Carl Rogers Ideas - Research Paper Example

?613548 Carl Rogers Carl Rogers’ ideas gained wide acceptance in many fields of academia in the latter half of the twentieth century. He is considered the major instigator of the branch of psychology known as humanistic psychology. Experts used his ideas to inform theories in nursing science, education, marital counseling, rhetoric, and politics. Mainly he emphasized the innate goodness of each person and their inner motivation for living a worthwhile life. He believed each person was an individual with unique ideas that could contribute to the overall flow of ideas in some way even if it seemed insignificant. Rogers stressed mutual respect for each other’s individuality and perspective. Regardless of this non-threatening, universally accepting, humanistic approach, many people saw Rogers’ ideas as too ambitious for humans to live up to. Rather than challenging people to do so, these detractors just say that Rogers’ ideas are flawed. Biography Carl Rogers was an American psychologist who served as director of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, New York. He taught at the University of Rochester, Ohio State University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin. He was a resident at the new Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla. One of the founders of humanistic psychology, Rogers developed a client-centered therapy, which maintains that a client should have a say in which direction his/her therapy takes.  The current way psychotherapy is viewed has a lot to do with Rogers’ influence. His Rogerian theory, that he hoped would help to solve the cold war, is frequently used in marriage counseling and other relationship therapy. One characteristic of Rogers many people comment on is his open and warm personality. This outlook was reflected in his work. He was welcoming and non-judgmental which parallels his philosophy of psychology. His personality-centered approach to life and his work left lasting impressions on many people and changed the way people approach life. Rogers Contribution to the Field The most frequently offered praise of Rogers is his optimistic way of viewing people. He saw them as inherently good. Mental illness or bad behavior of any sort comes about in Rogers’ view because of some unsolicited/unpredicted distortion of the good in a person. This uncomplicated view resulted in Rogerian theory based on what Rogers called an “actualizing tendency” which can be defined as the motivation each person has to become the best that s/he can be (Boeree, 1998, 2006). Some call this an existential theory. Rogers himself described it as the “central source of energy in the human organism. This source is a trustworthy function of the whole organism rather than of some portion of it; it is most simply conceptualized as a tendency toward fulfillment, toward actualization, involving not only the maintenance but also the enhancement of the organism” (Rogers, 1980, p. 123). This belief that each person, all living beings in fact, has worth and value just because they exist (i.e., existentialism) informs Rogers’ work. A person who was healthy both mentally and physically Rogers would have termed “fully functioning.” This person would possess several of the characteristics defined in Rogerian theory. First of all, they would be open to new experience and accepting of reality including his/her feelings even if the emotions are not exactly praiseworthy. For instance, if a parent meets their teenage son’s new girlfriend. See seems like a nice young woman, but Mom and Dad cannot help but feel caution and protectiveness. Mom may even feel jealousy even though she probably would not admit it. Rogers would say, she should admit it, explore the feeling, discuss it with her son, and come to terms with it so that she can interact in a healthy way with the girlfriend for as long as she remains important to her son. In this way, the son at least knows his mother’s feelings even if he discounts them. He may come to appreciate the fact that his mother willingly and honestly shared even the feelings she was not proudest of with him later in life when he experiences feelings that he is not proud of. However, this healthy relationship between the mother and son does not necessarily include planning for a future with the girlfriend. Rogers would say live in the here and now; do not plan on the future too much because what is important is the moment. In other words, the mother should just express her feelings and not require a reaction from her son. That may come later. In the same way, Rogers advocated learning from the past, but not dwelling on it. He also says that planning for the future and day-dreaming are acceptable and even healthy practices, but one should not put too much energy into them. Mom should not count on her son remembering her willingness to share her feelings about his girlfriend, but she should continue to honestly express herself because hopefully it will leave an overall impression. Rogers cautioned that getting too wrapped up in regrets or longing is not healthy and robs time from a person’s existential