Person-centred philosophy

'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.'

Carl Rogers

Person-centred philosophy offers us an image of the person that I find both hopeful and inspiring. It has its roots in humanistic psychology whose key founders were the 20th century American psychologists, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. The image of the person that they portrayed in their writings was radically different from others that were prominent at the time and it proved highly controversial.

Positive at the core

The image of the person that is the keystone of this philosophy is a profoundly optimistic one. It is one that strongly affirms the essential worth and dignity of human beings. It firmly rejects the idea that the core of our humanity is fundamentally flawed, destructive or evil and sees the essence of human nature as positive, constructive and trustworthy.

This is, however, an image of the person that is often misunderstood. It is not, as Rogers himself said, ‘a Pollyanna view’ of human nature. It accepts that human beings are imperfect. It does not deny that there is a darker side to human nature and that all of us have the capacity for destructive behaviour. It acknowledges our brokenness and woundedness and the often devastating impact this can have on our relationships with ourselves, others and our environment. What person-centred philosophy is saying, however, is that the innermost core of our being - what Rogers called our 'organismic nature' and what I call the soul - is positive, constructive and trustworthy.

Always in the process of becoming

Person-centred philosophy also sees human beings as always in the process of growing, developing or of ‘becoming’ as Rogers put it. In perhaps his best known book, 'On Becoming a Person’, he shared his deeply held conviction that all of us have the capacity to ‘become a person’, to realise our full potential as human beings and to embrace a revolutionary way of being which is profoundly growthful not only for ourselves, but also for those with whom we are in relationship. For Rogers, to become is to find our way to ‘that self that one truly is‘ as the philosopher, Kierkegaard put it. It is to embrace our full personhood. This is, he said, the key purpose of human life and the journey of a lifetime.

Person-centred philosophy also rests on the belief that within all of us, there is a constructive, ‘forward-moving' force or energy which is present from birth. It is a force which animates, energises and sustains us. It motivates us to protect and care for ourselves, to defend ourselves when we are threatened, to meet our basic needs. It pushes us towards acting autonomously and assuming control of ourselves and our lives. It stimulates us to grow, to realise our potential, to fulfil and enhance ourselves, to become more fully who we are. It drives us to learn, to expand our knowledge and understanding, to be creative. Rogers called it 'the actualizing tendency' and saw it as ‘the mainstream of life.’ It is otherwise known as the human spirit.

The presence of the spirit does not, however, guarantee that growth will take place in any one of us. It only creates the potential for it. For it is a force that can be inhibited or suppressed by damaging life experiences and relationships or by the impact of wider environmental influences such as the dysfunctional social and cultural systems within which we often live out our lives. Sometimes we face such difficult challenges in life that our potential for growth is not always fully realised, that we fail to become all that we have the potential to be.

The human spirit cannot, however, be totally destroyed. Given the right conditions, it can always be re-energised no matter how damaged it has been. And those ‘core conditions’ are met, Rogers said, when we experience a relationship in which we feel unconditionally loved and accepted for who we are, in which we are fully heard and understood and in which the other’s capacity to be congruent - to be who he or she is - frees us to begin growing again. If we are fortunate, we encounter along the way someone – a friend, a partner, a teacher, a therapist, a spiritual companion – who is able to love us into being the self that we truly are.

'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.'

Carl Rogers

In search of soul