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The word self is used in person-centred writing in at least two ways, and it is important to distinguish between them if we are to avoid confusion. The ®rst usage is re¯exive, and carries the meaning: I did it myself. When Rogers asserts that the organism maintains itself, he means that the organism both initiates and bene®ts from the process of maintenance. It works, as it were, for its own good. The second usage derives from the use of the word self as a noun. Thus, when Rogers writes about self- actualisation he means the actualisation of the self. One implication of this is that the term self-actualisation can mean one of two things in any one context. It can mean:
1 that the organism self-actualises, or actualises itself; or
2 that the organism actualises its `self', which is a conceptual element within the organism.
On the subject of the self, Rogers drew on the work of Angyal (1941), Raimy (1943, 1948), Lecky (1945) and Standal (1954), in¯uences he acknowledges in his own work (Rogers, 1951, 1959b, 1963) and later in an interview published after his death (Rogers & Russell, 2002).2 Rogers
(1959b, p. 200) disclaims any early interest in the notion of the self, viewing it as `a vague, ambiguous scienti®cally meaningless term which had gone out of the psychologist's vocabulary with the departure of the introspec- tionists'. However Barrett-Lennard (1998) points out that Rogers' (1931)
2 This acknowledgement is important as, in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in September 1947 (later published, Rogers, 1947), Rogers drew heavily on Raimy's (1943) doctoral thesis, as he later put it (Rogers & Russell, 2002, p. 130) `without even being aware of that'. At the time another student took him to task for this lack of acknowledgement and Rogers reports feeling `great humiliation' about this (ibid., p. 130).
early work includes the development of a test for children approximating the concepts of actual and ideal self. In a dialogue with Rogers, Evans (1975/81, p. 16) acknowledges that Rogers was among the earliest group of individuals in psychology to emphasise the self. Rogers responds with a de®nition of the self. He says that it `includes all of the individual's perceptions of his organism, of his experience, and of the way in which those perceptions are related to other perceptions and objects in his environment and to the whole exterior world'.
Signi®cantly, this quote emphasises the uni®ed picture of self which Rogers favoured. Whilst he acknowledges that some person-centred theor- ists have developed the notion of different selves, a development which has, wittingly or unwittingly, in¯uenced some person-centred practitioners since, the notion of different selves did not have much meaning for Rogers himself. Despite Evans' acknowledgement, some texts on the self in American psychology omit Rogers even from discussions about the devel- opment of self psychology and the centrality of empathy. We discuss self psychology, including Rogers' own comments on the differences and simi- larities between his work and that of Kohut, below (pp. 116±23). In reviewing and advancing the concept of self in person-centred theory we aim to bring some clarity to theory and practice.
Rogers develops his theory of self in three key papers:
1 In the context of a number of propositions about personality and behaviour (Rogers, 1951), in which he views the self in the context of the organism.
2 In his major formulation (Rogers, 1959b), in which he de®nes self and related constructs and offers a fuller account and illustration of the history of these constructs.
3 In a paper on the actualising tendency (Rogers, 1963), in which he reiterates its unitary nature.
In 1951 Rogers (p. 497) describes the self as emerging from a portion of the `total perceptual ®eld ' and says that it is, speci®cally (p. 498), `the awareness of being, of functioning':
As a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluational interaction with others, the structure of self is formed ± an organized, ¯uid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the `I' or the `me', together with the values attached to these concepts.
This de®nition and conceptualisation of self is based in the organism, and is highly interactive. Rogers' description of infant development in the pages
following this proposition (IX) pre®gures the intersubjective view of self and developmental psychologists, notably Stern (1985), by over thirty years.
Angyal (1941, p. 113) says that the self `is symbolically elaborated by the organism and then appears as self-awareness or consciousness of self'. Our self-awareness, he suggests, extends to objects outside our bodies such as clothes and property. Furthermore, the greater my governance of an object, the greater my sense of that object belonging to me. Thus, I have more self- awareness of `my hands' than `my shirt', and more awareness of `my shirt' after I have bought it than before when it was on a rack in a clothes shop. This is also true in the learning of skills or the rediscovery of lost skills: `we ascribe a given factor to ourselves or the external world, respectively, on the basis of whether it is prevalently under autonomous or heteronymous government' (ibid., p. 114). In this we can see the psychological signi®cance of political autonomy, self-government and independence. In his ®rst formulation of a theory of the self, Rogers (1951, p. 497) echoes Angyal on this point: `Whether or not an object or experience is regarded as part of the self depends to a considerable extent on whether or not it is perceived as within the control of the self.'
