Who’s your favorite person—the person you’d choose to spend your time with on a free afternoon, a long car trip, or the rest of your life? And how do you feel when you’re with this person? Sure, your feelings vary as you gossip, joke, and talk seriously. Yet, if you’re lucky and this person is a really good friend, you consistently feel like yourself. You don’t hide your thoughts or try to make a good impression. You know your friend accepts you for who you are, which gives you the freedom to express your true self.

Freud said little about friendships and experiences of one’s true self. Humanistic theory rectifies this oversight. Humanistic theory is an approach to personality that focuses on people’s thoughts and feelings about themselves and the ways that interpersonal relationships shape those feelings. Humanistic psychologists emphasize people’s conscious experiences (rather than Freud’s emphasis on the unconscious), their search for meaning in life, and their capacity to make choices that can make their lives more meaningful.

In these regards, the humanistic viewpoint is the very opposite of Freud’s. In Freudian theory, the most powerful personality system is the id, which is concerned with gratifying bodily needs. In humanistic theory, the major personality structure is the self, and the major personality process is the individual’s quest to develop a meaningful self-concept. In Freudian theory, most significant personality processes are unconscious. In humanistic theory, conscious self-reflection is key to personality. Finally, Freud treated personality as a kind of machine: a set of parts put in motion by energy. Humanistic psychologists treat people as human beings who, unlike machines, have hopes, plans, dreams, and personal values and whose psychological makeup cannot easily be dissected into separate parts.

Many psychologists contributed to humanistic personality theory. But unique contributions were made by a psychologist from Illinois, Carl Rogers. Rogers first planned to be a minister. His religious training made him aware of people’s struggle to attain a deep sense of personal meaning in their lives (Kirschenbaum, 1979). After studying scientific psychology and receiving training as a psychotherapist, Rogers developed a theory of personality centered on the self.

Rogers was an exceptionally skilled therapist. By listening attentively to his clients, he not only helped them, but also learned from them. The critical lesson he learned was that the overarching question people ask themselves is, “Who am I—what is my true self?” The central personality structure in Rogers’s theory is thus the self.

THE SELF. In Rogers’s humanistic theory of personality, the self refers to people’s conception of who they are. Rogers’s idea is straightforward: Through our daily experiences, we learn about ourselves. We observe our strengths and weaknesses. We learn how we’re similar to and different from other people. We learn what others think of us. When we consciously reflect on all this information, we try to organize it into a coherent portrait of who we really are. The result is the self (or self-concept), an organized set of self-perceptions of our personal qualities. When conducting therapy, Rogers repeatedly heard his clients describe their experiences “through the lens” of the self. When an experience went poorly, they would say, “I was disappointed in myself.” When surprised by their own actions, they’d say, “I wasn’t acting like myself.” These statements caused Rogers to center his theory on the self.

Therapy taught Rogers a second lesson: The self can change. People can alter and improve their self-concept. Just as you change your beliefs about other people when you discover something new about them, you may change your self-concept when you discover something new about yourself. Consider a client of Rogers’s. She reported that “several parts of herself”—an interest in the arts and theatre; a playful, fun-loving style of behavior—had, in recent years, “been lost” (McMillan, 2004, p. 50). Once she rediscovered them, her sense of self changed; she developed a more positive self-concept, that is, a higher sense of self-esteem. In therapy, Rogers provided a supportive relationship in which people could engage in self-discovery and regain their true sense of self (Chapter 15).

ACTUAL AND IDEAL SELF. Rogers identified two aspects of the self: the actual and ideal self. The actual self is people’s perceptions of how they are in the present. The ideal self is a set of self-perceptions about qualities that a person would like to possess; it is a future self that the individual hopes to attain.

The actual and ideal often do not match up. People would like to be a certain kind of person, but when they look in the mirror they see someone else. For instance, you might see yourself as fun-loving and irresponsible, but wish you were responsible and conscientious. If so, Rogers would say you’re experiencing a discrepancy between your actual and ideal self.

Discrepancies between the actual and ideal self produce distress. People feel disappointment in their actual self, guilty about not being better, and worried about ever attaining their ideal. Rather than accepting themselves as they are, they imagine an ideal self—perhaps a thinner, smarter, or richer self—and then criticize themselves for not reaching this ideal. In Rogers’s personality theory, then, the self—not the Freudian id—is the key source of emotion.

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Rogers proposed an optimistic, positive view of personality processes. Rather than emphasizing sexual and aggressive drives, as Freud did, Rogers highlighted people’s desire for self-actualization.

SELF-ACTUALIZATION. In humanistic personality theory, self-actualization is a motivation to enhance one’s psychological state, that is, to achieve a personal meaning in life and attain a state of psychological maturity (Rogers, 1951). Self-actualization is a universal psychological drive. All people, in other words, are inherently motivated toward the attainment of psychological growth and maturity. (In the study of motivation, the humanistic theorist Abraham Maslow similarly proposed a motivating self-actualization need; see Chapter 11.)

