Define Carl Rogers' personality structures of the self and self-image; describe what is meant by a fully functioning person and contrast this with a person who is incongruent, including the two ways that incongruence can occur; and explain how children develop conditions of worth, how these internalized conditions of worth contribute to incongruence, and why unconditional positive regard is so

important.

What will be an ideal response?

Answers will include that the fully functioning person lives in harmony with his or her deepest feelings and impulses, are open to their experiences, and trust their inner urges and intuitions. Rogers believed that this attitude is most likely to occur when a person receives ample amounts of love and acceptance from others. Rogers' theory emphasizes the self, a flexible and changing perception of personal identity. Much behavior can be understood as an attempt to maintain consistency between our self-image and our actions. Your self-image is a total subjective perception of your body and personality. For example, people who think of themselves as kind tend to be considerate in most situations. Rogers believed that we allow experiences that match our self-image into awareness, where they gradually change the self. Information or feelings inconsistent with the self-image are said to be incongruent. Thus, a person who thinks she is kind but really isn't is in a state of incongruence. In other words, there is a discrepancy between her experiences and her self-image. Experiences seriously incongruent with the self-image can be threatening, and are often distorted or denied conscious recognition. Blocking, denying, or distorting experiences prevents the self from changing and creates a gulf between the self-image and reality. As the self-image grows more unrealistic, the incongruent person becomes confused, vulnerable, dissatisfied, or seriously maladjusted. When your self-image is consistent with what you really think, feel, do, and experience, you are best able to actualize your potentials. Rogers also considered it essential to have congruence between the self-image and the ideal self. The ideal self is similar to Freud's ego ideal. It is an image of the person you would most like to be. Rogers was aware that we never fully attain our ideals. Nevertheless, the greater the gap between the way you see yourself and the way you would like to be, the more tension and anxiety you will experience. Rogers emphasized that to maximize our potentials, we must accept information about ourselves as honestly as possible. Researchers have found that people with a close match between their self-image and ideal self tend to be socially poised, confident, and resourceful. Those with a poor match tend to be depressed, anxious, and insecure. The development of a self-image depends greatly on information from the environment. It begins with a sorting of perceptions and feelings: my body, my nose, I want, I like, etc. Soon, it expands to include self-evaluation: I am a good person, I did something bad, etc. Rogers believed that positive and negative evaluations by others cause children to develop internal standards of evaluation called conditions of worth, in which we learn that some actions win our parents' love and approval, whereas others are rejected. More important, parents may label some feelings as bad or wrong. For example, a child might be told that it is wrong to feel angry toward a brother or sister, even when anger is justified. Learning to evaluate some experiences or feelings as "good" and others as "bad" is directly related to a later capacity for self-esteem, positive self-evaluation, or positive self-regard. To think of yourself as a good, lovable, worthwhile person, your behavior and experiences must match your internal conditions of worth. The problem is that this can cause incongruence by leading to the denial of many true feelings and experiences. Thus, Rogers blamed many adult emotional problems on attempts to live by the standards of others. He believed that congruence and self-actualization are encouraged by replacing conditions of worth with organismic valuing. Organismic valuing is a direct, gut-level response to life that avoids the filtering and distortion of incongruence and involves trusting one's own feelings and perceptions. Organismic valuing is most likely to develop when children