In the seminal paper in which he outlines his theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships, Rogers (1959b) acknowledges that Raimy (1943) produced a careful and searching de®nition of the self- concept based on the categorising of self-attitudes. Generally, the self- concept is seen as the mental notion a person has about her physical, psychological and social attributes as well as her attitudes, beliefs and ideas. It comprises the image we have of ourselves, and how we value ourselves (self-esteem). Raimy (op. cit., p. 154) de®nes the self-concept as: `. . . the more or less organized perceptual object resulting from present and past self-observation'. Raimy's was the ®rst objective study of change in the self- concept, and he is widely acknowledged as an innovative researcher and thinker in this ®eld. He went on to introduce measures of self-concept in counselling interviews (Raimy, 1948), arguing that psychotherapy is basic- ally a process of altering the ways that individuals see themselves and, some years later, he published a book on Misconceptions of the Self (Raimy, 1975). From Raimy's work Rogers (1959b, p. 201) took the following: 1 That self-referrent attitudes alter signi®cantly in therapy, from a
predominantly negative evaluation of the self to a predominantly positive one.
2 That `violent ¯uctuation' in the client's concept of self is not uncommon, even within one session.
3 That this picture of self (or `product') was a gestalt, or con®guration. Lecky's (1945) work informed Rogers and may also be a source of confusion between concepts of organism and self. As Lecky himself (p. 75)
puts it: `There is a coherence in the behaviour of any single organism which argues against explanation in terms of chance combinations of determiners and points to an organized dynamic subsystem which tends toward self- determination' [our emphasis].
Rogers (1959b, p. 200) de®nes the self, which he equates with concept of self and self-structure, as:
the organized, consistent conceptual gestalt composed of perceptions of the characteristics of the `I' or `me' and the perceptions of the char- acteristics of the `I' or `me' to others and to various aspects of life, together with the values attached to these perceptions. It is a gestalt which is available to awareness though not necessarily in awareness. This both echoes and elaborates his 1951 proposition. A number of points follow from this:
1 The self is a concept.
2 The self is a gestalt. It is thus inherently moving between ®gures or what Mearns (1999) refers to as con®gurations (see p. 130). It is ¯uid, not ®xed, and is constantly changing in the light of new experiences. 3 The self is also consistent. No matter how much change occurs, there
remains within individuals a constant internal sense that they are still the same person at any given moment. Lecky (1945) contributed the notion that self-consistency is a primary motivating force in human behaviour; and, in his review, Barrett-Lennard (1998, p. 77) suggests that it is the organism that `applies a criterion of consistency in organizing experience as part of the self'. Discussing the impact of time on identity, Davies (1995, p. 16) argues that `the very concept of selfhood hinges on the preservation of personal identity through time'. The self, then, is, at any given moment, a speci®c entity which is de®nable in operational terms by means of research methods such as a `Q sort' (see Dymond, 1954; Vargas, 1954; Rogers, 1955/67; Cartwright & Graham, 1984).
4 The self is itself perceptual. `The self' says Murdoch (1970/85, p. 93) `the place where we live, is a place of illusion.' This perspective echoes Macmurray's (1961/91) sceptical view of the `Self' (see p. 127). The notion of `I' or `me' also carries an implicit reference to Mead's famous distinction between these two aspects of self (see p. 113).
