Roger's Humanistic Psychotherapy

RogerianPerson-Centered Theory

Key Terms:
Phenomenology The Phenomenal Field The Self-Concept
Self-Actualization Organismic Enhancement Congruence/Incongruence
Positive Regard The Client-Centered Hypothesis Process Equation
Insight Transference Psychotherapy
Therapy Ingredients Therapized Individual Evolutionary Ethos
Non-Directive Techniques Basic Encounter Group

Thought Questions

1. What is the goal of life?
2. Is altruism possible? Does the idea even make sense from this perspective?
3. Do you feel comfortable accepting everything a client does? What if you’re working in prisons with killers and rapists?
4. Are people responsible for what they do and how they do it?
5. Do you think that people just become congruent on their own when somebody shows them positive regard?
6. Is “congruence” good? Can you justify your response one way or the other?
7. What epistemology does Rogers assume?
8. What forms of causality are evident in Rogers thinking?
9. Does Rogers assume/assert free will?
10. What forms of moral relativism and moral absolutism are found in Roger’s theory?

Phenomenology - Kant’s distinction between the noumena (the world as it actually is) and the phenomena (our experience of the world). Phenomenologists argue that we can never know the noumena, all we can know is the phenomena. All we ever have access to is our own subjective understanding of reality. When we want to know why people are the way they are, we must understand their subjectivity, the world how they see it and how they understand it. It does not (and cannot) exist objectively. When we think of how we are thinking, we are attending to our own subjectivity. The body still operates, we’re not just bodiless minds floating around, but we can observe our own processes, whether they be psychological or physical (we’re the only creatures that we know of who can do that). We can transcend our immediate phenomenological experience to observe it in a different subjective way. We can observe our own observations. Husserl called this “transcendental phenomenology”.

What does this have to do with Rogers? Rogers was very much a phenomenologist. He believed strongly in subjectivity, and how our experience of our world, even if not empirically verifiable, is real to us. What the world means to us is far more important than what the world objectively is, which doesn’t matter at all (because we have no access to it).

This comes into focus when it comes to his understanding of the unity of mind and body. We cannot have a subjective understanding of the world without those two. They are united in that our bodies are the locus of our minds, yet our minds lend meaning to the world. The sum total of what the whole of being means to us is called the “phenomenal field”. This is the sum total of our subjective reality. To quote Rogers “Man lives essentially in his own personal and subjective world, and even his most objective functioning, in science, mathematics, and the like is the result of subjective purpose and subjective choice” (Rogers, 1959, p. 191). Behavior is always goal-oriented, organized by the phenomenal field (what life means to us) and carried out in that context.

The “Self” to Rogers is actually the “self-concept” or how we define ourselves. As we go through living our lives we are not aware of who we are until we are asked or until we think about it. Then we define who we are in our phenomenal field, we focus just on our own subjective impressions of who and what we are, which is understood in the context of the rest of the phenomenal field. We all are constantly growing and learning, and we naturally do this in a positive direction. This process is called “self-actualization” when we try to become all we can be.

So why does anybody do anything? Because we have fundamental needs as human beings. Our primary need is (of course) a unified psychological/physical need that is driven by evolution. It is the need that all of us have to enhance our phenomenal field by enriching its range, articulation, and differentiation. This motivational construct is called “organismic enhancement”. The more “evolved” a creature is, the greater the ability it has to enhance its phenomenal field. People naturally grow in this positive direction. Keep in mind that although we have certain physical needs (like the need to eat), but what is specifically need-generating in our lives is influenced by our unique experiences and personal understandings. Hunger is horrible to one, sanctifying to another, and a symbol of rage to a third.

Self-concept can clash with our tendency towards organismic enhancement. How we think we should be can be diametrically opposed to the need we have for organismic enhancement. Some people feel that they should live pious constrained lives, yet the need for organismic enhancement specifies that we should get as varied experiences in life as possible.

