Strengths_Ad_Weaknesses_of_Rogers'_Understanding_of_the_Person

Understanding in Counselling. Essay 1 “What are the strengths and weaknesses of Rogers’ understanding of the person' How does this understanding fit with your own experiences and beliefs' Introduction In this essay I will outline Rogers’ understanding of the person and examine some of the philosophical and personal context within which he developed it. I will go on to examine what I consider to be the strengths and weaknesses of his understanding, using material from the literature, from research findings and from my own beliefs and experiences. I will conclude that while on the whole there may be some aspects of Rogers’ theory of self with which I cannot fully agree, my view is that the person-centred approach on which it is based continues to offer a firm bedrock for much successful counselling practice in the UK, Europe and beyond. Personal philosophy and historical context of Rogers’ work Rogers’ personal philosophy was both humanist and phenomenological He believed that “the subjective human being has an important value which is basic; that no matter how he may be labelled and evaluated he is a human person first of all, and most deeply.” (Rogers 1961, p8). Building on the work of the philosopher Husserl, he argued that understanding could only be subjective: "Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me” (Rogers 1961, p23). Both of these statements resonate with me, and find echoes in my own personal beliefs: I find them both affirming and uplifting, in contrast for example to the darkly pessimistic world-view of the Freudians, or the deterministic and reductionist perspective of behaviourism. He rejected the deficiency models of psychoanalysis and behaviourism with their emphasis on dysfunction and maladjustment, in favour of a belief in human potential and innate wisdom and goodness. In this last respect I find I can’t agree entirely with his view, possibly as a result of the fact that our differing backgrounds and life experiences have shaped our world views. Carl Rogers was born into a rural, middle-class Christian family in the American Mid-West in 1902. His childhood appears to have been marked by stability and affection and an emphasis on hard work and self-reliance. Kirschenbaum (1979, p29) suggests that by the early 1920s Rogers had already become interested in the existential idea that one should “take responsibility for one’s own actions”, perhaps reflecting the family values which surrounded him. Barrett-Lennard (1998) also points out the relevance of the social and political context of the time in the development of Rogers’ ideas. The Great Depression of the 1920s and Roosevelt’s New Deal was followed in the 1950s and 60s by a period of stability and economic progress in the United States, with the Second World War receding from memory, the success of the Marshal Plan in helping to re-build much of Europe, and the collectivist ideas of Communism being successfully demonised in the American psyche. It is perhaps not surprising that Rogers’ theories based on humanistic principles of potential, growth, Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology optimism and goodness, found a ready audience. In contrast I was born in 1957 and grew up in a secular working-class urban family, taking full advantage of the post-war boom in social mobility brought about by grammar schools and free university education. While this gave me a similarly humanistic outlook to Rogers, and a belief in individual responsibility, my life experience has also been marked by the context of nuclear proliferation in the 1960s and 70s with the prospect of mutually-assured destruction, the Cold War, the conflict in N Ireland and the struggle against apartheid in S Africa. I also married into a Jewish family for whom the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict are very real and painful. As a result I feel my own personal philosophy owes more to that of the existentialist views of Rollo May than to that of Carl Rogers. Rogers understanding of the person Rogers’ foundation work on his understanding of the self appears to have begun early in his career. In 1928, he began to work with disturbed children and adolescents in Rochester New York. His doctoral thesis work was on personality adjustment in children, developing a test to assess the child’s view of his/her self, compared to how they would like to be, already showing the basis of what would later flower into his concept of “congruence”. It was during the 1940s and 50s, whilst a professor of psychology, but also perhaps more importantly as a practising therapist, that Rogers developed his practice of what he termed “Client-Centred Therapy”, the title of his 1951 book. In Part III of this he sets out a theory of personality and behaviour in the form of his 19 propositions. He is clear that the model is one he has “gradually come to adopt as a result of clinical experience and clinically-oriented Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology research” (Rogers 1951 p. 482), but also suggests that he regards the theory as still tentative. His ideas on personality dynamics and the nature of the person continued to be refined as a result of his clinical work and were updated in his contribution to Koch (1959). He pulled together much of his thinking into his famous work “On becoming a person” published in 1961. Rogers's understanding of the person is based on two basic concepts: the “actualising tendency” and what he named the “organismic valuing process.” He described the human