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On becoming a person: a therapist's view of psychotherapy

Book by Carl Rogers · 32 quotes · Persons, Process, Ifs

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On becoming a person: a therapist's view of psychotherapy Quotes

“The action of the child inventing a new game with his playmates; Einstein formulating a theory of relativity; the housewife devising a new sauce for the meat, a young author writing his first novel; all of these are in terms of definition, Creative, and there is no attempt to set them in some order of more or less Creative.”

WritingFirstsChildrenActionYoungOrderGamesTermNovelCreativeTheoryDefinitionsMeatInventingRelativitySauceHousewifeTheories Of RelativityDevising
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“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”

WayYearsMayPersonsUseGrowthChangeHealingRelationshipTreatsAskingPersonal GrowthCuresPhrasesPsychotherapy
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“I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.”

IfsBelieveOrderI BelieveEducationTeachTeacherTeachingStudentsAchievementContrarySignificantTherapyTestingCriteriaImplicationsGreat TeacherGood TeacherTeaching ChildrenTeaching And LearningTeachers And TeachingTeacher And StudentGreat TeachingGood TeachingTeaching StudentsTeachers Learning From StudentsEducating Others
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“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.”

IfsMaySelfValuesWishAttitudeLearningGrowingConditionsDiversitySocial JusticeIndependenceConformityUniquenessDisturbed
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“A second characteristic of the process which for me is the good life, is that it involves an increasingly tendency to live fully in each moment. I believe it would be evident that for the person who was fully open to his new experience, completely without defensiveness, each moment would be new.”

BelievePersonsMomentsWould BeLife IsI BelieveProcessTendenciesCharacteristicsGood LifeEvidentNew ExperiencesDefensiveness
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“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 discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming me.”

PersonsIdeasProcessMy OwnReturnBecomingAuthorityHighestAgain And AgainValidityTouchstonesApproximation
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“This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. 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.”

MeanLife IsProcessGrowingBecomingOneselfConvincedStreamsGood LifeHeartedStretchingBecoming MoreLaunchingFaint Hearted
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“The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy, man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature - the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self.”

MenHumansMeanSelfForceCreativityCapacityTendenciesHuman LifeUrgesMatureOrganismsPsychotherapyActivate
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“Watching my clients, I have come to a much better understanding of creative people. El Greco, for example, must have realized as he looked at some of his early work, that 'good painters do not paint like that.' But somehow he trusted his own experiencing of life, the process of himself, sufficiently that he could go on expressing his own unique perceptions. It was as though he could say, 'Good artists do not paint like this, but I paint like this.' Or to move to another field, Ernest Hemingway was surely aware that 'good writers do not write like this.' But fortunately he moved toward being Hemingway, being himself, rather than toward some one else's conception of a good writer. Einstein seems to have been unusually oblivious to the fact that good physicists did not think his kind of thoughts. Rather than drawing back because of his inadequate academic preparation in physics, he simply moved toward being Einstein, toward thinking his own thoughts, toward being as truly and deeply himself as he could. This is not a phenomenon which occurs only in the artist or the genius. Time and again in my clients, I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust of the processes going on within themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings, live by values which they discover within, and express themselves in their own unique ways.”

CreativityIndividualityAuthenticityVulnerabilityBecoming OneselfTrust Of Self
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“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.”

LifeInspirationalHumanism
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“Somewhere here I want to bring in a learning which has been most rewarding, because it makes me feel so deeply akin to others. I can word it this way. What is most personal is most general. There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in my writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else could understand, because it was so uniquely my own…. In these instances I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.”

VulnerabilityArtistsSelf ExpressionPsychotherapyCommon Ground
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“The more I am open to the realities in me and in the other person, the less do I find myself wishing to rush in to "fix things." As I try to listen to myself and the experiencing going on in me, and the more I try to extend that same listening attitude to another person, the more respect I feel for the complex processes of life. SO I become less and less inclined to hurry 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.”

TherapyTherapistCarl Rogers
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