Carl Rogers (1902 to 1987) was an American psychologist who founded person-centred therapy, and changed counselling across the world by insisting that the client, not the therapist, is the expert on their own life. His trust in our inner drive to grow, and his refusal to hold power over the people he worked with, are at the heart of how Therapeutic Shamanism works, and Therapeutic Shamanism sets the drive he described beside its own teaching on Soul.
Who was Carl Rogers? #
An American psychologist who changed the way therapy is done. He was born in rural Illinois in 1902, went to the University of Wisconsin to study agriculture, then trained for the Christian ministry, and finally turned to psychology.1 For twelve years he worked with troubled children in Rochester, New York, then taught at Ohio State University from 1940, at the University of Chicago from 1945 and at the University of Wisconsin from 1957. He spent his last years in La Jolla, California, where he took his work into groups and into efforts to resolve conflicts between communities and nations.2 Those efforts were so extensive, the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom writes, that “he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.”3 He died in 1987.
His best-known books include Client-Centered Therapy (1951), On Becoming a Person (1961) and A Way of Being (1980).
What did Rogers change about therapy? #
Who holds the power. Early psychotherapy mirrored a hierarchical society, “with the therapist being the expert, analysing the client and telling the client what was wrong with them.”4 Rogers turned this round, so that therapist and client meet as equals. In his own words, “The locus of evaluation is in the person, not outside.” That is, the client is the expert at growing and blossoming into who they were meant to be.5
He also took a far more hopeful view of human nature than Freud: “Unlike Freud, who believed that people were inherently selfish until socialised, Rogers believed that people were inherently good.”6 At the root of this was what he called the actualising tendencyActualising tendency. Carl Rogers’s term for the drive in every living thing to grow into the best version of what it is meant to be. In animist terms, this is the drive of the Lower-World Soul. More about this, the drive in every living thing to grow towards what it can be: “things will still do the best that they can, given the circumstances they are in – think of how a plant grows in the cracks of a pavement.”7 See What can person-centred therapy offer shamanic work?
Why do so many of us feel unlovable? #
Rogers saw this as one important thing that keeps people lonely. He wrote that what keeps people “locked in their loneliness” is “the conviction that their real self”, the self hidden from others, “is one which no one could love.” He traced it to childhood, where a child’s spontaneous feelings are so often disapproved of that the child comes to disapprove of them too.8 Therapeutic Shamanism builds on this in its teaching on conditions of worthConditions of worth. Carl Rogers’s term for the conditions placed on love and acceptance in childhood, internalised as conditions of self-worth: the wonky stories of the middle-world self that override the Soul’s original instructions. More about this and on the parts of ourselves we send away. See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?
Why does Rogers matter so much to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Because his way of working is built into it. Paul Francis has been a psychotherapist since the early 1980s, and what he saw of power being misused put him off shamanism for years; he came back to it only once he had learnt how to practise it in a more person-centred and empowering way. That is why the principles of the person-centred approach are at the heart of his work and of Therapeutic Shamanism.9 Rogers is among Paul’s personal heroes, as “the founder of counselling”.10
Therapeutic Shamanism also sets Rogers’s idea beside its own teaching on Soul, the wild and true self each of us is born with. “All beings have a template, like a seed within them”, and a drive to grow into it: “The founder of counselling, Carl Rogers, called this drive the “actualising tendency”.”11 See What can shamanism offer person-centred therapy?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism go beyond Rogers? #
Into the more-than-human world. Rogers’s ‘fully-functioning person’ matches the healthy hunter-gatherer adult closely; the only major difference is that therapy does not usually reconnect us with the other-than-human world. Rogers himself reached towards this late in life. Describing the kind of person he saw emerging in the future, he wrote: “They feel a closeness to, and a caring for, elemental nature. They are ecologically minded, and they get their pleasure from an alliance with the forces of nature, rather than in the conquest of nature.”12 Therapeutic Shamanism takes that alliance further, into relationship with the other-than-human Peoples themselves. See What is Therapeutic Shamanism?
Has his approach been criticised? #
Yes, and Rogers knew it: “There are many who criticise this point of view. They regard it as too optimistic, not dealing adequately with the negative element, the evil, the dark side in human beings.”13 He was also honest about his own research. Summing up a large study of therapy with hospital patients in Wisconsin, he wrote that “many of the most impressive of our findings either went contrary to our expectations, or forced us to modify the theories from which we started”.14
In 1982 the existential psychologist Rollo May wrote an open letter to Rogers, asking for a more realistic view of human evil, and saying that each of us can turn towards good or towards evil.15 Rogers replied that he could find no inborn tendency towards destructiveness in people. Everyone can behave in evil ways, he wrote, but whether they do depends on “social conditioning and voluntary choice”.16