organism as having “one basic tendency and striving to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism” (1951, p. 487). In the course of pursuing this actualisation, people engage in what Rogers called the organismic valuing process. The human infant gradually comes to differentiate itself from others through experience and the”self-concept” develops, described as "the organized set of characteristics that the individual perceives as peculiar to himself/herself" (Ryckman 1993, p106). In a favourable developmental environment, all humans have the capacity to develop into healthy individuals with positive self-regard and an accurate sense of who they are, congruent with the “ideal self” they have internalised. When significant others in the person's world (usually parents) provide positive regard that is conditional, rather than unconditional, the person acquires "conditions of worth" (Rogers, 1959). These conditions of worth depend on an external locus of evaluation. In other words they depend on opinions, judgments and evaluations from others, external to the person. Thus the person develops a self-concept, or self-concepts, based partly on others’ judgments rather than on its own organismic valuing. The need for positive self-regard leads to a selective perception Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology of experience in terms of the conditions of worth that have been internalised. Those experiences in line with these conditions are perceived accurately in awareness, while those that are not are distorted or denied into awareness. This leads to incongruence between the self as perceived and the actual experience of the organism, resulting in psychological distress. The aim of what Rogers referred to as “non-directive” or “client-centred” therapy is to provide “different soil and a different climate in which the client can recover from past deprivation and begin to flourish as the unique individual he or she actually is”. (Mearns and Thorne 2007, p17). An understanding not a theory Even given the limitations of my necessarily brief summary of Rogers’ thoughts on the nature of the self I am struck by the idea that what many perceive to be its strengths may in fact also be seen as its weaknesses. First and foremost it is indeed an “understanding” of phenomena, rather than a theory or model which seeks to explain and predict. Rogers himself (1959, p.190) referred to it as encompassing “an unknown amount of error and mistaken inference”. McLeod (2009) discusses at length the nature of theory in psychotherapy and counselling, and highlights the tension between theory as reflecting an ultimate truth about the world, or as a practical tool for understanding the world. Rogers clearly intended his 19 propositions to provide a stimulus for further understanding. He falls very much within the social constructionist orientation – providing a set of concepts to make connections, tease out themes and gain insight. This could be said to be a major strength in that it enables the practice of person-centred therapy to offer a flexible response to individual circumstances and experiences, rather than offering a single Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology ideological truth with which a client may or may not fit. Yet while this fits comfortably with my humanistic belief in the uniqueness and individuality of all people, it also means that the labels “Rogerian” or “person-centred approach” can encompass a huge variety of practices and orientations. Wilkins (2003, p.4) refers to the “lack of clarity about theory and practice” and Mearns and Thorne (1988, p.2) describe the person-centred approach as comprising a “veritable smorgasbord of therapeutic approaches”. My impression from reading within the literature of the person-centred approach is that there is often a lack of precision and definition in much of the terminology. Perhaps this is the price to be paid for an approach which describes itself as a “way of being” rather than a “way of doing”. While I have an instinctive attraction for an understanding based primarily in individual human experience, I am aware that there for me is a tension between this, and the more rational, so-called “scientific” side of me which seeks a basis in evidence and quantitative data – probably a relic from the very experimentally-based first degree in Social Psychology in the 1970s. A panacea for the articulate Western middle-class' Rogers was very much a practising therapist and it is evident that he came to construct his understanding of the self out of the results he observed in his many years of practice, rather than first devising a set of hypotheses which could then be tested out on his clients. It is certainly the case that much work has been done by Rogers and his collaborators and those following after him to provide research support for the approach. During the formative development of his approach through World War 2, Rogers was involved in programmes for servicemen and veterans and in student counselling , and, his work involved therapy with a diverse range of clients. Perhaps more than other major therapy Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology systems, the approach grew from a broad spectrum of experience and clientele. Rooted as it in Rogers' world-view, it has been suggested that a particular weakness of person-centred understanding is that it is based on middle-class American culture and values and is a therapy for the articulate “worried well”. In fact reading for this essay has led me to discover that there is much research