PSYCH 645 Week 4 Humanistic and Existential Views of Personality Example

Worth Earned by Trophies: Humanistic and Existential Views of the Band Director's Search for Acceptance and Meaning

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University of Phoenix

PSYCH/645: Personality Theories

Week 4 Assignment

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[Date]

Elena Ruiz and her history are a composite case written for a model paper; theories and research findings come from the sources listed.

Humanistic and existential theories view people as active agents striving for growth and meaning, shaped by how others accepted or judged them and by the choices they face. This paper applies these perspectives to the composite case from earlier weeks, asking how her sense of worth and her search for meaning shape her relationships.

Elena in Her Own Words

In a conversation about her journal, Elena Ruiz said: "I feel worth something only after a good performance. When the band wins, I feel like I've earned the right to exist for another month. With Daniel, there's nothing to win. He says he loves me, and I keep thinking, for what?" She recalled her mother praising her for watching her brother and for straight A's, and her father showing up mainly for concerts. "My parents came to the concerts," she said. "That was when I was visible."

Rogers's Self Theory

In Rogers's view, every person carries a built-in push toward growth, and personality takes shape around the picture each person forms of who they are. When children receive positive regard only for certain behaviors, they develop conditions of worth: beliefs that they are valuable only when meeting certain standards. They then distort or deny experiences that conflict with these conditions, producing incongruence between self-concept and experience, which leads to anxiety and defensiveness.

Rogers (1957) stated the necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic personality change: two persons in psychological contact, a client in a state of incongruence, a therapist who is congruent or genuine in the relationship, who experiences unconditional positive regard for the client and empathic understanding of the client's frame of reference and who communicates these to the client to a minimal degree. Rogers proposed that when these conditions are present, constructive personality change follows.

Elena's account fits Rogers's ideas closely. Praise tied to achievement and caretaking taught her that her worth depends on performance. Love without performance, Daniel's love, does not fit her self-concept and feels unearned, perhaps even suspicious. Ending relationships may restore congruence with the belief that she must earn affection.

Goals That Fit the Self

Humanistic ideas inspired research on how goals relate to the self. Sheldon and Kasser (1995) studied coherence and congruence in personal goals and found that people whose goals were self-concordant, pursued because they were enjoyable or personally important rather than because of guilt or external pressure, showed greater well-being, vitality and healthy functioning. Congruent goals were more consistent with psychological needs and better integrated with each other.

Elena's professional goals mix both kinds: she loves music and teaching, but she also pursues trophies to feel worthy. The second kind, driven by internal pressure, may explain why victories bring relief rather than joy.

Basic Psychological Needs

Self-determination theory, developed by Ryan and Deci (2000), proposes three basic psychological needs: autonomy, the experience of choosing one's actions; competence, the experience of being effective; and relatedness, the experience of close, caring connection. When these needs are satisfied, people show more intrinsic motivation, integration and well-being; when they are thwarted, motivation and well-being decline. The theory distinguishes intrinsic motivation from forms of extrinsic motivation that range from controlled to more autonomous.

For Elena, competence is richly satisfied at work and autonomy partly so, though often under internal pressure. Relatedness, especially in intimate relationships, is chronically unmet, and she undermines it when it is offered.

At school every need is met but one; at home, the one that is missing is the one she keeps refusing.

Maslow and Self-Actualization

Maslow stacked human needs in tiers, bodily needs and safety at the base, then love and belonging, then esteem, with becoming all one can be at the top. Modern research supports the idea of universal needs but not a rigid order. Elena's esteem needs, met through achievement, may be crowding out belonging, an inversion of Maslow's sequence that suggests needs can be met in unusual combinations.

Existential Themes

Existential psychologists emphasize that humans face certain givens: freedom and the responsibility it brings, isolation, the search for meaning and mortality. Elena's choices to end relationships are free choices, and existential thinking would ask her to own them as choices rather than as inevitable reactions. Her isolation, a basic human condition, may be intensified by her pattern of leaving. Her meaning comes largely from music and students, a genuine source, but one that may not fill the space intimate connection could.

The Value of Being Understood

Elliott et al. (2018) meta-analyzed studies of therapist empathy and found that empathy was a moderately strong predictor of therapy outcome across different therapy approaches. Clients who felt understood improved more. The finding supports Rogers's emphasis on empathic understanding, though it does not prove that empathy alone is sufficient for change.

The Ideal Self and the Real Self

Rogers also distinguished the self a person is from the self they believe they should be. When the gap between the two is wide, people feel chronic dissatisfaction. Elena's ideal self is flawless: the director whose band never misses an entrance, the daughter who never needed help, the partner who would never disappoint. Measured against that ideal, her real self always falls short, and closeness threatens to reveal the shortfall. Narrowing the gap does not mean lowering every standard; it means allowing the ideal to include being imperfect and still loved, which her history never taught.

Responsibility Without Blame

Existential thinking holds people responsible for their choices, which can sound harsh. In practice, existential therapists pair responsibility with compassion: Elena did not choose her father's absences, but she can choose how she responds to Daniel now. Owning the breakups as choices, rather than as things that happened to her, gives her the possibility of choosing differently.

What This Perspective Adds

Earlier weeks explained Elena's pattern through attachment, traits and cognitions. The humanistic view adds the meaning she gives to worth: she believes she must earn love. It emphasizes her agency and capacity for growth and points toward an accepting relationship, therapeutic or personal, as the setting for change.

Criticisms

Words like actualization resist measurement, and the founders of the humanistic movement wrote more from the therapy room than from experiments. Self-determination theory and studies of empathy have given some ideas stronger evidence, but others remain hard to examine.

A Growth-Oriented Path

A humanistic approach would offer Elena a relationship of acceptance not tied to performance, in which she can notice experiences that conflict with her conditions of worth, such as Daniel's care, without discarding them. Practices such as pursuing music for its own sake, not only for competitions, could shift her goals toward self-concordance.

Conclusion

Humanistic and existential theories describe Elena's pattern as the result of conditions of worth that tie her value to achievement, unmet needs for relatedness and choices she can learn to own. Research on self-concordant goals, basic needs and empathy supports parts of this view and points toward acceptance as a route to change.

References

Elliott, R., Bohart, A. C., Watson, J. C., & Murphy, D. (2018). Therapist empathy and client outcome: An updated meta-analysis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 399-410. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000175

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

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

Sheldon, K. M., & Kasser, T. (1995). Coherence and congruence: Two aspects of personality integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(3), 531-543. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.68.3.531