On Becoming a Person

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Rogers, psychological testing, and the psycho-educational clinic at Columbia University's Teachers College (1924–1935)". At one place in the book, Rogers sums up most of his ideas about how a good consultant/client relationship looks like and what it does “into one statement. It has seemed to me that my most fruitful periods of work are the times when I have been able to get completely away from what others think, from professional expectations and daily demands, and gain perspective on what I am doing.

Carl Rogers - Wikipedia Carl Rogers - Wikipedia

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. another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have. And understanding does mean – almost always – not judging, even if some things seem to you wrong or stupid.

I had learned to be more subtle and patient in interpreting a client’s behaviour to him, attempting to time it in a gentle fashion which would gain acceptance. I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker.

The 7 Stages of Process • Counselling Tutor The 7 Stages of Process • Counselling Tutor

The central tenet of Rogerian, person-centered politics is that public life need not consist of an endless series of winner-take-all battles among sworn opponents; rather, it can and should consist of an ongoing dialogue among all parties. The problem was clearly her early rejection of the boy, but over many interviews, I could not help her to this insight. There seems to be some fundamental, universally-valid characteristics which can be noticed in fully functioning individuals: they are completely acceptant of their feelings, thoughts, emotions as they arise.El Greco, for example, must have realized as he looked at some of his early work, that 'good painters do not paint like that. 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. To open one's spirit to what is going on now, and discover in that present process whatever structure it appears to have" (Rogers 1961). The fulfilled person, he believed, should come to accept themselves “as a stream of becoming, not a finished product.

Review of On Becoming a Person. - APA PsycNet

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. It seems that gradually, painfully, the individual explores what is behind the masks he presents to the world, and even behind the masks with which he has been deceiving himself.The counselor's attitude and orientation were shown to be instrumental in the decisions the client made. Freedom of choice – not being shackled by the restrictions that influence an incongruent individual, they are able to make a wider range of choices more fluently. The values attached to experiences, and the values that are a part of the self-structure, in some instances, are values experienced directly by the organism, and in some instances are values introjected or taken over from others, but perceived in distorted fashion, as if they had been experienced directly. the organized consistent conceptual gestalt composed of perceptions of the characteristics of 'I' or 'me' and the perceptions of the relationships of the 'I' or 'me' to others and to various aspects of life, together with the values attached to these perceptions.