Carl Rogers - Humanistic Psychologist
Channel: Thiyagu Suriya
Date: 2021-03-13

Rogers based his theories of personality development on humanistic psychology and theories of subjective experience.  A person reacts to changes in their phenomenal field, which includes external objects and people as well as internal thoughts and emotions. Rogers further divided the self into two categories: the ideal self and the real self. The ideal self is the person that you would like to be; the real self is the person you actually are. Rogers focused on the idea that we need to achieve consistency between these two selves. We experience congruence when our thoughts about our real self and ideal self are very similar—in other words, when our self-concept is accurate. High congruence leads to a greater sense of self-worth and a healthy, productive life. Conversely, when there is a great discrepancy between our ideal and actual selves, we experience a state Rogers called incongruence, which can lead to maladjustment.