Carl Rogers Glossary
Instructor's addition: This glossary was created as a supplemental course resource and was not part of Dr. C. George Boeree's original text.
Foundations of Rogers' Theory
- Person-Centered Theory
- Rogers' humanistic approach to personality emphasizing personal growth, subjective experience, the self, and the natural tendency of living organisms to develop their potential.
- Phenomenological Perspective
- An approach emphasizing the person's subjective experience of reality. To understand a person, it is important to understand how that person experiences and interprets the world rather than relying only on an outside observer's description.
- Phenomenal Field
- The total world of experience as it is perceived and experienced by an individual. Behavior is influenced by the person's subjective experience of events rather than simply by external circumstances.
- Actualizing Tendency
- Rogers' central motivational principle: the built-in tendency of living organisms to develop, maintain, enhance, and fulfill their capacities and potentials.
- Actualization
- The continuing process through which an organism develops its capabilities and moves toward greater complexity, independence, flexibility, and fulfillment.
- Organismic Valuing Process
- The natural process through which a person evaluates experiences according to whether they support or interfere with growth and actualization.
- Organismic Valuing
- Rogers' term for the organism's natural tendency to value experiences that support growth and avoid experiences that interfere with healthy development.
Positive Regard and Conditions of Worth
- Positive Regard
- Love, affection, attention, acceptance, nurturance, and other forms of positive response received from other people.
- Positive Self-Regard
- A positive attitude toward oneself, including feelings of self-worth, self-respect, and acceptance. Rogers believed positive self-regard develops partly through receiving positive regard from other people.
- Unconditional Positive Regard
- Acceptance and valuing of a person without requiring that the person meet particular conditions in order to be worthy of respect and care. It does not mean approving every behavior.
- Conditional Positive Regard
- Acceptance, affection, or approval that is provided only when a person behaves according to particular expectations or standards.
- Conditions of Worth
- Standards a person learns must be satisfied in order to receive approval, affection, or a sense of personal worth. These conditions may lead people to ignore their own organismic experiences in order to gain acceptance from others.
- Conditional Positive Self-Regard
- Valuing oneself only when particular conditions or standards are met. The person internalizes the conditions of worth originally imposed by other people and begins applying those conditions to the self.
The Self and Incongruity
- Self
- The organized and changing pattern of perceptions, beliefs, and experiences that a person recognizes as describing who he or she is.
- Self-Concept
- The person's organized perception and understanding of the self, including beliefs about personal characteristics, abilities, relationships, and identity.
- Real Self
- In Boeree's presentation of Rogers, the aspect of the person grounded in the actualizing tendency and organismic valuing. It represents the person one can become when growth is not excessively distorted by conditions of worth.
- Ideal Self
- The image of the person one believes one should be. When this image is based heavily upon external conditions of worth, it may become unrealistic and increasingly distant from actual experience.
- Congruence
- A condition of consistency or harmony between a person's experience, awareness, and sense of self. Greater congruence allows experiences to be recognized and accepted without excessive distortion or denial.
- Incongruity (Incongruence)
- A discrepancy between a person's actual experience and the self the person believes he or she must be. Greater incongruity produces greater psychological tension and vulnerability.
- Neurosis
- In Rogers' theory, a state of significant incongruity in which a person is increasingly out of touch with organismic experience and the actualizing tendency.
Threat, Anxiety, and Defense
- Threat
- The perception that an experience is inconsistent with the existing self-concept and may expose or increase incongruity.
- Anxiety
- The emotional signal that an experience may threaten the person's existing self-concept or reveal an important incongruity.
- Defense
- A psychological process used to protect the existing self-concept from experiences that are perceived as threatening.
- Denial
- A defense in which a threatening experience is prevented from entering awareness or is excluded from conscious perception.
- Perceptual Distortion
- A defense in which a threatening experience is reinterpreted or altered in perception so that it appears consistent with the person's existing self-concept and therefore less threatening.
