Carl R. Rogers
"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 in me." -Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
DEVELOPED THEORIES - THERAPIES
Person-Centered; Humanistic; Client-Centered; Student-Centered
TIMELINE
1902 - Carl Rogers was born in Oak Park, Illinois.
1919 - Enrolled at University of Wisconsin.
1924 - Graduated from University of Wisconsin and enrolled at Union Theological Seminary.
1926 - Transferred to Columbia.
1931- Earned Ph.D. from Columbia.
1940 - Began teaching at University of Ohio.
1946 - Elected president of American Psychological Association (APA).
1951 - Published Client-centered Therapy.
1961 - Published On Becoming A Person.
“The kind of caring that the client-centered therapist desires to achieve is a gullible caring, in which clients are accepted as they say they are, not with a lurking suspicion in the therapist's mind that they may, in fact, be otherwise. This attitude is not stupidity on the therapist's part; it is the kind of attitude that is most likely to lead to trust...”
“You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.”
“I'm not perfect... But I'm enough.”
“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
“Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?”
“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.”
“Das Persönliche ist das Allgmeine.”
“What is most personal is most universal.”
“there is direction but there is no destination”
“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
“What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.”