On Becoming a Person

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Merry, Tony. (2002) Learning and Being in Person-centred Counselling. 2ndedition Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books. I have learned to become more adequate in listening to myself; so that I know…what I am feeling at any given moment – to be able to realize I am angry, or that I do feel rejecting toward this person; or that I feel very full of warmth and affection for this individual; … or that I am anxious and fearful in my relationship to this person. … One way of putting this is that I feel I have become more adequate in letting myself be what I am. I believe that I have learned this from my clients as well as within my own experience – that 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. Rogers really is superb isn’t he? (And he has been most unfairly ignored by the academy in recent decades I think. I suspect that academics are more comfortable with the fixed than the flowing and thoughts rather than feelings.)

Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person The Best Bits From Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person

There’s another quote from this book we thought we shouldn’t omit, especially having in mind the fact that one of the most influential Western intellectuals at the moment is Jordan Peterson. Rogers’ prose is often so dry that reading it is a pure chore, but that’s not the most frustrating part about it. And the safe environment can be created only within the “genuineness and transparency” of a good and trusting relationship. We’ve already told you a thing or two about existentialism’s fundamental tenets while summarizing Being and Nothingness , the central work by, arguably, the greatest existentialist philosopher of the 20 th century, Jean-Paul Sartre.In short, client-centered therapy held that change would only happen through the experience of a relationship, and that it was the therapist's role to provide an environment in which personal growth might occur. Many people live in a frightening world of their own making; they desperately try to hold everything in place. To allow a person to break through to a more free-flowing life that is closer to attuned to changing reality, Rogers had to first feel what it was like to exist in such a ‘tight, constricted little world’, to really get inside the skin of the client. Most types of so-called understanding, Rogers noted, was someone providing objective understanding from outside. Yet he saw a big difference between someone trying to work out your problem and help with it, and that person actually wanting to feel what it is like to be you; only through the latter, however, could you have a powerful interaction. 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. Rogers offered a group of nineteen hypothetical statements which, together constitute his person-centred theory of personality dynamics and behaviour . ‘A theory of personality and Behaviour’ can be found in Rogers (1951, pp. 481-533). Rogers makes the following statement: “Thistheory is basically phenomenological in character, and relies heavily on the concept of the self as an explanatoryconstruct. It pictures the end-point of personality development as being a basic congruence between the phenomenal field of experience and the conceptual structure of the self - a situation which, if achieved, would represent freedom from internal strain and anxiety, and freedom from potential strain; which would represent the maximum in realistically oriented adaptation; which would mean the establishment of an individualised valuesystem having considerable identity with the value system of any other equally well-adapted member of the human race.”(p. 532)

On becoming a person - BibGuru Guides Citation: On becoming a person - BibGuru Guides

Experience which, if assimilated, would involve a change in the organization of self, tends to be resisted through denial or distortion of symbolism” (Rogers, 1951). If the content or presentation of a course is inconsistent with preconceived information, the student will learn if he or she is open to varying concepts. Being open to consider concepts that vary from one's own is vital to learning. Therefore, gently encouraging open-mindedness is helpful in engaging the student in learning. Also, it is important, for this reason, that new information is relevant and related to existing experience.Certain ideas that Rogers championed,” writes Kramer, “have become so widely accepted that it is difficult to recall how fresh, even revolutionary, they were in their time.” Rogers’ Influences: Humanist Psychology Is Existentialist Psychology