Again, it was experiences in therapy that guided Rogers’s theorizing. In case after case, he observed clients recovering from personal setbacks. They fought to improve their psychological lives, and they usually succeeded. Rogers attributed their success to their inner strength—their inherent capacity, and tendency, to overcome problems and attain personal growth. His clients, he concluded, were driven by a motive for self-actualization.

CONDITIONS OF WORTH. If we’re all motivated toward self-actualization, as Rogers suggests, why aren’t we always happy? Why do we experience so much psychological distress?

Rogers’s answer is that people often experience conditions of worth. A condition of worth is a requirement for a person’s behavior; specifically, it is a requirement that must be met if the person is to be fully valued, loved, and respected by others. Imagine, for example, a child who is interested in art, uninterested in sports, and whose parents are big sports fans. If the parents indicate, by their words or actions, that the child will be fully loved and respected only by excelling at sports rather than art, then they are imposing a condition of worth. The parents’ behavior may cause the child to reject his interest in art, to pursue sports instead, and thus to lose touch with an aspect of his true self.

Contrast this situation with one in which the parents love and respect their child no matter what his interests may be. In this case, the child experiences unconditional positive regard, a consistent expression of respect and acceptance.

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Rogerian theory predicts that these different types of relationships have different effects on personality development. Unconditional positive regard enables people to explore the world confidently and to develop their true self. People know that they can try out new activities, take chances, and sometimes fail without losing the acceptance of others. By contrast, when relationships feature conditions of worth, people are forced to deny aspects of their true self in order to gain the acceptance of others. They become defensive and cautious, lose touch with their true self, and fail to grow toward self-actualization. Conditions of worth are therefore the ultimate source of distress.

Unlike Freud, Rogers used the methods of psychological science to assess personality in an efficient, reliable manner. Because the central structure in Rogers’s theory is the self, his main assessment goal was to assess self-concept.

ASSESSING SELF-CONCEPT. Rogers did not personally invent a method for assessing self-concept. Instead, he and his colleagues used an existing method, the Q-sort technique (Stephenson, 1953). The Q-sort is an assessment procedure in which people indicate whether each of a series of words and phrases describes them; they categorize or “sort” statements according to their self-descriptiveness.

When taking a Q-sort, one receives a large set of cards with printed statements such as “I am highly anxious” or “I do not easily express anger.” Test takers sort cards along a continuum ranging from “most characteristic of me” to “least characteristic of me” (Figure 13.3). This enables psychologists to identify clusters of characteristics that are most and least descriptive of the individual test taker, from that individual’s own perspective.

The Q-sort can be used to measure discrepancies between the two aspects of self identified by Rogers, the actual and ideal self. Psychologists ask participants to complete the Q-sort twice; participants sort the personality statements according to their conception of their (1) actual self and (2) ideal self. By comparing the two Q-sorts, psychologists can gauge the degree of discrepancy between these two aspects of self-concept.

TRY THIS!

The Q-sort should seem familiar to you. It is the personality assessment method you completed in this chapter's Try This! activity. By comparing your own Q-sorts, you could see the relation between your actual and ideal self.

Q-sort measures have proven valuable in a number of areas of research, such as the study of psychological disorders (Fowler & Lilienfeld, 2007) and personality development (Block, 1961). One creative application of the method used Q-sorts to study the personalities of parents and their children (Zentner & Renaud, 2007). Parents and children ages 15 to 19 categorized Q-sort statements describing their actual personality and their ideal life goals (e.g., “having a high status career,” “having children,” “having fun,” “working to promote the welfare of others”). A comparison of parents’ ratings to their children’s identified a gender difference: Girls’ ideal self-concepts were more similar to their parents than were those of boys. Boys, in other words, were more likely to develop personal aspirations unlike those of their parents.

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Rogers’s humanistic theory was historically significant for personality psychology. It shifted the field’s focus from the unconscious mind to conscious thoughts about the self, and from animalistic drives to the uniquely human tendency to actualize the self. Rogers developed a positive, uplifting psychology that drew attention to people’s capacity to recover from setbacks and attain meaningful lives. The enduring importance of his thinking is evident from recent developments in psychology. Many psychologists today contribute to a positive psychology movement that focuses attention on human strengths, virtues, and conditions of life that enable people to develop optimally (Gable & Haidt, 2005; Keyes, Fredrickson, & Park, 2012). These are precisely the themes highlighted by Rogers. If he were still alive, he surely would be pleased to see twenty-first-century psychologists focusing on positive psychological growth.

The main limitation of Rogers’s theory is that it is not sufficiently comprehensive. There are significant aspects of personality about which Rogers’s theory says little. One is personality’s “biological side”—individual differences in personality that may be inherited and evident early in life. As knowledge of human genetics grew in the second half of the twentieth century, researchers became increasingly interested in the biological foundations of personality. This interest triggered the development of a third approach to personality, trait theory.

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CULTURAL OPPORTUNITIES