed
by Rogers as actualizing tendency.

• He defines it as “The inherent tendency of the

human beings to develop all its capacities in ways
which serve to maintain or enhance the human
being”
 Basic constructs and postulates
• This includes both drive reducing and drive
increasing behaviors.

• Drive reducing: hunger, thirst, sex, oxygen

deprivation.

• Drive increasing: tension increasing behaviors-

curiosity, creativity, and the willingness to undergo
painful learning experiences in order to become more
effective and independent
 Basic constructs and postulates
• Actualizing tendency- only motive needed to
account for all our behavior, whether to fill an
empty stomach, to produce children, or to
become independent and healthy.
 Self-Actualization
• Self-actualization was a term first
popularized by Kurt Goldstein

• the psychological process aimed at

maximizing the use of a person’s abilities and
resources. This process may vary from one
person to another
• In other words, for our purposes, self-
actualization can be thought of as the full
realization of one’s creative, intellectual, or
social potential.
 The self and self concept
• The idea of a ‘self’ is central to Rogers’
theory of personality
• This self is the real inner life of the person - It
is present from birth
• Unlike the real inner self, the self-concept
develops through interactions with others:
‘you are a brave boy’, ‘aren’t you an
observant child’, ‘why are you always so
naughty?’.
 Defenses
• Experiences that serve as a threatening reminder of
the incongruence (between the self concept and the
experiential reality) between the self-concept and
organismic experience are likely to be defended
against by distorting them, or (less frequently) by
blocking them from consciousness.
• Even such positive feelings as love or success may be
defended against if they fail to agree with the self-
concept.
 Critique
• Rogers has been criticized for an overly optimistic and
simplified view of human nature. Actualizing all of our
innermost potentials is desirable only if the deepest
levels of personality are healthy and constructive
• Yet it seems doubtful that an inherently peaceful and
cooperative species would so frequently engage in war,
crime, and other destructive behaviors solely because
of parental pathogenic behaviors and introjected
conditions of worth.
• Fails to explain more precisely his proposed innate
potential for actualization.