Consider the eras, life histories, and personalities of Freud and Rogers.
Identify two research articles published in the last 5 years: one that investigates a psychoanalytic or Freudian construct and one that investigates a client-centered, humanistic, or Rogerian construct.
Write a 700- to 1,050-word paper about Freud and Rogers that addresses the following:
- Provide a summary of each article, highlighting the processes that contemporary psychologists use to develop the theories of Freud and Rogers.
- Explain their views of human nature and their worldviews as expressed in their respective theories.
- Which aspect of their theory do you think would be different if they were alive and working today?
- Explain how social and cultural factors influenced the development of Freud’s and Rogers’ respective theories of personality.
Do NOT use about.com, psychology.about.com, ask.com, simplypsychology.org, AllPsych.com, SparkNotes.com, wikipedia, or other sources that are not scholarly in nature.
You MUST have a minimum of 2 scholarly sources as references. You may use your textbook but it does not count as one of these sources.
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Read the Case of Jim in Chapter 6
Each team member should discuss the case using the humanistic theory as a model. Then use the humanistic theory to discuss how you would use it to assess the client.
Post an initial response to this case analysis (approximately 350 words with at least 1 scholarly source).
THE CASE OF JIM
SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL: PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORY
Jim completed ratings of the concepts self, ideal self, father, and mother using the semantic differential (Chapter 5), a simple rating scale. Although the semantic differential is not the exact measure recommended by Rogers, its results can be related to Rogerian theory since its procedures have a phenomenological quality and assess perceptions of self and ideal self.
First, consider how Jim perceives his self. Based on the semantic differential, Jim sees himself as intelligent, friendly, sincere, kind, and basically good—as a wise person who is humane and interested in people. At the same time, other ratings suggest that he does not feel free to be expressive and uninhibited. Thus, he rates himself as reserved, introverted, inhibited, tense, moral, and conforming. There is a curious mixture of perceptions: being involved, deep, sensitive, and kind while also being competitive, selfish, and disapproving. There is also the interesting combination of perceiving himself as being good and masculine but simultaneously weak and insecure. One gets the impression of an individual who would like to believe that he is basically good and capable of genuine interpersonal relationships at the same time that he is bothered by serious inhibitions and high standards for himself and others.
This impression comes into sharper focus when we consider the self ratings in relation to those for the ideal self. In general, Jim did not see an extremely large gap between his self and his ideal self. However, large gaps did occur on a number of specific scale items. For example, Jim rated his actual self as low on a weak–strong scale and his ideal self as high on the same scale; in other words, Jim would like to be much stronger than he feels he is. Assessing his ratings on the other scales in a similar way, we find that Jim would like to be more of each of the following than he currently perceives himself to be: warm, active, egalitarian, flexible, lustful, approving, industrious, relaxed, friendly, and bold. Basically, two themes appear. One has to do with warmth: Jim is not as warm, relaxed, and friendly as he would like to be. The other theme has to do with strength: Jim is not as strong, active, and industrious as he would like to be.
Jim’s ratings of his parents give some indication of where he sees them in relation to himself in general and to these qualities in particular. First, if we compare the way Jim perceives his self with his perception of his mother and father, he clearly perceives himself to be much more like his father than his mother. Also, he perceives his father to be closer to his ideal self than his mother, although he perceives himself to be closer to his ideal self than either his mother or his father. However, in the critical areas of warmth and strength, the parents tend to be closer to the ideal self than Jim is. Thus, his mother is perceived to be warmer, more approving, more relaxed, and friendlier than Jim, while his father is perceived to be stronger, more industrious, and more active than Jim. The mother is perceived as having an interesting combination of personality characteristics. On the one hand, she is perceived as affectionate, friendly, spontaneous, sensitive, and good. On the other, she is perceived as authoritarian, superficial, selfish, unintelligent, intolerant, and uncreative.
COMMENTS ON THE DATA
Compared to the earlier data, involving the Rorschach (Chapter 4), we begin here to get another picture of Jim. We learn of his popularity and success through high school and of his good relationship with his father. We find support for the suggestions from the projective tests of anxiety and difficulties with women. Indeed, we learn of Jim’s fears of ejaculating too quickly and not being able to satisfy women. However, we also find an individual who believes himself to be basically good and interested in doing humane things. We become aware of an individual who has a view of his self and a view of his ideal self, and of an individual who is frustrated because of the feelings that leave a gap between the two.
Given the opportunity to talk about himself and what he would like to be, Jim talks about his desire to be warmer, more relaxed, and stronger. We feel no need here to disguise our purposes, for we are interested in Jim’s perceptions, meanings, and experiences as he reports them. We are interested in what is real for Jim—in how he interprets phenomena within his own frame of reference. We want to know all about Jim, but all about Jim as he perceives himself and the world about him. When using the data from the semantic differential, we are not tempted to focus on drives, and we do not need to come to grips with the world of the irrational. In Rogers’s terms, we see an individual who is struggling to move toward self-actualization, from dependence toward independence, from fixity and rigidity to freedom and spontaneity. We find an individual who has a gap between his intellectual and emotional estimates of himself. As Rogers would put it, we observe an individual who is without self-consistency, who lacks a sense of congruence between self and experience.