into the efficacy of the person-centred approach with very deeply disturbed or impaired clients, for example the work of Prouty on “pre-therapy” with schizophrenic, chronic and developmentally-impaired individuals, (Prouty 2002). Warner (2000) provides much evidence of the usefulness of the person-centred approach with clients demonstrating “fragile and dissociated process”, often as a result of traumatic childhood abuse. Similarly there are charges that the construct of the self as autonomous and independent as articulated by Rogers is only applicable to Western cultures. Laungani (1990) argues this persuasively, and I know from my own experience that those from hierarchical, family-centred Asian and African cultures would perceive their relationship to the therapist and the process of therapy very differently to, for example a European client. Yet there is work which has demonstrated the cross-cultural relevance of person-centred therapy, for example Morotami (1998) in which he examines the relevance for Japanese clients. The actualising tendency: a naively optimistic view The actualising tendency sits at the very core of Rogers’ understanding, and without it, none of his ideas of self and of therapeutic change would hold together. The concept of man as having an innate drive towards constructive growth endows Rogers’ understanding with optimism, hope and generosity. Natiello (2001, p.(v)) speaks of the need for a “deep Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology and prevailing trust in the innate wisdom of others”. Others take the opposite view: Quinn (1993, p.21) speaks of the “Pollyannaish optimism” of the person-centred approach. It is for me an uplifting set of principles, although not one with which I can easily agree. Of course the concept of self-actualisation is not unique to Rogers – I recall being struck forcefully 35 years ago when I first learned about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, by just how “right” that concept felt to me in helping to understand human behaviour. Whilst I do believe that there is a deep actualising tendency within us all, my own experience leads me to the view that there are basic needs which must be satisfied before the human organism can contemplate the work of psychological growth. Our instinct to fulfil basic needs for food, shelter and safety can become all-encompassing, leaving nothing left over for anything more. I have lived and worked in Africa and South Asia, and my experience of the very poor in the developing world is that the concept of fulfilling one’s human potential might well raise a hollow laugh in a woman struggling to feed her starving children. A further weakness for me in the concept of the actualising tendency as expounded by Rogers is that it appears to pay little attention to social, cultural or other barriers. There may be very real obstacles to actualising one’s potential which lie outside the individual rather than within. Rogers holds out the hope of change and development towards psychological “full-functioning” through dissolving acquired conditions of worth to achieve a self which is congruent with experience and the organismic valuing process. It assumes that this is not culture-bound, but it is difficult to see how this can be achieved in a society which, for example, may deny equality for women or some other group, and has built a culture and a shared understanding on that basis. Mearns and Thorne (2000, p.181-4) suggest a focus on the “actualising process which contains not only the actualising tendency but the dialogue Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology between it and the restraints of social mediation…..The forces of social mediation form a coherent and functional part of our existence as social beings, allowing us the expression of the actualising tendency but exerting an imperative which cautions against endangering of the social life space”. This emphasis on the inherently socially-connected nature of humans links to what is for me a further weakness of the concept of the actualising tendency as that of humanity as inherently trustworthy, with the assumption that given an optimum developmental environment a person will develop into Rogers’ “fully-functioning person”. His analogy with potatoes is frequently quoted (1977, p.7) but for me it is impossible to equate the biological and physiological tendencies of plants with the psychological tendencies of thinking, self-aware and social human beings. For me there is too much evidence of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man and to the natural environment for this to be the case. I read with interest the dialogue between Carl Rogers and Rollo May carried out in the pages of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in the summer of 1982. While Rogers as ever argues eloquently, I find that the views of May align more closely with my own personal philosophy. For Rogers, human evil is distinct from human nature:” Though I am very well aware of the amount of malevolent, cruel, destructive behaviour in today’s world- from the threats of war to the senseless violence on the streets – I do not find that this evil is inherent in human nature.” (Rogers 1982).Rogers argued that evil is a function of society and culture. May (1982) counters by asking “But who makes up the culture except persons like you and me' “ He suggests that people innately have both the potential for good and for evil, for creativity or for destructive urges: “I see the human being as an organized bundle of potentialities. These potentialities, driven