Subjectivity in Rogerian Psychotherapy
In the late 1940s a psychotherapist named Carl Rogers began publishing titles such as “Significant aspects of nondirective therapy” (1946), “The orientation and attitude of the counselor in client-centered therapy” (1949), and “Client-centered therapy: A helping process” (1951). For a field dominated by psychoanalytic psychotherapy and behaviorism during the 40s and 50s, this would have been unfamiliar language. Rather than conceiving of the thinking subject as driven by unconscious forces or conditioning, Rogers pioneered what we know today as ‘positive psychology’, focusing “more explicitly on the actualizing tendency as the basic motivational force that leads to client change” (Corey, 2010). Today, this the dominant language used in clinical mental health graduate programs.
Rogers hit on something radical in the nature of the therapeutic practice:
“It appears that the goal the individual most wishes to achieve, the end which he knowingly and unknowingly pursues, is to become himself” (1961).
While the name of this approach underwent many changes (from ‘nondirective’ to ‘person-centered’ to ‘client-centered’), we will refer to this approach more specifically as the Rogerian approach to psychotherapy. Rogers’ most comprehensive philosophical and practical account of his new work is in a collection of essays and lectures, On Becoming a Person, edited and published in 1961. What Rogers believed of the individual, and of subjective experience, is elucidated in these pages.
Becoming a Person, Personhood
The central therapeutic technique that Rogers brought to the clinical space was the therapeutic relationship. This relationship was to be different than what most of his clients had experienced in their lives. This relationship is to be a safe and secure environment in order to facilitate the single goal of psychotherapy: becoming a person (‘person’ being a rather privileged achievement, not a given).
First and foremost, becoming a person requires freedom. The organism and the psyche need room to breathe and to experience without detrimental consequences or unnecessary restraints. For Rogers, pathology is the result of an individual having to distort his or her experience under the pressure of social requirements. The distortion looks like masks stacked on top of each other, over time taking on an increasingly rigid nature, sometimes even tricking the individual herself that this is ‘the real her’, in an act of Sartrean bad faith.
What this model of psychopathology reveals to us about Rogerian subjectivity is the following: there is someone essential, underneath the social masks and identities, that is authentic and unmediated and fluid — this is the ‘Person’. However, it should be noted that the Person is not the same as the Humanistic or theological subject. Rogers makes it clear that Personhood is deeply and fundamentally open, fluid, changing, and forever ‘becoming itself’. Whereas Renaissance or Enlightenment Humanism and theology emphasize the unchanging, indeed transcendent, aspects of the subject, Rogers wants to get at the ephemeral subjectivity beneath the identities that foreclose true experience to us. In fact, he continually stresses that psychotherapy itself is a process, not a product:
Individuals move, I began to see, not from a fixity or homeostasis through change to a new fixity… the more significant continuum is from fixity to changingness, from rigid structure to flow, from stasis to process (1961).
So what’s beneath the mask?
Rogers answers with four qualities (depending on what lecture or essay you’re looking at; however, these four are repeated most commonly in different wordings):
Openness to experience. In the process of ‘masking’, we risk our own experience. Internal and external bits of information are distorted to protect the identity subject is veiling over itself. Being open to experience involves a welcoming stance towards internal experiences, such as emotions or desires, and external stimuli, such as information or sensations. Openness means that “beliefs are not rigid, that [subject] can tolerate ambiguity” (1961).
Trust in one’s organism. The person who has achieved his own personhood will be more accepting and trusting of his body’s experience, and can rely on it to guide his behaviors and decisions in situations. He can sense out where the social demands and the desire of others begin and end, and can more accurately listen to the contradictions, feelings, and experiences of his own body. That is, he develops a bodily intuition. This person deepens a sensitivity towards one’s feelings and sensations.
An internal locus of evaluation. The person stops looking elsewhere, to others, for evaluations and judgements of her own decisions. She more frequently turns inward, towards her own experience, and gathers judgements and evaluations concerning her own behaviors. Subject becomes its own frame of reference.
Willingness to be a process. Rogers also calls this “existential living”, and it looks like “a person [who is] a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits” (1961).
Becoming Who You Are
Becoming who one is — this is a strange sentiment. How do we become who we already are? Rogers clearly admired the existentialist tradition of authenticity and of individualism, and he explicitly draws from the Danish sage on this point:
The best way I can state [the] aim of life, as I see it coming to light in my relationship to my clients, is to use the words of Soren Kierkegaard — ‘to be that self which one truly is.’ I am quite aware that this may sound so simple as to be absurd (1961).
How does Rogers resolve this simple absurdity?
From interactions with his clients, Rogers finds that the tendency for the individual to ‘become who they are’ is an active position. Again, the true Rogerian subject is always moving, always in motion. He tells us that he notices two fundamental movements: away from and towards. The Person which the subject truly becomes “moves towards being, knowingly and acceptingly, the process which he inwardly and actually is”, which is not an intellectual endeavor, but “the groping, tentative, uncertain behaviors by which he moves exploringly towards what he wants to be” (1961).
The person moves away from facades, from ‘oughts’, from meeting expectations, from pleasing others; and towards self-direction, towards being a process, towards embodying complexity, towards openness to experience, towards the acceptance of others, and towards trusting in their own self.
Utopia?
Some might smell in this something of a naturalistic utopia emitting from the Rogerian subject. He is, in the end, calling for a more ‘natural’ way of being, and he assures us that it is only the constraints, the social facades, and the bad faiths that humans become corrupt, selfish, or greedy. In other words, it is society and human institutions that have the capacity to obfuscate subject’s own experience of itself. Underneath these distortions, within the processual becoming of the organism, exists a natural attitude, a natural predisposition: feelings can be felt without the collapse of society and all needs and desires find their natural order in the harmony of the human body and mind.
The Rogerian subject is highly reminiscent of Bosch’s middle panel in his famous triptych, “Garden of Earthly Delights”. There is no war in this image, no outright vice — but humans are nonetheless indistinguishable from animals. Is this not the opposite of what ‘cultured peoples’ tell us? Isn’t the animal kingdom pure violence, excess, and unmediated emotion?
No, Rogers argues; in the animal kingdom, he tells us, the lion eats only what is required, and no more. Although it must brutally destroy an antelope in the process, it is in harmony and accordance with the natural law. People, on the contrary, consume and attack without limits. Bosch’s third triptych is human society writ large.
So “Becoming what one is” is the fundamental axiom for Rogerian subjectivity. It is a task, not a given; but this task is ‘already complete’, in the sense of us already having the ‘tools’ within us to access our full Personhood. This is so because we are first animals; we have access to harmony and authenticity as the lion or antelope. The organism is there, we just need to trust it; anger and love are there, we just need to tune into them.
The ironic thing about Rogers’ conception of the subject is that Personhood looks closer to what most would call Animalhood. In becoming who we are, we gain access to our desires, delights, and anger in an unmediated (that is, undistorted by all those distinctly human-like things, like social masks and rigid facades) form. We become one with ourselves.
[Subjectivity in Psychotherapy, 04]
References
Corey, G. (2017). Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy (10th ed.).
Rogers, C. (1961). On Becoming a Person.
