PSY 405 Week 4 Humanistic and Existential Perspectives Example

Worth Without Conditions: Humanistic and Existential Views of a Principal at Midlife

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSY/405: Theories of Personality

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The principal, her coach and her history are composites written for a model paper; theory and research come from the sources listed.

The theories studied so far explained Renée Castillo's personality from outside: hidden conflicts, measurable traits and learned habits. Humanistic and existential perspectives ask how she experiences herself, what she believes she must be to be acceptable and what gives her life meaning. This paper applies those perspectives as she begins work with a leadership coach.

Rogers and the Self-Concept

Carl Rogers proposed that people have an actualizing tendency, a drive toward growth and fulfillment, and that the self-concept develops through relationships. Children need positive regard from caregivers. When regard is given only under certain conditions, children absorb conditions of worth, standards they must meet to feel valued, and begin to deny or distort experiences that conflict with them.

Renée's history fits closely. Her father's warmth came with achievement, his coldness with mistakes. She learned that she was worthy only when flawless. As an adult, she evaluates herself by the same condition, and her self-concept, "the principal who never fails," leaves little room for an ordinary setback.

Incongruence and Anxiety

Rogers described incongruence as a gap between the self-concept and actual experience. When experience threatens the self-concept, people feel anxiety and defend against it by distorting or denying the experience. The school's lower rating is such an experience: it conflicts with her self-concept as a leader who never fails. Her overwork and sharpness with staff serve to keep the threatening experience at a distance, an interpretation that overlaps with the Week 1 account of defenses but places the self, rather than drives, at the center.

The Conditions for Change

Rogers (1957) argued that constructive personality change occurs when a person in a state of incongruence is in contact with someone who is genuine, who offers unconditional positive regard and who understands the person's inner world empathically, and when the person perceives these qualities. Rogers proposed that these conditions were not only necessary but sufficient, regardless of technique.

Renée's coach offers these conditions. She listens without judgment as Renée describes her shame, reflects her feelings accurately and responds to admissions of mistakes with acceptance rather than advice. Over several weekly sessions, Renée begins to describe the rating drop without self-condemnation, a sign that her self-concept is widening to include fallibility. Decades of later research have supported the importance of empathy and the therapeutic relationship for outcomes, though not the claim that the conditions alone are sufficient.

Maslow and Self-Actualization

Abraham Maslow described a hierarchy of needs, from physiological and safety needs through belonging and esteem to self-actualization, the realization of one's potential. Renée's esteem needs are strongly engaged, and her work with students resembles self-actualization at its best. Research, however, does not support a strict order in which lower needs must be met before higher ones matter; people pursue several needs at once.

Renée learned that she was worth something when she was flawless; the coach's task is to show her she is worth something on an ordinary Tuesday.

Existential Themes: Meaning and Responsibility

Frankl (2006), drawing on years of imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps, held that people are moved above all by a need to find meaning, which can come through work and creation, through love and relationships and through the attitude they take toward unavoidable suffering. Existential thinkers also emphasize freedom and responsibility: people cannot always choose circumstances but can choose their response.

For Renée, the rating threatens to define her worth by a number she cannot fully control. Frankl's view helps her separate her purpose, helping students from families like hers reach futures her parents could not, from an external score. The responsibility she can accept is for her response: leading her staff through the setback rather than shouldering it alone.

Measuring Meaning

Steger et al. (2006) developed the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, which measures two related but distinct aspects: presence of meaning, the sense that one's life is meaningful, and search for meaning, the drive to find it. In their studies, the two subscales showed good reliability and expected relationships with well-being, with presence linked to life satisfaction and positive emotion.

On this measure, Renée scores high on presence of meaning; her work feels deeply purposeful. Her search score has risen since the rating drop, reflecting a midlife questioning of what success means. The measure shows how existential concepts, often dismissed as untestable, can be studied empirically.

Culture and the Self

Renée's family culture adds a layer the classic humanistic writers seldom addressed. In her parents' view, success belonged to the family, and her achievements repaid their sacrifice. Her drive is therefore not only a private need for approval but also a form of loyalty. A coach who treated her striving purely as a symptom would miss its meaning; acceptance in Rogers's sense includes accepting that duty to family is part of who she is, while helping her stop measuring that duty by a single rating.

Comparing Perspectives

The psychodynamic view located her drive in an internalized father; Rogers locates it in conditions of worth, a similar origin with a more hopeful view of change through acceptance. The trait view described her conscientiousness and neuroticism; the humanistic view explains what they mean to her. The behavioral view offered concrete habits to change; the humanistic view offers a relationship in which change can occur.

Limits

Humanistic concepts such as the actualizing tendency are difficult to measure, and the view can underplay biology and situations. Its focus on individual growth may also fit cultures that prize independence better than those, like Renée's family culture, that emphasize duty to others.

Conclusion

Rogers's theory explains Renée's distress as incongruence rooted in conditions of worth, and the conditions Rogers set out for change describe how her coaching relationship can widen her self-concept. Frankl's account of meaning helps her separate purpose from a single score, and a validated measure shows how meaning can be studied. The humanistic and existential view adds her inner experience, in her own terms, to the account built across the course.

References

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95-103. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045357

Steger, M. F., Frazier, P., Oishi, S., & Kaler, M. (2006). The Meaning in Life Questionnaire: Assessing the presence of and search for meaning in life. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53(1), 80-93. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.53.1.80