Carl Rogers
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Carl Rogers
Carl Rogers (1902–1987) was an influential American psychologist best known for founding humanistic psychology and developing client-centered therapy (also known as person-centered therapy). His work emphasized the inherent worth of the individual, the centrality of human experience, and the transformative power of unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence in therapeutic settings.
Rogers challenged the dominant medical and psychoanalytic models of his time, advocating instead for a growth-oriented, non-pathologizing approach to human healing and development. He believed that people possess an innate drive toward growth, actualization, and psychological well-being, a view that aligns closely with the Lightning Path's core principle of authentic healing through needs satisfaction, truthfulness, and reconnection to higher consciousness.
Concept Map
Carl Rogers Terms
Actualizing Tendency, Client-Centered Therapy, Congruence, Fully Functioning Person, Growth Hypothesis, Ideal Self, Self, Self-Structure, Tendency Towards Self-Actualization
Key Figures
Human Development > A. L. Kitselman, Abraham Maslow, Albert Hofmann, Aldous Huxley, Carl Rogers, Grof, Stanislav, Humphry Osmond, Johan Galtung
Notes
A Way of Being
In his book "A Way of Being," he speaks about the foundations of a healing and healing.
His chapter "Experiences in Communication" is a transcript of a lecture he gave in 1964 at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In it he basically talks about what makes him and others happy and healthy, and what does not. The entire chapter is basically support for the idea that health and happiness come with you meet people's various Seven Essential Needs for love (psychological needs), safety (environmental needs), alignment, connection, and so on. He opens by speaking to students about the importance of communicating "at a feeling level," basically saying that he wants to connect with the students there. He then goes on and talks about how meeting various needs creates improves all relationships, therapeutic, professions, familiar, etc., and helps create happy and healthy people.
First, he relates the importance of meeting the need for Outer Connection, "The first simple feeling I want to share with you is my enjoyment when I can really hear someone."[1] He also says "I like to be heard...without judging...diagnosing...appraising...evaluating me." (trans: I like it when I am connected to others in an open and non-judgmental way). he feels "shut into" himself when he tries to express and others cannot understand. He thought this blocked connection was very serious, suggesting this disconnection from another's reality "makes some individuals psychotic. It causes them to give up hoping that anyone can understand them. Once they have lost that hope, then their own inner world, which becomes more and more bizarre, is the only place where they can live. They can no longer live in any shared human experience."
Then he relates the importance of Inner Connection. "I find it very satisfying when I can be real, when I can be close to whatever it is that is going on within me. I like it when I can listen to myself. "
There are also intimations of meeting Alignment needs, which he calls Congruence.
"In place of the term “realness” I have sometimes used the word “congruence.” By this I mean that when my experiencing of this moment is present in my awareness and when what is present in my awareness is present in my communication, then each of these three levels matches or is congruent. At such moments I am integrated or whole, I am completely in one piece. Most of the time, of course, I, like everyone else, exhibit some degree of incongruence. I have learned, however, that realness, or genuineness, or congruence—whatever term you wish to give it—is a fundamental basis for the best of communication."
He spends pages talking about Outer Alignment and Inner Alignment.
So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person’s inner world? Can I resonate to what he is saying so deeply that I sense the meanings he is afraid of yet would like to communicate, as well as those he knows?" Here Rogers recognizes that relationships of all forms benefit from Alignment, both with self and with the realities of another. His goal is to "resonate" with a person "at all levels."
He also speaks about "messages from a dungeon," messages about pain and suffering that come from people stuck and unable to move forward.
In chapter "My Philosophy of Interpersonal Relationships..." Carl Rogers discusses the importance of Connection, calling his early experience of life as an "unconsciously arrogant separateness." He relates therapeutic anecdotes that that an aligned and connected relationship with a client is the necessary foundation for healing. He also says many things that point to the importance of creating a safe environment (thus meeting an basic environmental needs for safety.
"I have found that if I can help bring about a climate marked by genuineness, prizing, and understanding, then exciting things happen. Persons and groups in such a climate move away from rigidity and toward flexibility, away from static living toward process living, away from dependence toward autonomy, away from defensiveness toward self-acceptance, away from being predictable toward an unpredictable creativity. They exhibit living proof of an actualizing tendency."
He characterizes a safe environment (Right Environment) as a non-judgment, non-controlling, non-hierarchical, and supportive one.
Only in a safe environment can mutual trust emerge. Trust is of course the foundation of connection. If you can't trust somebody, you will not open yourself to them. It is as simple as that.
In his chapter "Two Struggles" he talks about his struggles with psychiatry and behaviouristic psychology, the former about psychiatry's efforts to suppress psychology, and the latter a political discussion about his distaste for behaviourism which he characterizes as a psychology built for management and control by the elites whereas his humanistic psychology is one built for healing and health.
In all candor I must say that I believe that the humanistic view will, in the long run, take precedence. I believe that Americans are, as a people, beginning to refuse to allow technology to dominate our lives. Our culture, increasingly based on the conquest of nature and the control of man, is in decline. Emerging through the ruins is the new person, highly aware, selfdirecting, an explorer of inner, perhaps more than outer, space, scornful of the conformity of institutions and the dogma of authority. He does not believe in being behaviorally shaped, or in shaping the behavior of others. He is most assuredly humanistic rather than technological. In my judgment he has a high probability of survival. Yet, this belief of mine is open to one exception. If we were to permit one-man control, or a military take-over of our government—and it is obvious we have been (and are) perilously close to that—then another scenario would take place. A governmental-military-police-industrial complex would be more than happy to use scientific technology for military and industrial conquest and psychological technology for the control of human behavior. I am not being dramatic when I say that humanistic psychologists, emphasizing the essential freedom and dignity of the unique human person, and his capacity for self-determination, would be among the
first to be incarcerated by such a government.
There is an interesting anecdote in that chapter on a cowardly act by B.F. Skinner when he refused to allow a nine-hour debates between Rogers and himself to be released, possibly because it revealed Skinner's "philosophical choice" to develop a psychology of control rather than a psychology of freedom, possibly in willing service to a managerial elite.
In his chapter "Living the Process of Dying" he talks about evidence for the survival of individual consciousness after the death of the Physical Unit. "All these experiences, so briefly suggested rather than described, have made me much more open to the possibility of the continuation of the individual human spirit, something I had never before believed possible."
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Footnotes
- ↑ Italics in original