Rogers' theory is predicated on an individual's innate capacity to decide his/her own best directions in life, provided his/her circumstances are conducive to this, based on the organism's "universal need to drive or self-maintain, flourish, self-enhance and self-protect".
[1] Counsellors Keith Tudor and Mike Worrall proposed that analogues of the actualizing tendency can be found in texts by various writers from antiquity onward, such as Aristotle, Lucretius, Spinoza, Sándor Ferenczi, Jessie Taft, and Eric Berne.
[2]: 86 Rogers based his notion of the actualizing tendency on his deductive observation that whenever a person is free to choose their goals they select "positive and constructive pathways".
[1] Rogers found that: "it is our experience in therapy which has brought us to the point of giving this proposition a central place",[3]: 489 and eventually named this theoretical construct the actualizing tendency.
"[4] To illustrate the universal nature of the actualization of an individual organism's life cycle Rogers wrote of how potatoes had sprouted and grown in his parents' dark basement: "They would never become plants, never mature, never fulfil their real potential.
"[4]: 118 Nathaniel Raskin, a long-term collaborator with Carl Rogers, wrote in 2000 that the actualizing tendency ...is a central tenet in the writings of Kurt Goldstein, Hobart Mowrer, Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, and Andras Angyal, to name just a few.
In PCT the process of self-actualization is what does the healing, and the therapist must remain non-directive and "sustain the conviction that each person is attempting to actualize himself: do not try to change anyone".
[7]: 288 Art Bohart (2013) cited evidence for the idea that people can be surprisingly "self-righting" following psychological distress, including trauma,[7]: 95 and that it is this capacity that facilitates effective therapy.
[11] Therapist Jeffrey von Glahn hypothesized that these core conditions provide sufficient support for "unforced activation of the client's emotional experiencing".
A well-functioning human mind is free to continually reflect upon and reinterpret its experience, and to restructure and reinvent itself, allows the individual to adapt in sophisticated ways to complex aspects of its current and predicted environment.
[16]: 46 The general aim of therapy, in Greenberg and van Balen's view, is to help clients to become "viable in a given environment rather than to actualize potential or become all one can be",[16]: 47 and such development "is based more on a set of values than on a biological tendency".
[16]: 47 Greenberg and van Balen noted that basic organismic experience itself, far from being an expression of an actualizing tendency, sometimes needs therapeutic change: "For example, in posttraumatic stress syndrome the emotion system often signals an alarm when no danger is present.