Congruence/Incongruence: Congruence is the way I would like to be. Whatever feeling or attitude I am experiencing would be matched by my awareness of that attitude. This is when what we think and how we feel agree with each other. Incongruence is when our self-actualization and organismic actualizing tendency are at odds with each other. We go along with parental values without ever really engaging with them, and we do things that don’t feel right. We go along with peer pressure to do things we feel are morally wrong, yet we ignore the guilt and keep doing them.

Positive Regard. In order for incongruence to be done away with, we must experience positive regard. We must first experience it for others before we can experience it for ourselves. This is the feeling of “I am worthy” and “I can be what I feel myself to be without shame or apology.” Positive regard entails not only accepting who and what people are, but also showing acceptance for all they do, no matter how immoral, destructive, or irresponsible. Morals are relative, and we must strive to help people be congruent

The Client-Centered Hypothesis: “The individual has a sufficient capacity to deal constructively with all those aspects of his life which can potentially come into conscious awareness. This means the creation of an interpersonal situation in which material may come into the client’s awareness, and a meaningful demonstration of the counselor’s acceptance of the client as a person who is competent to direct himself” (Rychlak, 1981, p. 599).
The person of the counselor becomes bracketed, stands back from and apart from the person of the client to the point that the counselor becomes a warm, accepting mirror of the client that they then perceive in the person of the counselor. “[T]he relationship is experienced as a one-way affair in a very unique sense. The whole relationship is composed of the self of the client, the counselor being depersonalized for the purposes of therapy into being ‘the client’s other self.’ It is this warm willingness on the part of the counselor to lay his own self temporarily aside, in order to enter into the experience of the client, which makes the relationship a completely unique one, unlike anything in the client’s pervious experience” (ibid)
Hence, from a truly Rogerian frame, there is no evaluation, diagnosis, probing, interpretation, or confrontation. By “warmly” entering the client’s experience, we help them reopen communication between their organismic and self-evaluations about what are important and what is right. It is the task of the Rogerian therapist to help the client be as natural as possible, and they will then grow in responsibility for who they are and who they are not. We help them accept themselves as themselves . . . As Roger’s thought developed, however, he found that if a counselor is truly 100% congruent, how could they NOT express strong feelings that come up naturally in the counseling relationship? As his writing and thinking matured, Rogers became highly expressive of is own feelings in group counseling (below) although he remained steadfast in the therapist bracketing themselves to warmly enter the client’s experience in individual therapy.

The Process Equation: “The basic idea that one person in a relationship – be it therapeutic or simply social – intends that there should come about in another person ‘more appreciation of the latent inner resources of the individual’” (Ryclak, 1981, p. 600). To Rogers, Life = Therapy, and Therapy = Life. Therapy, like life, is a relationship, and all therapists are is skilled relationship facilitators.

Insight: “The perception of new meaning in the individual’s own experience” (p. 601). Clients must find their own reasons why they suffer psychological maladjustment, and they must become responsible for what happens in their phenomenal fields. Insight is merely the phenomenon of their realizing the cause and effect of their own behavior in their lives (whether that behavior is overt or covert, thought or action). Given that insight can be subtle, and very hard to put into words, Rogers placed emphasis on the fact that new experiences in the therapeutic relationships lead to insight (new meaning) even if the client cannot articulate their new experience.

Transference: Rogers argued that he rarely, if ever, saw transference take place in the manner Freud describes. Rogers stated that infantile attitudes are not transferred to the therapist who presents themselves on equal status to the client. Basically, dynamic therapists pull for transference by taking the expert role while never allowing their client to see that they’re human too. (Which is exactly the point to a dynamic therapist, while Rogers would offer the rebuttal that such transference is artificial in the relationship, and hence artificial in the lives of the clients.)