- Psychological Maladjustment
- A condition in which important experiences are denied or distorted because they conflict with the person's self-concept, increasing incongruity and interfering with healthy actualization.
- Psychosis
- In Rogers' explanation, a severe breakdown that may occur when defenses can no longer protect an increasingly incongruent self. The person's previously organized sense of self may become fragmented and unstable.
The Fully Functioning Person
- Fully Functioning Person
- Rogers' description of a psychologically healthy person who is open to experience, engaged with the present, trusting of organismic experience, aware of personal freedom and responsibility, and capable of living creatively.
- Congruent with Reality
- The ability to perceive and accept experiences as they actually are rather than distorting or denying them to protect one's self-concept. A fully functioning person is open to reality, including personal feelings and experiences, even when they are uncomfortable.
- Openness to Experience
- The willingness and ability to experience feelings, thoughts, and events accurately without automatically distorting or denying them in order to protect the self-concept.
- Existential Living
- Living openly in the present rather than allowing the past or expectations about the future to dominate present experience. Past experiences can be remembered and future events planned for without losing contact with the present.
- Organismic Trusting
- Trusting one's organismic valuing process when making choices. This requires openness to experience and contact with the actualizing tendency rather than simply acting on every immediate impulse.
- Experiential Freedom
- The subjective experience of having meaningful choices and accepting responsibility for those choices, even though human freedom exists within real biological, social, and environmental limitations.
- Creativity
- The ability to respond flexibly and constructively to life and to participate actively in the world. Rogers viewed creativity broadly, including contributions to relationships, work, society, art, science, and the growth of other people.
Person-Centered Therapy
- Non-Directive Therapy
- Rogers' early name for his therapeutic approach. The therapist avoids directing the client's decisions and instead provides an environment in which the client can explore experiences and determine the direction of change.
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Rogers' later name for his therapeutic approach, emphasizing that the client rather than the therapist is the primary agent responsible for discovering problems, exploring alternatives, and determining the direction of personal change.
- Person-Centered Therapy
- The broader modern name for Rogers' approach, emphasizing the person's capacity for growth within a relationship characterized by genuineness, empathic understanding, and unconditional positive regard.
- Rogerian Therapy
- A commonly used name for the therapeutic approach developed by Carl Rogers.
- Supportive, Not Reconstructive
- Rogers' view that therapy should provide the psychological conditions that allow clients to discover and direct their own growth rather than having the therapist reconstruct their personalities for them.
- Reflection
- A therapeutic response in which the therapist communicates an understanding of the feelings, meanings, or experiences expressed by the client. Reflection is intended to clarify and deepen understanding, not merely repeat the client's words.
- Reflection of Feeling
- A form of reflection in which the therapist identifies and communicates the emotional meaning expressed by the client, helping the client recognize and explore the experience more clearly.
The Therapeutic Relationship
- Congruence (Genuineness)
- The therapist's authenticity and honesty within the therapeutic relationship. The therapist does not hide behind an artificial professional role but relates to the client as a genuine person.
- Empathy
- The therapist's ability to understand the client's experiences and feelings from the client's frame of reference while maintaining the distinction between the therapist's experience and the client's.
- Unconditional Positive Regard
- The therapist's acceptance and valuing of the client as a person without requiring the client to satisfy particular conditions in order to deserve respect.
- Necessary and Sufficient Conditions
- Rogers' position that certain qualities of the therapeutic relationship provide the essential conditions for constructive personality change. In Boeree's summary, these are congruence, empathy, and unconditional positive regard.
- Internal Frame of Reference
- The person's subjective world of perceptions, feelings, meanings, and experiences. Empathic understanding involves attempting to understand the client's experience from this internal point of view.
- Locus of Evaluation
- The source a person relies upon when judging personal experiences, values, and choices. Healthy development involves moving away from excessive dependence upon external approval toward greater trust in an internal process of evaluation.