Q.Arihant wants to become a singer even though he belongs to a family of doctors. Though his family members claim to love him but strongly disapprove his choice of career. Using Carl Rogers' terminology, describe the attitudes shown by Arihant's family.

In Carl Rogers' terms, Arihant's family is showing conditional positive regard rather than unconditional positive regard. Although they claim to love him, their acceptance is conditional — given only if he meets their expectation of becoming a doctor — and they strongly disapprove of his real wish to be a singer.

Rogers held that healthy growth of the self needs an atmosphere of unconditional positive regard, in which a person is valued regardless of the choices she or he makes. By tying their approval to his career, the family creates incongruence between Arihant's real self (a singer) and his ideal self, which can lower his self-concept and self- …

The situation in Rogers' framework

Carl Rogers' humanistic theory is built around the concept of self. He proposed that each person has a self-concept and also an ideal self (the self one would like to be). When there is correspondence (congruence) between the real self and the ideal self, the person is generally happy; a discrepancy between them results in unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Rogers held that people have a natural tendency to maximise their self-concept through self-actualisation, and to develop into a fully functioning person.

Crucially, Rogers argued that for the self-concept to grow in a healthy way, an atmosphere of unconditional positive regard must be created — the person must feel valued and accepted regardless of the particular choices, feelings or behaviours she or he expresses. This is the very condition that his client-centred therapy tries to provide.

Applying it to Arihant's family

Arihant wants to become a singer, but his family of doctors, though claiming to love him, strongly disapproves of his choice. Their affection is therefore tied to a condition — he will be fully approved of only if he follows the career they want (medicine). In Rogers' terms this is conditional positive regard, the opposite of the unconditional positive regard that healthy self-development requires.

The likely consequences, in Rogers' theory, are:

• Incongruence — a gap opens between Arihant's real self (a person whose genuine aspiration is singing) and his ideal self/the self his family demands, producing unhappiness and dissatisfaction. …