For Maslow, they seem to be practically synonymous.
Maslow. Motivation and personality
We will never understand a person if we continue to ignore his higher aspirations. Such terms as “personal growth”, “self-actualization”, “striving for health”, “search for oneself and one’s place in the world”, “need for perfection” (and others denoting a person’s aspiration “upward”) should be accepted and widely used already. because they describe general, and perhaps even universal, human tendencies.
However, such phenomena as psychological maturation, self-expression, personal growth or self-actualization, in my deep conviction, do not obey the general rule of the universality of motivation, and therefore they should be discussed not in terms of overcoming, but in terms of expression.
But we must not forget that other, regressive tendencies are also characteristic of a person, such as, for example, a tendency to fear, self-abasement. Reveling in the talk of «personal growth,» we run the risk of giving listeners a dangerous illusion, especially when dealing with fledglings. In my opinion, a thorough study of psychopathology and depth psychology of a person should become a necessary prevention against an overly light, superficial attitude to “personal growth”. We have to admit that many people prefer the bad to the good, that personal growth, often being a painful process, frightens a person, that we do not necessarily love the best that nature has given us, often we are simply afraid of it; we have to admit that most of us have an ambivalent feeling towards such values as truth, beauty, virtue, admiring them, and, at the same time, being wary of their manifestations (295).
Carl Rogers. The formation of personality
I also believe and hope that many people who have never sought help from a counselor will feel more courage and self-confidence when they read a client’s statements during a psychotherapy session. It will be easier for them to understand their own difficulties by imagining the struggle of other people for their personal growth.
In the field of psychotherapy, significant progress has been made in the last decade in measuring the psychotherapeutic impact on the personality and behavior of the client. The last two or three years have brought success in identifying the basic conditions that determine the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic relationships that contribute to the development of a person in the direction of mental maturity. In other words, we have made progress in identifying those components of human relationships that stimulate personal growth.
It seems to me that my articles belong to a direction that can give a new impetus to psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and other areas of knowledge. I still don’t know what to call this direction, but in my thoughts it is associated with such adjectives as phenomenological, existential, personality-centered; with such concepts as self-actualization, formation, growth; with such people (in our country) as Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May. From this we can conclude that, although this book will be significant for many specialists with different interests, they will be united by a common motive: concern for a person and his personal growth in a modern world that, it seems to me, rejects and humiliates him.
Suppose we choose a set of values centered on the dynamic, changing elements of the process rather than its static characteristics. Then we can put forward the following values:
- The process of becoming a person, as gaining a sense of self-worth and significance through the disclosure of all one’s potentialities.
- The process of self-actualization of the personality, as a movement in the direction of gaining more and more complex and diverse experience.
- The process of creative adaptation of a person to a constantly changing and renewing world.
- The process in which knowledge overcomes its boundaries, just as the theory of relativity overcame the boundaries of Newtonian physics so that in the future a new perception of the world would overcome its boundaries.