Psychotherapy: “Psychotherapy deals primarily with the organization and functioning of the self. There are many elements of experience which the self cannot face, cannot clearly perceive, because to face them or to admit them would be inconsistent with and threatening to the current organization of the self.” Therapy entails the counselor having the appropriate attitude (as opposed to the appropriate skill or knowledge). This attitude is one of accepting and warm regard, and when that attitude is consistent and congruent the counselor becomes a positive and accepting alter-ego to the client, which frees the client up from fear of evaluation and allows them to become a more consistent, more real, self. It is only when we are truly accepted that we can change, paradoxically enough. The power of that acceptance allows us to re-configure our phenomenal field (who we are and what things mean to us) without threat of emotional/relational injury.

Therapy Ingredients: 1. Contact (the client and counselor must communicate). 2. Client must be incongruent while the counselor must be congruent (the thoughts/feelings of the client must not match up in some way, causing anxiety or depression, while the counselors thoughts/feelings/behaviors must all line up). 3. The counselor must experience positive regard (all of the clients thoughts and feelings are worthy of positive regard). 4. The therapist must feel genuine empathic understanding and must be able to see things from the client’s perspective.

Therapized Individual: A therapized individual demonstrates a more willing, honest, and open acceptance of whatever their feelings indicate. They lose their self-consciousness while demonstrating self-awareness. They may be defensive from time to time, but the recognize defensiveness as such, and has a sense of when such defensiveness is appropriate/congruent. Such people are very aware of themselves and very accepting about who they are and how they feel. “[T]o be the self that one truly is” is to be an aware, congruent, therapized individual.

Evolutionary Ethos: “Instead of universal values ‘out there’ or a universal value system imposed by some group – philosophers, rulers, priests or psychologists – we have the possibility of universal human value directions emerging from the experiencing organism. Evidence from therapy indicates that both personal and social values emerge as natural, and experienced, when the individual is close to his own organismic valuing process. The suggestion is that though modern man no longer trusts religion or science or philosophy nor any system of believes to give him values, he may find an organismic valuing base within himself which, if he can learn again to be in touch with it, will prove to be an organized, adaptive, and social approach to the perplexing value issues which face all of us” (p. 608). The contradiction of the evolutionary ethos: As a psychologist Rogers is imposing a value system, one that is still dominant in this field today. He argues that pro-social values are good, and only come about when people become intensely self-focused. The paradox is this: People become more pro-social when they become more self-focused.

Non-Directive Techniques, from Most Common to Least Common
1. Recognizes in some way the feelings or attitude the client just expressed
2. Interprets or recognizes feelings or attitudes expressed by general demeanor, specific behavior, or earlier statements
3. Indicates topic of conversation but leaves development to the client
4. Recognizes the subject content of what the client has just said
5. Asks highly specific questions, delimiting answers to yes, no, or specific information
6. Explains, discusses or gives information related to the problem or treatment
7. Defines the interview situation in terms of the client’s responsibility for using it.

Basic Encounter Group: The premise and core involves freedom of expression for both the therapists and the clients. Rogers felt that the group together was wiser than he was as the facilitator, so he had great faith that the group would go to good places. In such encounter groups (be they once for an hour or a week-long power-marathon). Often times care and acceptance is expressed during such groups, but at other times members confront one another so the masks come off, and congruence becomes more probable.
It is the role of the facilitator to demonstrate acceptance for all members of the group, which provides for psychological safety. Most importantly, however the counselor encourages genuineness on the part of the participants (Rogers was known to walk out of group when the clients were being superficial.) Rogers would focus on the ongoing behaviors of the group members, but was loathe to make group process comments, noting that it tended to slow down real, genuine interaction because it made group members feel evaluated and hence self-conscious. Role-playing, bodily contact, and psychodrama have all been used by Rogers. He was very clear, however, that such activities should not be planned in advance, but should instead arise organically and congruently out of the encounter session. The whole goal is to get people to begin to express how it is they really feel. Such frankness and openness, however, can be very painful, but Rogers felt such risks were worth the benefit of helping people become more congruent. Most importantly, however, the group facilitator is part of the group (and hopefully a congruent one) and expresses his thoughts/feelings as a group member as opposed to remaining reserved and aloof (which Rogers thought was an indication of a lack of congruence on the part of the facilitator).