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summary of the humanistic theories of personality
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Humanistic and existential PSYCHOLOGY A perspective that emphasizes looking at the whole individual and stresses concepts such as free will, self-efficacy, and self-actualization. Rather than concentrating on dysfunction, humanistic psychology strives to help people fulfill their potential and maximize their well-being. Focuses on psychological growth, free will, and personal awareness. Adopts holistic approach to human existence and pays special attention to such phenomena as creativity, will, and positive human potential View the person as an active, creative, experiencing human being who lives in the present. Humanistic and existential approaches share a belief that people have the capacity for self-awareness and choice.
Pillars of Humanistic Theory Abraham Maslow Carl Roger
Abrahammaslow’s motivation theory • His unique contribution is drawing upon his investigation of healthy and creative persons to arrive as certain formulations regarding personality. • He thought the heart of learning lies in experiences, and that psychologically speaking people’s fulfillment or “self-actualization” is the “development of human potential,” • To Maslow, reason, dignity, worth, nobility are key concerns and foundations o Humanistic Psychology.
Abrahammaslow Propounded a theory of human motivation that differentiates between basic needs & metaneeds His theory of human motivation suggests a hierarchical principle - takes both biological and social foundation of human motives into consideration. According to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the needs must be achieved in order. For instance, one would be unable to fulfill their safety needs if their physiological needs have not been met.
Actions are motivated in order achieve certain needs. This hierarchy suggests that people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other, more advanced needs. As people progress up the pyramid, needs become increasingly psychological and social. Soon, the need for love, friendship, and intimacy become important. Further up the pyramid, the need for personal esteem and feelings of accomplishment take priority. Maslow emphasized the importance of self-actualization, which is a process of growing and developing as a person in order to achieve individual potential.
FIVE LEVELS OF THE HIERARCHY OF NEEDS • Physiological Needs • These include the most basic needs that are vital to survival, such as the need for water, air, food, and sleep. Maslow believed that these needs are the most basic and instinctive needs in the hierarchy because all needs become secondary until these physiological needs are met. • Security Needs • These include needs for safety and security. Security needs are important for survival, but they are not as demanding as the physiological needs. • Examples of security needs include a desire for steady employment, health care, safe neighborhoods, and shelter from the environment.
FIVE LEVELS OF THE HIERARCHY OF NEEDS • Social Needs • These include needs for belonging, love, and affection. Maslow described these needs as less basic than physiological and security needs. • Relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments, and families help fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance, as does involvement in social, community, or religious groups. • Esteem Needs • After the first three needs have been satisfied, esteem needs becomes increasingly important. • These include the need for things that reflect on self-esteem, personal worth, social recognition, and accomplishment.
FIVE LEVELS OF THE HIERARCHY OF NEEDS Self-actualizing Needs This is the highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Self-actualizing people are self-aware, concerned with personal growth, less concerned with the opinions of others, and interested fulfilling their potential. "What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization... It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming."
Types of Needs Abraham Maslow believed that these needs are similar to instincts and play a major role in motivating behavior. Deficiency needs Physiological, security, social, and esteem needs are deficiency needs(also known as D-needs), these needs arise due to deprivation. Satisfying these lower-level needs is important in order to avoid unpleasant feelings or consequences. Maslow termed the highest-level of the pyramid as growth needs (also known as being needs or B-needs). Growth needs Does not stem from a lack of something, but rather from a desire to grow as a person.
PROGRESSION IF LOWER NEEDS ARE SATISFIED 5 GROWTH NEEDS 4 DEFICIENCY NEEDS : 3 2 1
Maslow’s contribution • Peak Experience • Are especially joyous and exciting moments in the life of every individual. • Feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision; the feeling of being; mystical in nature; somehow gave a feeling of transcendence. • Jonah Complex • It is the “ the fear of one’s own greatness ..evasion of one’s destiny... running away from one’s talents”. (Maslow, Hergenhahn, & Olson, 2003) • The Jonah Complex is the fear of success which prevents self-actualization, or the realization of one’s potential. It is the fear of one’s own greatness, the evasion of one’s destiny, or the avoidance of exercising one’s talents. • Everyone has a voice inside them that tells them they can be something great. Many of us believe that, if given the right opportunities and resources, we can be as successful or as great as our predecessors.
Self-actualizing characters • Maslow advocated a holistic analytic approach to study the total person. His theory is concerned with growth motivation, which can be gained through self actualization. • The value of self-actualizing people include: • truth, • goodness, • beauty • spontaneity, • Simplicity • playfulness or humor, • justice and order, • transcendence of dichotomies totality.
Characteristics of Self-actualizing people • More Efficient Perception of Reality • Acceptance of Self, others, and Nature • Spontaneity, simplicity and Naturalness • Problem-centering • The need for privacy • Autonomy • Continued Freshness of Appreciation • The Peak Experience • Profound Interpersonal Relations • The Democratic character structure • Discrimination between means and ends • Sense of Humor • Creativeness • Resistance to Enculturation
Carl rogers – person centered theory • Humanistic Psychology - unique qualities of human. • potential for growth, hopeful and optimistic • Organismic Theory - individual motivated by one sovereign drive – SELF- ACTUALIZATION • unity, coherence, integration of a normal personality • Ideally, all individuals evaluate their experiences using the organismic valuing process. • Healthy people use these processes as guides to living their lives. This means that people can trust their feelings.
