Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow built on the ideas about existential psychology summarized in the previous section and tied them, as did Rollo May, to the concrete practice of treating people with problems in living. In this section, we briefly described each of their models of personality.

The focus of Rogers' personality theory was the self. Rogers claimed that, as a psychotherapist, he repeatedly heard his patients talk about discovering, or losing, their "true selves." This initially seems paradoxical: How can people be anything but themselves? The way Rogers made sense of this was to differentiate between a person's behavior, thoughts, and feelings, on one hand, and their self-concept, on the other. The self-concept consisted of a set of beliefs about behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that could be more or less discrepant, or incongruous, with the person's real behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. A person whose self-concept was radically different from his true self would be constantly running into situations in which his behavior surprised or upset him. Why would someone develop such an inappropriate self- concept? Rogers argued that the self-concept was strongly influenced by society. Society disapproves of a wide range of behaviors, and many people choose therefore to ignore those behaviors in themselves--to leave them out of their self- concept--instead of integrating them into a holistic understanding of their behavior. The goal of Rogerian therapy is to help people discover their true selves by illuminating these "conditions of worth" and facilitating integration of previously-ignored aspects of the self. The therapist does this by listening non-judgmentally to the patient's statements and reflecting them back so that the patient can become aware of and accept his or her true self.

Maslow, like Rogers, focused on the ways in which people could "self-actualize." Unlike Rogers, he emphasized the particular needs that people need to satisfy before they could become self-actualized. He organized these needs into a hierarchy, with the more basic, fundamental needs at the bottom and the more complex, self-actualizing needs at the top. The levels of needs, in ascending order, are as follows:

• Physiological needs: food, water, sleep, etc.
• Safety needs: shelter, protection from attack, etc.
• Belongingness and love needs: establishing social ties
• Esteem needs: self-respect and respect from others
• Self-actualization needs: self-expression, creativity, self-discovery, connectedness, and purpose.

Each of the lower stages needs to be relatively satisfied before the individual can tackle the needs of the next higher level. A person who has not satisfied basic physiological needs will not be able, for instance, to work on establishing self- respect. Maslow qualified this stage-like progression by saying that satisfaction of each need was only relative (a person could be somewhat hungry or sleep-deprived but still working towards self-actualization) and that multiple needs could contribute to a single action.