On Becoming a Person

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Her framework challenges approaches that unconditionally promote some potentials while suppressing others. Instead, she advocates examining the conditions under which any given potentiality may be adaptive or maladaptive. For individualistic cultures only?

Most of the ways of behaving that the organism adopts are those that are consistent with the concept of self. And, according to the fathers of psychology, there’s something disturbing deep within each and every one of us; and it is a psychotherapist’s job to help an individual either to do away with these dark impulses (Freud) or to embrace them and incorporate them in a healthier way in his being (Jung). Now, if men are essentially good, then it’s not your job as a psychotherapist to fix them but to understand them. Without these qualities, relationships and healthy personalities will not develop as they should, much like a tree will not grow without sunlight and water. Despite the popularity of self-actualization as a concept associated with positive psychology and motivation theories, it does not cease to draw criticism.

Kurt Goldstein highlighted the holistic nature of self-actualization, encompassing physical, psychological, and social well-being. Creativity: it follows that they will feel freer to be creative. They will also be more creative in the way they adapt to their circumstances without feeling a need to conform. Venter, Henry. (2017). Self-Transcendence: Maslow’s Answer to Cultural Closeness. Journal of Innovation Management, 4 (4), 3-7. The values attached to experiences, and the values that are a part of the self-structure, in some instances, are values experienced directly by the organism, and in some instances are values introjected or taken over from others, but perceived in distorted fashion, as if they had been experienced directly.

Carl Rogers (1902-1987) was a humanistic psychologist best known for his views on the therapeutic relationship and his theories of personality and self-actualization. The concept of self-actualization, characterized by realizing one’s full potential, is often seen as the pinnacle of psychological development. However, the cultural specificity of self-actualization has been questioned (Itai, 2008). In other words, if you can be whatever you want to be, what you are at the moment is exactly what you are not (statistically, let’s say that’s only about 1% of your potential realized and you still have 99% to go). Rather than trying to ‘fix’ the client, Rogers felt it much more important was to listen absolutely to what a person was saying, even if it seemed wrong, weak, strange, stupid or bad. This stance allowed that person to be accepting of all their thoughts, and after a number of sessions they would heal themselves. Rogers summed up his philosophy as: "simply to be myself and to let another person be himself". As this was a time when the study of psychology revolved around the behavior of rats in laboratories, his belief in letting the 'crazy' patient set the direction of things was a big challenge to the profession, and many denounced his ideas. Because only in the first case the psychotherapist truly believes that the person sitting next to him is a person, someone in the process of becoming something, and not someone whose existence is already fixed.

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Emotion accompanies, and in general facilitates, such goal directed behavior, the kind of emotion being related to the perceived significance of the behavior for the maintenance and enhancement of the organism. As experiences occur in the life of the individual, they are either (a) symbolized, perceived and organized into some relation to the self, (b) ignored because there is no perceived relationship to the self structure, or (c) denied symbolization or given distorted symbolization because the experience is inconsistent with the structure of the self. To use psychological terms, it is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis. According to Maslow, the internal drive to self-actualize would seldom emerge until more basic needs are met.