Person-centered theory • According to Rogers all people live in a subjective world, their own subjective reality, called their phenomenological field. • In Rogers' view, the self is the central ingredient in human personality and personal adjustment • His theory is basically phenomenological in character • Growth occurs when individuals confront problems, struggle to master them, and through that struggle develop new aspects of their skills, capacities, views about life. • Life, therefore, is an endless process of creatively moving forward, even if only in small ways.
Nineteen propositions All individuals (organisms) exist in a continually changing world of experience (phenomenal field) of which they are the center. The organism reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived. This perceptual field is "reality" for the individual. The organism reacts as an organized whole to this phenomenal field. A portion of the total perceptual field gradually becomes differentiated as the self. As a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluative interaction with others, the structure of the self is formed—an organized, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the "I" or the "me", together with values attached to these concepts. The organism has one basic tendency and striving—to actualize, maintain and enhance the experiencing organism. The best vantage point for understanding behavior is from the internal frame of reference of the individual. Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced, in the field as perceived. Emotion accompanies, and in general facilitates, such goal directed behavior, the kind of emotion being related to the perceived significance of the behavior for the maintenance and enhancement of the organism. The values attached to experiences, and the values that are a part of the self-structure, in some instances, are values experienced directly by the organism, and in some instances are values introjected or taken over from others, but perceived in distorted fashion, as if they had been experienced directly.
Nineteen propositions As experiences occur in the life of the individual, they are either, a) symbolized, perceived and organized into some relation to the self, b) ignored because there is no perceived relationship to the self structure, c) denied symbolization or given distorted symbolization because the experience is inconsistent with the structure of the self. Most of the ways of behaving that are adopted by the organism are those that are consistent with the concept of self. In some instances, behavior may be brought about by organic experiences and needs which have not been symbolized. Such behavior may be inconsistent with the structure of the self but in such instances the behavior is not "owned" by the individual. Psychological adjustment exists when the concept of the self is such that all the sensory and visceral experiences of the organism are, or may be, assimilated on a symbolic level into a consistent relationship with the concept of self. Psychological maladjustment exists when the organism denies awareness of significant sensory and visceral experiences, which consequently are not symbolized and organized into the gestalt of the self structure. When this situation exists, there is a basic or potential psychological tension. Any experience which is inconsistent with the organization of the structure of the self may be perceived as a threat, and the more of these perceptions there are, the more rigidly the self structure is organized to maintain itself. Under certain conditions, involving primarily complete absence of threat to the self structure, experiences which are inconsistent with it may be perceived and examined, and the structure of self revised to assimilate and include such experiences. When the individual perceives and accepts into one consistent and integrated system all his sensory and visceral experiences, then he is necessarily more understanding of others and is more accepting of others as separate individuals. As the individual perceives and accepts into his self structure more of his organic experiences, he finds that he is replacing his present value system—based extensively on introjections which have been distortedly symbolized—with a continuing organismic valuing process.
development of personality • Organismic self- • possess inherent actualizing tendency (to expand to grow) • Subject to strong influence from social environment (parents/significant other) • Has strong need for affection, love, acceptance (positive regards). • In childhood - parents provide this, but some parent make positive regard Conditional-this creates conditions of worth and child's block out of His self-concept those experiences that makes them unworthy of love. • If given unconditional love -less need to block out unworthy experience and grow up to be the kind of person he wants to be (Real Self). • Unconditional love foster CONGRUENCE • Conditional love foster INCONGRUENCE.
Development of personality • Self or self-concept • Our inner personality • Influenced by the experiences a person has in their life, and their interpretations of those experiences. • Two primary sources that influence our self-concept: • Childhood experiences • Evaluation by others • Component of Self-Concept • Self-image • Ideal self • Self-worth/Self-Esteem
Self-worth or self-esteem Comprises 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.
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-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 affects how a person thinks, feels and behaves in the world.
If child grow up believing that affection from others is very conditional – more and more distortion in child’s experience in order to feel worthy of acceptance. • Self-concept evolves throughout child and adolescence as it gradually stabilizes person • Behave consistent with it • Resistant to information that contradicts self- concept. • Contradictory information threatens- principal cause of anxiety. • To ward off anxiety, people behave defensively (ignore, deny twist reality) to protect and perpetuate self-concept. • Defensiveness is the protection of the self-concept against anxiety and threat by using denial or distortion, (two major defense mechanism), allowing us to block out experiences that otherwise would cause unpleasant anxiety or threat. • Whenever these defenses, (denial or distortion) fail or are insufficient to block out incongruence, people become disorganized.
In general, organismic theory feels that potentialities of organism – If allowed to unfold in an orderly manner by an appropriate environment (warm, affectionate, accepting) will produce, healthy, integrated personality. • Malignant environment forces – cripple /destroy the person. • Nothing is inherent “bad” in the organism – It is made bad by an inadequate environment.
ASSESSMENT TASK 1 (for Midterm) The 19 propositions are important pillars in Carl Rogers Person-centered theory. They provide us with an elegant theory of how and under what circumstances people change, and why certain qualities of relationship promote that change. Explain and elaborate the proposition that was assigned to you by using personal experience as an example. Your example should prove this proposition Write your answer in a ½ sheet of paper and submit it on March 30, 2021.
