Personality Theories, Phenomenological

Basic Tenets

William James's famous distinction between the “I” (subject) and the “me” (object) can be used to understand all phenomenological approaches to personality. The “I” refers to experience as it occurs for an individual (e.g., what it feels like to win an award). The “me” refers to how a person thinks about her- or himself as an object of knowledge (e.g., what someone thinks about her- or himself for having won an award). In the phenomenological model, the “I” and the “me” interact to give an individual's self-consciousness its particular form.

Phenomenological theorists focus on two kinds of subjective experience. The first is how people experience themselves in relation to others. An example is how a young girl experiences herself as her parents express disapproval of her behavior. People's positive and negative experiences with others contribute to how they learn to value themselves, sometimes called self-regard. Carl Rogers was particularly concerned with conditions of worth—or expectations that others have in order for a person to be acceptable to them. If a person receives the message that certain thoughts and feelings are unacceptable to others, he or she may become uncomfortable having those experiences and distort them. When that occurs, experiences of the person's own spontaneous inclinations are not integrated into his or her self-concept and the “me” becomes less genuine or inauthentic. Such a constrained self is not free.

The second kind of experience is what might be called internal monitoring, or people's intuitive sense of their own inclinations. According to phenomenological theory, experiences that reflect a person's truer inclinations always exist in some form and can be recovered, leading to a more authentic sense of the self. Put another way, everyone has an inherent and consciously accessible potential to develop in a healthy way, and people can always learn to connect with that potential. Somewhat incorrectly, psychologists commonly consider this focus on self-actualization to be synonymous with phenomenological theory.

American phenomenological theories are also referred to as humanistic theories because they [Page 757]emphasize the inherent goodness of the individual. In the work of Carl Rogers, personal experience is valued as uniquely genuine and wholesome. People may commit atrocious acts and be quite bad, but Rogers and like-minded humanists reject the notion of an inherent or inborn badness.

The strain of phenomological theory that stresses the human capacity for self-actualization has considerable overlap with 19th-century Romanticism, which focused on the truth value of individual intuition in contrast to the rationally discovered laws of science. Like the Romantics, the proponents of a self-actualization approach are suspicious of an exclusively scientific perspective, particularly one that focuses on technical details and ignores meaning.

Existentialism

A more European version of phenomenological theory, referred to as existentialism, also studies human experience and subjectivity, but the experiences upon which it focuses are loneliness, isolation, and death. Existential theorists believe that such ultimate concerns can be sources of a deeper personal meaning. The awareness of death in particular is considered to be uniquely human.

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