Carl Rogers (1902 – 1987)
Influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology.
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“When material needs are largely satisfied,” writes Carl Rogers, “as they tend to be for many people in this affluent society, individuals are turning to the psychological world, groping for a greater degree of authenticity and fulfillment.” The clear distinction between material and psychic needs is already the mystification; it capitulates to the ideology of the affluent society which affirms the material structure is sound, conceding only that some psychic and spiritual values might be lacking. Exactly this distinction sets up “authenticity” and “fulfillment” as so many more commodities for the shopper. Rather it is the fissure itself which is the source of the ills—between work and “free” time, material structure and psychological “world,” producers and consumers.
It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.
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. Neither the Bible nor the prophets -- neither Freud nor research -- neither the revelations of God nor man -- can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction.
Don't be the ammunition wagon, be the rifle ... knowledge exists primarily for use.
"What I am is good enough, if I could just be it openly."
People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can 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.
If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.
There is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities.
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