experience. As with the teenage romance, everything could change tomorrow, best to live in the moment and derive experience in the present. Another characteristic Rogers supported was trusting oneself, doing what comes natural, and being oneself. This idea, according to Boeree, has become a point of contention in Rogers’ theory. Many would interpret Rogers’ advocacy of “organismic trusting” as a license to do whatever a person wants to do including harm to one’s self or others, theft of property, and all sorts of other inappropriate behavior. Many people even accuse the openness of society in the 1970s on such licentiousness. However, Rogers did not necessarily mean that each person should do as they please without consideration of others. He meant that each person should trust their own instincts when it came to making decisions that would affect their lives and not depend on others to direct them. Interestingly, society praises individual thinking when it comes to entrepreneurial pursuits and money making endeavors. However, if a person wants to pursue their individualistic dreams of another sort, without focusing on profit, they are viewed as suspicious. Ed Bagley Jr. and a few others like him, for years pursued sustainable living when the majority of the population wasted natural resources with abandon. People laughed at Bagley and others of his ilk. Now, all of a sudden, when the resources and the price they command fall outside of the reach of most, Bagley and these other people who have advocated self-sustainable living for all of these years do not look so weird any more. All they did was to follow their convictions even when others laughed at them. Rogers would have viewed that as a healthy trust in one’s self. Rogers would have also praised the way that Bagley and others pursued the choices available to them. Granted, Bagley had enough money to put expensive solar panels on his roof long before it became the latest in home improvement as it seems to be now. However, Bagley could have succumbed to the public derision often hurled at him by late night comedians and others, but he instead felt free to experiment. Rogers advocated this freedom, but also responsibility when the choices one makes do not turn out well. Rogers also advocated creativity, or participation in the world, by offering one’s own unique ideas to the mix. Rogers’ version of creativity can take many forms: one can be an inventor, an artist, a politician, a parent, or just being the best at whatever profession one pursues. Even the most menial of professions has use and should be respected. Rogers’ positive spin on mental health influenced many areas of thought, most notably of course is psychotherapy. According to Denise Kensit, Rogers’ theory, labeled Rogers' Client-Centered Therapy (RCCT), included the phenomena `phenomenology' (i.e., multiple reality theory) and the `innate desire to self-actualize', maintained by the organismic valuing process” (Kensit, 2000).  RCCT held that therapists had to remain positive and genuine toward their clients. However, that notion has been re-evaluated and some of it discarded, most obviously its fundamental contradictory nature. That is, if a therapist genuinely dislikes a client, believes that the client should be pursuing another path, or a whole host of other potentially negative possibilities a therapist may offer to a client, s/he should express this to be genuine, but then s/he is not being positive. Yet, Rogers’ overall positive and kind attitude has lasting effects in many areas. Its influence on modern counseling practices and humanistic psychology is clear. Other areas impacted by Rogers’ theory include “human resource training (stressed importance of empathy, respect and self-exploration)” and education (Kensit, 2000). Critics of Rogers’ Theory Most of the information available about Rogers is positive. Most people discuss his methods as overall useful even if they are a bit idealistic and, perhaps in light of the sea change in society since Rogers developed his theories, utopian. “He has become more and more concerned with the social outreach of this thinking not only in the helping professions and in education, but in interracial and intercultural tensions, in forecasting a view of the future, and in all modes of realizing human potential” (Heppner, Rogers, & Lee, 1984, p. 102). Unfortunately, Rogers’ theories did not stick. Too many people saw his methods as weaknesses rather than regarding them as ways to demonstrate mutual respect. Rogerian argument theory involves the statement of the issue from the viewpoint of all parties involved, the restatement of each others’ views, and then the statement of the favored outcome again by all parties. Rogers thought this would be a helpful way to resolve Cold War issues, but the Untied States (and other countries) chose the less friendly more violent approach. Now the world suffers from severe distrust of one another. No one is genuine; no one has respect for anyone else. This occurs not just in the political realm, but in interactions between individuals too. Perhaps the biggest flaw in Rogers’ theory is that he did not