Rogers, unlike Siegmund Freud, held an optimistic view of man, namely that of Humanistic Psychology. According to this, man is a being who strives to realize his inner possibilities and to develop his creative abilities. In the end, human nature always tends towards the good, and undesirable developments arise in an unfavorable human environment. The force for good causes everyone to strive toward the greatest possible degree of self-creation for him.
Man must be able to develop himself
According to Rogers, psychotherapy should help people to be able to retrace the path forward when it is blocked to them. In one of his books he quotes the sentence of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “If I avoid influencing them, people become themselves”. Carl Rogers emphasizes the becoming, the evolving of the human being. For him, there is no final state that a person can reach in his or her life. The human being is in a process of continuous change.
The more a person is able to perceive inner and outer stimuli in himself without distortion, i.e. to be congruent, the more he tends to accept himself and, as a consequence, to change if necessary. If the human being is able to accept himself and possibly also to change, he develops in the direction of his perfection.
This “actualization tendency is regarded as the overriding principle of meaning and development of human behavior and experience. It causes the human organism to seek to develop and maintain all its physical, mental and spiritual possibilities.” (Swiss Society for Person-Centered Psychotherapy and Counseling (SGGT)) If this development proceeds unfavorably, it can lead to blockages, mental disorders and inhibitions or to destructive, irrational, antisocial behavior.
Carl Rogers’ person-centered psychotherapy: first comes the person.
For Rogers, therapy is first and foremost an encounter between two people. True to philosopher Martin Buber’s “dialogic principle,” a person’s self can develop only in contact from the I to the Thou, and not when one person becomes the object of another’s observation or treatment. The therapist as this “Thou” is to help the client actualize his or her self.
Rogers practiced psychotherapy and counseling as a clinical psychologist for twelve years before teaching at three American universities as a professor of psychology and (in part) of psychiatry from 1940 to 1963. In the 1960s Rogers became co-founder of the “Center for Studies of the Person” in La Jolla, California, where he worked until the end of his life. The therapy and counseling approach went through several phases of development, which were also reflected in its name: from “non-directive psychotherapy and counseling” to “client-centered therapy” to the “person-centered approach.”
At the end of the 1950s, Hamburg psychology professor Reinhard Tausch brought the concept to the German-speaking world and gave it the name “conversational psychotherapy.” In 1972, the “Society for Scientific Conversational Psychotherapy” (GwG) was founded, which further established the concept by developing advanced and continuing education courses.
