Carl Rogers

Carl Ransom Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology.

Quotes

Managers today come up against a few more communication barriers. One is the pressure of time. Listening carefully takes time, and managers have little of that to spare. In today’s business culture especially, with its emphasis on speed, already pressed managers may give short shrift to the slower art of one-on-one communication.
- Carl Rogers, and Fritz Roethlisberger. "Barriers and gateways to communication." Harvard Business Review, 1952.

It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.
- Source: page 11

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.
- Source: page 23-24

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.
- Source: page # not specified

Don't be the ammunition wagon, be the rifle … knowledge exists primarily for use.
- Source: page 281

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.
- Source: page 351

What I am and what I feel are good enough to be a basis for therapy, if I can transparently be what I am and what I feel in relationshipto him. Then perhaps he can be what he is, openly and without fear.

Often paraphrased as: "What I am is good enough, if I could just be it openly."
- Source: Page 66

... I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people.

I have gradually come to one negative conclusion about the good life. It seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted or fulfilled or actualized. To use psychological terms, it is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis
- Source: page 185-186.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.
- Source: page 187.

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.
- Source: p.236.

There is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities.
- Source: page 7

Facilitative attitudes (and skills) can help a therapist gain entry into the group
Freedom from a desire to control the outcome, and respect for the capacity of the group, and skills in releasing individual expression
Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem
Acceptance of the problems experienced by the group where they are clearly defined as issues
Allowance of the freedom of choices in direction, either for the group or individuals particularly in the near future
- Source: page 113

“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.
- Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (1975), p. 48-49

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Carl Rogers