Like a number of theoreticians in this ®eld, Rogers was not the most rigorous or consistent in his use of language. This has given rise to confusions, interpretations and debates, and to a certain amount of textual analysis. For instance, in a paper on creativity (written in 1954), he refers to the `real self' emerging, in response to empathic understanding and
acceptance. A few years later, he wrote a paper on a therapist's view of personal goals (Rogers, 1960/67b) in which he takes his title from the existential philosopher Kierkegaard: `To be that self which one truly is'. Although this implies that there is a true or real self, this was not the particular focus of Rogers' paper. Rogers describes his view of personal goals and purpose in terms of directions:
·
away from facËades (from behind which people face life); from `oughts'; from meeting expectations; from pleasing others, and·
towards self-direction; being process; being complexity; openness to experience; acceptance of others; and trust of self.Two aspects of this are both interesting and problematic. The ®rst is that Rogers frames such directionality in terms of personal `goals', implying an achieved end rather than a continuous process. Second, he mixes references to self, such as `self-direction' and trust of `self', as distinct from organismic direction and a trust in the organism, with references to more ¯uid concepts, such as `being process' and `being complexity'. Others have taken this as permission to think in terms of a `real' self as distinct from a `false' self, conditioned in response to external conditions of worth; or a `core' self, as distinct from more peripheral selves. One term applied to this is that of the `organismic self', a term coined by Seeman (1983), which he equates with a core sense of self, and taken up by others, including Mearns and Thorne (1998). We ®nd this particularly unhelpful as it confuses and con¯ates two distinct concepts which Rogers, amongst others, strove to distinguish from each other. One implication of this con¯ation is, as Tolan (2002) points out, that it makes Rogers' (1951) concept of the self-structure redundant.
The other, related term which Raimy, Rogers and other researchers used at that time was the `ideal self' or `ideal self-concept'. Again, this is not to be confused with Maslow's concept of self-actualisation, that is, the achievement of an ideal state. According to Butler and Haigh (1954, p. 56), who conducted research into the relationship between self-concepts and ideal concepts consequent upon client-centred counselling, the ideal self- concept is:
the organized conceptual pattern of characteristics and emotional states which the individual consciously holds as desirable (and non desirable) for himself. The assumption is that the individual is able to order his self-perceptions along a continuum of value from `what I would most like to be' to `what I would least like to be' or, more brie¯y, from `like my ideal' to `unlike my ideal'.
Rogers' third major paper on the self, `The actualizing tendency in relation to ``motives'' and to consciousness', was written in 1963. Mearns (2002, p. 15) views this paper as `extremely important for students of the approach in that it documents the qualitative change of emphasis in Rogers' thinking that heralded his forsaking of the university sector and the move to California'. In it Rogers (1963, pp. 19±20) characterises the actualising tendency as purely positive and acknowledges that his thinking has changed:
Ten years ago I was endeavoring to explain the rift between self and experience, between conscious goals and organismic directions, as something natural and necessary, albeit unfortunate. Now I believe that individuals are culturally conditioned, rewarded, reinforced, for behaviors which are in fact perversions of the natural directions of the unitary actualizing tendency.
In other words estrangement and dissociation are learned, and are the basis for all psychological and social pathology. Bifurcated systems and theor- etical concepts (conscious, unconscious; self, experiencing process) are also the result of particular social learning and, as it were, constitute theoretical pathology. Although he does not say this directly, as far as the theory of self is concerned, this paper constitutes a reassertion of his organismic view whereby self is the awareness of being organism and of the functioning organism.
Rogers' theory of development
One purpose of any theory of self is in what it has to say about our development: literally, our self-development. For Rogers (1951, p. 498), the self is `the awareness of being, of functioning' and is thus synonymous with self-awareness and self-experience (see also Chapter 3 regarding con- sciousness). As self is a differentiated portion of the perceptual ®eld (Rogers, 1951, 1959b), our sense of self is born out of differentiation: `This is my arm . . . when I lift my arm to my face I feel my skin . . . I am my arm . . . my arm is part of me.' Stern (1991) describes this well in his Diary of a Baby, his inventive version of his earlier theoretical work (Stern, 1985) (see pp. 123ff.).
