On Becoming a Person

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Clients express that they are seeing things more clearly, and take ownership of their situation, being prepared to take action: ‘I’m not surprised I’m angry with my boss after what I’ve been through. So I’ve quit my job.’ Under certain conditions, involving primarily complete absence of threat to the self structure, experiences inconsistent with it may be perceived and examined, and the structure of self revised to assimilate and include such experiences. We guess that you can already understand what kind of a shift Rogers introduced in the world of psychology; but one can understand this better if we compare his approach to the approach practiced by his predecessors.

On Becoming a Person - Carl Rogers - Google Books

Another quote that I’ve used in just about every assignment since Level 2 to help illustrate the development of person-centred therapy. Characteristics of a Helping Relationship The client recognises their own and others’ process towards self-actualisation: ‘I accept that pain within me, and what I and others did. I feel a warmth and compassion towards myself and them for where I am at.’ That’s it, Rogers realized: all we need to live a more fulfilled life is to feel that our desires and actions are normal! In therapy the individual learns to recognise and express his feelings as his own feelings, not as a fact about another person. Thus, to say to one’s spouse ‘what you are doing is all wrong.” is likely to lead only to debate. But to say ‘I feel very much annoyed by you are are doing,” is to state one fact about the speaker’s feelings, a fact that no one can deny. IT no longer is an accusation about another, but a feeling which exists in oneself. ‘You are to blame for my feelings of inadequacy,” is a debatable point, but ‘I feel inadequate when you do thus and so’ simply contributes a real fact about the relationship.”Porter, E.H. (1941) The development and evaluation of a measure of counseling interview procedure. Ph. D. Dissertation, Ohio State University. Rogers, C.R., Raskin, N.J., et al. (1949). A coordinated research in psychotherapy. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 13, 149–200. Cited in: N.J. Raskin, The first 50 years and the next 10. Person-Centered Review, 5(4), November 1990, 364–372. Such a shift in emphasis towards the possible (as opposed to merely the problematic) made Rogers, along with Abraham Maslow, a major figure in the new 'humanistic' psychology, with its notions we take for granted today about personal growth and human potential. Curiously enough, a positive evaluation is as threatening in the long run as a negative one, since to inform someone that he is good implies that you also have the right to tell him he is bad.”

Carl Rogers - On Becoming A Person - Tom Butler-Bowdon Carl Rogers - On Becoming A Person - Tom Butler-Bowdon

On Becoming a Person – Kramer goes on – “sold millions of copies when million was a rare number in publishing. Rogers was, for the decade that followed, the Psychologist of America, likely to be consulted by the press on any issue that concerned the mind, from creativity to self-knowledge to the national character.” You see, he realized, after a pretty long career as both a researcher and a clinician, that he – or anyone else for that matter – is simply not competent enough to solve other people’s problems. After all, everyone has them and what really puts one human being in a position above another one? Despite most of his work being very challenging, Rogers will occasionally treat the reader to beautifully-written insights into the human condition, words of profound wisdom, or paragraphs that perfectly sum up the how and why of what we’re trying to achieve as therapists. And the job of a psychotherapist should be that: to listen attentively and pass no judgment over his patients, thus creating a safe environment wherein one can really get in touch with his true self.I get defeated sometimes, I get hurt sometimes, but I’m learning that these experiences are not fatal.” Rogers, Carl (1951). Client-centered therapy: Its current practice, implications and theory. London: Constable. ISBN 978-1-84119-840-8. This theory provides a valuable common language with which to discuss clients in both supervision and case studies. Rogers, Carl. (1959). A Theory of Therapy, Personality and Interpersonal Relationships as Developed in the Client-centered Framework. In (ed.) S. Koch, Psychology: A Study of a Science. Vol. 3: Formulations of the Person and the Social Context. New York: McGraw Hill. The application to education has a large robust research tradition similar to that of therapy, with studies having begun in the late 1930s and continuing today (Cornelius-White, 2007). Rogers described the approach to education in Client-Centered Therapy and wrote Freedom to Learn devoted exclusively to the subject in 1969. Freedom to Learn was revised twice. The new Learner-Centered Model is similar in many regards to this classical person-centered approach to education.

Carl Rogers - Wikipedia Carl Rogers - Wikipedia

In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?” I have learned that my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect.” Optimal development, as referred to in proposition 14, results in a certain process rather than static state. Rogers calls this the good life, where the organism continually aims to fulfill its potential. He listed the characteristics of a fully functioning person (Rogers 1961): [26] we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.” As is the case with all ideas, it’s not like Rogers’ fell from Mars; on the contrary: they are deeply rooted within the philosophy of existentialism which emerged from the ashes of the two great wars; especially the second one.

I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming. In other words, if you can be whatever you want to be, what you are at the moment is exactly what you are not (statistically, let’s say that’s only about 1% of your potential realized and you still have 99% to go). Raskin, N. (2004). Contributions to Client-Centered Therapy and the Person-Centered Approach. Herefordshire, Ross-on-the-Rye, UK: PCCS Books.