account fully for human nature. Many critics of Rogers’ theory say that he overestimated the potential in every human for positive change. In the area of mental health counseling, the belief that each person has potential and should be allowed to determine what it is, or the “selective constructive tendency” as Williams and Irving label it, has inconsistencies they claim. “The basis for this belief and its implementation in experiential learning shows a number of paradoxes: the model of a growing flower—a rigid, rule-following system—is presented as evidence of the potential for positive change; self-actualisation is claimed to be the power force of life, yet is so fragile that it fails most of us; self-knowing involves finding meanings—a cognitive task—yet personal development programmes are based on non-cognitive knowing. The Rogerian rationale for personal development work is thus fatally flawed” (Williams & Irving, 1996). Once discounted in the area for which it was founded, Rogers’ theory received criticism in other areas too. One of the areas where, regardless of criticism, that Rogers theory is still seen as legitimate is education. Rogers applied his humanistic theory in the area of education which resulted in a learner-centered model of education. He pointed out that each person has a unique experience in life and each processes their experience differently. These ideas influenced many education theorists including Howard Gardner who applied Rogers’ ideas to his own theory of learning: each student can only learn in his/her own way depending on his/her own unique set of life experience and his/her learning style. “Schools often use the theory of multiple intelligences, developed by Harvard University professor Howard Gardner in his ground-breaking book Multiple Intelligences (1993), to describe the different ways in which children process information. Gardner identified eight intelligences and gave them formal names” (Lorenzi, 2011). Therefore, in education, Rogers thought that learning should provide various experiences to appeal to as many students unique experience just as Gardener later identified. The information a student is expected to learn should be relevant to that student and s/he should be able to apply it to his/her own life. Rogers also stressed that students must have an open mind: willing to learn which comes from the teacher demonstrating the information’s importance to the student. Students forced to learn something will not be as open and receptive to learning. In fact, they may rebel. Rogers thought it best to have less formal classroom settings with mutual trust and no fear of retribution for disagreement. He believed teachers could learn from students while working to help students connect with the material being taught. Based on these beliefs, Rogers came up with a theory that was widely used in classrooms across the nation. However, Richard Farson and others while praising the optimistic and constructive angles of Rogers’ theory, also see its limitations. Farson said, “By and large [Rogers] is unable to recognize either the co-existence of opposites or the enormous complexity of human affairs. He is essentially a linear theory, as opposed to a curvilinear one; maximizing rather than optimizing. His concepts, like most others in humanistic psychology, are based on the idea of ‘the more the better,’ as opposed to ‘there can be too much of a good thing’” (Farson, 2001, p. 200). Interestingly, Farson lumps Rogers theory in with “most other humanistic psychology” when it really was the genesis for humanistic psychology. Also, Farson’s criticism seems to apply to Rogers’ theories overall rather than just the educational application of Rogers’ theory even though Farson is writing for an educational journal. Personal View Perhaps what Farson and the others who criticize Rogers’ theory see as its biggest defect is that it is too optimistic. Rogers had high standards in the area of mutual care and respect and it is difficult for people to live up to those standards. Unfortunately, it seems, by discounting Rogers’ methods, people have been given the permission to give up rather than strive to be the best that they can be and the best they can be to each other. Rogers’ way of emphasizing the genuineness and individuality of each person should be the norm, and along with it should come a mutual respect for each other’s distinctiveness. Yet, that is not the case anymore. People are told they are wrong or bad if they do not comply rather than admired for their courage to display their individuality. The bullying that goes on in schools speaks to how young this forced compliance begins. The disarray of the federal government, the unwillingness to compromise, the selfish lack of concern for others prevalent in day to day life, all reflect the absence of Rogers’ ideas of mutual respect for each other and an open spirit of compromise. Instead of critiquing his ideas on how unrealistic they are, perhaps the naysayers should be figuring out a way to disseminate them through society before it is too late and we have hated each other into utter destruction of the human race. Read More