by the daimonic urge, are the source both of our constructive Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology and our destructive impulses. If the daimonic urge is integrated into the personality (which is, to my mind, the purpose of psychotherapy) it results in creativity, that is, it is constructive. If the daimonic is not integrated, it can take over the total personality, as it does in violent rage or collective paranoia in time of war or compulsive sex or oppressive behavior. Destructive activity is then the result”. (May 1982) I find that my own view is best summed up by van Deurzen (2002): “Well-being is not the naive enjoyment of a state of total balance given to one by Mother Nature and perfect parents. It can only be negotiated gradually by coming to terms with life, the world and oneself”. (van Deurzen 2002, 184) Sharing the journey to psychological well-being Finally I perceive a major strength in Rogers’ understanding as the way that it has served to de-pathologise and democratise issues of psychological distress and to remove much of the stigma from the act of seeking counselling or therapy for such problems. What flows from Rogers’ work is the concept that “problems in living” are probably an inevitable consequence of the human condition and that there is no shame in seeking assistance to deal with them. He also stresses the client as “expert” on their own condition, with the counsellor acting not from a position of power, expertise or superior knowledge, but rather as a guide and companion, to allow the client in the words of Natiello (2001 p63) to “claim his or her personal power rather than relying on the power or expertise of another”. The person-centred approach does not rely on a medical model of distress, nor does it require training in complex theories or specific tools and techniques. It has served largely to de-mystify therapy and to make it both acceptable and widely available. I know that for my parents’ generation in the working-class North of England in the 1950s psychological Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology therapy would have been deeply shameful as well as remarkably difficult to access. Yet by the mid-1990s I was able to seek out local, low-cost counselling with Relate, and was praised by friends and family for doing so. I consider this major about-turn in attitudes as probably Rogers’ most astonishing achievement. Yet once again this strength can also be a weakness: the tool on which the person-centred approach relies is the therapeutic relationship and creating and maintaining that through the core conditions inevitably asks a huge amount of the person-centred therapist. Thorne (2000 p.61) speaks of” the need to accept the stern discipline of pursuing their own spiritual journey with unflagging commitment”, while Natiello (2001 p.31) refers to the “full participation by the therapist with all the intensity, real presence, and interactiveness of his or her capacity to be fully human”. From the perspective of the student at the start of her training it certainly looks like a tall order, and I only hope I will be up to the task. Conclusion In conclusion, my view is that there are certainly both strengths and weaknesses to Rogers’ understanding of the self, and for me the stumbling block to complete acceptance is the concept of the actualising tendency as a uniquely positive force. At this moment I struggle with the ability to trust completely in the ability of all clients to find their own way towards psychological health (Wilkins 2003). And yet…. when I am told to “trust the process…”, when I have been able to witness, even in my limited skills practice, brief glimpses of progress towards healing and wholeness, I wonder if perhaps this is a destination I can, one day, reach. Jackie Colton, MSc Counselling Psychology References * Kirschenbaum, H. (1979). On becoming Carl Rogers. Delacorte, New York, * May, R. (1982) The problem of evil: An open letter to Carl Rogers. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 22, 10-21 * Mearns, D. & Thorne, B. (2000). Person-centred therapy today: New frontiers in theory and practice. London: Sage. * Morotomi, Y. Person-centred counselling from the viewpoint of Japanese spirituality. Person-Centred Practice 6(1); 28-32 Retrieved October 20 2011 from http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/ps/ESRC/Preportall.pdf. * Natiello, P. (2001.) The person-centred approach: a passionate presence. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books * Prouty, G., Van Werde, D., & Portner, M. (2002) Pre-Therapy, reaching contact-impaired clients. PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye * Quinn, R. (1993) Confronting Carl Rogers: A developmental-interactional approach to person-centred therapy. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 33 (1): 6-23 * Rogers, C. (1951). Client-centered therapy: its current practice, implications and theory. London: Constable. * Rogers, C . (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. * Rogers, C. (1961). On becoming a person: a therapist's view of psychotherapy. London: Constable * Rogers, C. (1977). On personal power. New York: Delacorte Press * Rogers, C. (1982). Notes on Rollo May Journal of Humanistic Psychology 1982 22: 8-9, * Ryckmann, R.M. (1993). Theories of personality (5th ed.) California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Co * Wilkins, P. (2003.) Person-centred therapy in focus. London: Sage * Van Deurzen E. (2006). Existential psychology in Dryden, W., ed. Handbook of individual therapy. London: Sage.