Counselling tutors tell us that On Becoming a Person is one of the most important books we students will ever read. What they don’t tell us is that reading it can often be such a draining, soul-destroying process that we’ll need to see our own therapist afterwards. Carl Rogers summarized what he had learned about his own process of becoming a person in an essay entitled “This is Me,” found in On Becoming a Person . This discussion helps illuminate the beliefs he gained from experience about effective change and acceptance of one’s self. 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 (because Kierkegaard’s and Rogers’ are somewhat unnecessarily complicated), you can be whatever you want to be, but only if you choose to be yourself, you will not feel despair at your choice. Martin Buber

Carl Rogers: The Flow of Becoming a Person • Storied Mind Carl Rogers: The Flow of Becoming a Person • Storied Mind

Rogers, C.R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 21: 95-103. Between 1974 and 1984, Rogers, his daughter Natalie Rogers, and psychologists Maria Bowen, Maureen O'Hara, and John K. Wood convened a series of residential programs in the U.S., Europe, Brazil and Japan, the Person-Centered Approach Workshops, which focused on cross-cultural communications, personal growth, self-empowerment, and learning for social change.Carl R. Rogers was an American psychologist, one of the founders of the client-centered approach to psychology and one of the most influential psychologists in American history.

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

Increasing organismic trust – they trust their own judgment and their ability to choose behavior that is appropriate for each moment. They do not rely on existing codes and social norms but trust that as they are open to experiences they will be able to trust their own sense of right and wrong.

To cease evaluating another is not to cease having reactions. It may, as a matter of fact, free one to react. ‘I don’t like your idea’ (or painting, or invention, or writing), is not an evaluation but a reaction. It is subtly but sharply different from a judgement which says, ‘what you are doing is bad (or good), and this quality is assigned to you from some external source.’ The first statement permits the individual to maintain his own locus of evaluation. It holds the possibility that I am unable to appreciate something which is actually very good. The second statement, whether it praises or condemns, tends to put the person at the mercy of outside forces. He is being told that he cannot simply ask himself whether this product is a valid expression of himself. he must be concerned with what others think. He is being led away from creativity.”

On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of (PDF) On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of (PDF)

A rich full life: Rogers describes the life of the fully functioning individual as rich, full and exciting, and suggests that they experience joy and pain, love and heartbreak, fear and courage more intensely. His description of the good life:

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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. If a person could be fully open to his experience, every stimulus - whether originating within the organism or in the environment - would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism. Proctor, Gillian, and Napier, Mary Beth, eds. (2004). Encountering Feminism: Intersections Between Feminism and the Person-Cerntered Approach. PCCS Books. ISBN 978-1-898059-65-3. I become less and less inclined,” writes Rogers, “to hurry in to fix things, to set goals, to mold people, to manipulate and push them in the way that I would like them to go. I am much more content simply to be myself and to let another person be himself.” 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.”