Rogers (1959b, p. 223) continues: `This representation in awareness of being and functioning, becomes elaborated, through interaction with the environment, particularly the environment composed of signi®cant others, into a concept of self, a perceptual object in [the individual's] experiential ®eld.' With regard to human development, Rogers did not greatly elabor- ate this. In his 1959 paper he devoted just over a page to `Postulated
Characteristics of the Human Infant'. Nevertheless, his idea of represen- tations pre®gures the work of neuroscientists and self psychologists. Compare, for example, Siegel (1999, p. 167):
These complex conceptual representations are an important part of the information processing of the mind. They . . . are created by the computations of the mind in its interactions with the world and other people within it. In this sense, sensory-perceptual representations attempt to symbolize the mind's creation of ideas and of the mind itself. For an infant, non-verbal experiencing initially comprises a relatively undifferentiated totality of sensations and perceptions that constitute reality for that infant. At 6 weeks a sighted baby can see well and is aware of different colours, shapes and intensities. Later, interaction with signi®- cant others results in part of the infant's experiencing becoming differ- entiated into a `self' or `self-concept'. Later still, perceptions become discriminated as being related to `me' or `I', perceptions which Rogers termed `self-experiences'. The development of self is based on differentia- tion and the elaboration of the individual's being and functioning, through interaction with their environment and especially their signi®cant others. We consider that Stern's (1985) work, based as it is on the infant's inter- personal interactions with her environment, with its reference to `represen- tations of interactions which are generalised' (RIGs), is an elaboration of the development of self, consistent with Rogers' theory. Interestingly, from our present perspective, in the second, revised edition of his work, Stern (2000) echoes Rogers when he refers to RIGs as `ways-of-being-with'.
Following his postulated characteristics of the human infant and com- ments on the development of the self, Rogers (1959b) describes the condi- tions required for the development of personality. This theory may be viewed as an unfolding cycle of self-development, which we elaborate with some commentary:
The awareness of self emerges.
! The individual develops a need for positive regard . . .
Rogers views the need for positive regard as universal in humans, and pervasive and persistent in individuals. Standal (1954), who developed the concept, argues that this need is learned. For Rogers whether it is inherent or learned is irrelevant to theory of its satisfaction.
! . . . which is reciprocal ( !) . . . and potent.
Its potency is based on Rogers' (ibid., p. 224) view that `the positive regard of any social other is communicated to the total regard complex which the
individual associates with that social other'. He goes on to suggest that this can become more compelling than the organism's internal valuing process, with the result that the individual can become more adient to the positive regard of others. This is why, as therapists, it is more important to focus on the value the client gives to the emotion, than on the emotion itself (see also Keil, 1996).
! The individual comes to experience positive regard independently as self-regard . . .
! . . . which develops out of the association of self-experiences with the need for positive regard.
! Thus the individual experiences positive regard and its loss inde- pendently of transactions with social others.
Rogers (ibid., p. 224) states that, in this regard, `The individual becomes in a sense his own signi®cant social other. This is similar to the notion in object relations theory of the internalised self-object.'
! Rogers (ibid., p. 224) continues: `When self-experiences are discrimi- nated by signi®cant others as being more or less worthy of positive regard, then self-regard becomes similarly selective' . . .
! . . . and when an experience is avoided or sought solely on this basis, then the individual acquires a `condition of worth'.
We consider the effect of such conditions on the development of self disorders in Chapter 6. Rogers (ibid., p. 224) concludes this section of his theoretical outline of self-development with a comment that if no conditions of worth developed then `self-regard would never be at variance with organismic evaluation'.
Rogers' self-concept
Before leaving Rogers' view of self and self-concept, we want to comment brie¯y on his own self-concept. The notion that `all theory is auto- biographical' is not new. Indeed in the ®eld of psychology, there was a series of volumes published between 1930 and 1967 under the title A History of Psychology in Autobiography, to volume ®ve of which (Boring & Lindzey, 1967), Rogers (1967) contributed a chapter. He describes himself (p. 343) as:
fundamentally positive in my approach to life; somewhat of a lone wolf in my professional activities; socially rather shy but enjoying close
relationships; capable of a deep sensitivity in human interaction though not always achieving this; often a poor judge of people, tending to overestimate them; possessed of a capacity for setting other people free, in a psychological sense; capable of a dogged determinism in getting work done or in winning a ®ght; eager to have an in¯uence on others but with very little desire to exercise power or authority over them.