Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIII. Humanistic/Existential
Theories- Rogers:
Person−Centered Theory
(^324) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
Barriers to Psychological Health
Not everyone becomes a psychologically healthy person. Rather, most people expe-
rience conditions of worth, incongruence, defensiveness, and disorganization.
Conditions of Worth
Instead of receiving unconditional positive regard, most people receive conditions
of worth;that is, they perceive that their parents, peers, or partners love and accept
them only if they meet those people’s expectations and approval. “A condition of
worth arises when the positive regard of a significant other is conditional, when the
individual feels that in some respects he [or she] is prized and in others not” (Rogers,
1959, p. 209).
Conditions of worth become the criterion by which we accept or reject our ex-
periences. We gradually assimilate into our self-structure the attitudes we perceive
others expressing toward us, and in time we begin to evaluate experiences on this
basis. If we see that others accept us regardless of our actions, then we come to be-
lieve that we are prized unconditionally. But if we perceive that some of our behav-
iors are approved and some disapproved, then we see that our worth is conditional.
Eventually, we may come to believe those appraisals of others that are consistent
with our negative view of self, ignore our own sensory and visceral perceptions, and
gradually become estranged from our real or organismic self.
From early childhood forward, most of us learn to disregard our own organis-
mic valuations and to look beyond ourselves for direction and guidance. To the
degree that we introject the values of others, that is, accept conditions of worth, we
tend to be incongruent or out of balance. Other people’s values can be assimilated
only in distorted fashion or at the risk of creating disequilibrium and conflict within
the self.
Our perceptions of other people’s view of us are called external evaluations.
These evaluations, whether positive or negative, do not foster psychological health
but, rather, prevent us from being completely open to our own experiences. For ex-
ample, we may reject pleasurable experiences because we believe that other people
do not approve of them. When our own experiences are distrusted, we distort our
awareness of them, thus solidifying the discrepancy between our organismic evalua-
tion and the values we have introjected from others. As a result, we experience in-
congruence (Rogers, 1959).
Incongruence
We have seen that the organism and the self are two separate entities that may or may
not be congruent with one another. Also recall that actualization refers to the organ-
ism’s tendency to move toward fulfillment, whereas self-actualization is the desire of
the perceived self to reach fulfillment. These two tendencies are sometimes at vari-
ance with one another.
Psychological disequilibrium begins when we fail to recognize our organismic
experiences as self-experiences: that is, when we do not accurately symbolize or-
ganismic experiences into awareness because they appear to be inconsistent with our
emerging self-concept. This incongruencebetween our self-concept and our organ-
318 Part III Humanistic/Existential Theories