At this point in the child’s development, the evaluations of others become important due to the individual’s need for positive regard. The individual has a need to experience from others attitudes such as warmth, respect, sympathy, and acceptance. But here emerges the potential problem of development: Often the positive regard of another will be conditional on the individual being a particular way. And often, the positive regard of another will be at odds with the individual’s own organismic valuing process. For example, in our own organismic experience we may find it enjoyable to break objects, but our parents may not likewise evaluate this behavior
positively.

Now we are confronted with a dilemma. If we admit to ourselves that we get satisfaction from experiences that others judge negatively, then this is inconsistent with our self-concept as someone who is good or loveable. Rogers suggests that the normal resolution to this dilemma is that the individual comes to pursue those behaviors that have been positively evaluated by others, rather than those that have been experienced as positive to the actualization of his or her own organism.

We live not in terms of our own organismic valuing but rather in terms of values that have been introjected from others, or conditions of worth. We cannot regard ourselves positively unless we live in accord with thoseconditions.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

As infants we experience our world in terms of this goal of actualization, evaluating positively those experiences we perceive as maintaining or enhancing our organism and evaluating negatively those experiences we perceive as impeding this maintenance or enhancement. From birth, this organismic valuing is based on the individual’s own experience, what Rogers calls the phenomenal field.

Rogers emphasizes that it is our subjective experience that is crucial and that determines our valuation and consequent behavior, not some postulated objective environment apart from the organism. For example, a stranger might speak to two infants in exactly the same voice, but one infant might experience the sound as stimulating and so smile, whereas the other experiences the same sound as aversive and so cries.

With development, the individual becomes increasingly autonomous and differentiated in line with the actualizing tendency. An important consequence of this development is the differentiation of the self. A portion of our experience gets elaborated into a concept of what is “I” or “me” or “myself.” This self-concept consists of those qualities we perceive ourselves to have, the relationships we perceive between ourselves and other people and objects, and the values we attach to these perceived characteristics. It is through our interactions with the environment, especially interactions with
other people, that the conceptual pattern of a self is formed.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

In the case of Herbert Bryan. Ironically, one way that he did so was by directing Mr. Bryan to the issue of being directed by another. When we find Rogers’ vehement rejection of external direction coupled with his own unwitting act of directing another, we might be led to the hypothesis that Rogers’ personal interest in this issue derives from his having experienced unwanted direction in his own life. We will look for evidence of this when we turn to his personal life. At this point, however, we are ready to look at the theory of personality that he elaborated from his therapeutic work.

The Theory
By 1959, Rogers had extracted from his therapy experiences an explicit theory of the nature of persons and the course of their development both in and out of therapy. He presented this theory in a paper titled “A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships, As Developed in the Client-Centered Framework.”

At the core of this theory is the proposition that individuals are born with one exclusive motive, which he calls the actualizing tendency. This is an innate tendency to develop all of our capacities so as to maintain or enhance ourselves. According to Rogers, this inborn motive toward actualization is an inherently positive and trustworthy impulse toward the growth and development of one’s own organism.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

And in his footnote to the counselor’s statement in C54, Rogers praises the counselor for recognizing Mr. Bryan’s “dependent feeling” and says that
“if he had failed to recognize it, undoubtedly it would have cropped out again.”12 We should be wary when an author uses a term such as “undoubtedly”.

In this case it reflects a certainty that Rogers felt about the importance of the issue of dependency on external direction to the client, but his certainty may have derived instead from its importance to Rogers himself. In fact, in the very remark that Mr. Bryan had made in S50 before the beginning of this exchange, he had said this: “Well, after all, the whole thing is occurring within me, and it’s what might be termed a war within my
own house.”13 There is no hint of relinquishing his responsibility to an external authority here.

Why does Rogers fail to see the bias introduced here by the counselor? The answer is that Rogers shares the counselor’s bias, for he himself is the counselor of Herbert Bryan. This fact is indirectly conveyed to us at the end of the case, when in the concluding minutes of the last interview Mr. Bryan says to the counselor: “You’re sort of a pioneer in this, aren’t you? Is this largely your own technique?”14 Although Rogers never explicitly identified himself as Mr. Bryan’s therapist in his 1942 book, he later acknowledged that he was. Furthermore, Rogers later came to acknowledge that despite his belief in following the client’s lead, he had displayed”subtle directiveness”15

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

No. I feel that I already know the logic of it, but that doesn’t effect a cure. Now, I feel that in the last analysis—I think that psychoanalysis is probably a matter of prestige—prestige persuasion. I feel that if I get a confidence in you, that you know more about it than I do—that regardless of the logic—that is, I feel I am your equal in logic, but that you are my superior in certainemotion-changing techniques.

C54. In other words, if you felt that gradually you had enough confidence, and so on, in me, I might be able to bring about some change in you, but you couldn’t very well do that by yourself.10 The shift has now been made, from a focus on the issue of logic versus emotion (introduced by Mr. Bryan) to that on the issue ofinternal versus external direction (introduced by the counselor).

If we can see that the counselor has introduced this shift in focus, does Rogers? When he presents this case in the book, Rogers not only provides the line by line exchange between the counselor and Mr. Bryan but also offers his own commentary on the exchange as it unfolds. At times in the book Rogers is critical of the counselor’s approach, but for this exchange he is not. When in C53 the counselor asserts his reinterpretation of Mr. Bryan’s struggle as one of internal versus external direction, Rogers as the book author writes in a footnote about this remark that it “clarifies the attitude that is being expressed.”11

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

One thing that would seem to make this unlikely is that the case of Herbert Bryan was recorded and presented verbatim; indeed Rogers himself was offering this method of verbatim accounting in order to avoid the biases that can be introduced by general summaries of a case.

Because of this invaluable contribution we are able to reexamine the case more closely. In doing so, we discover that in fact the issue of external direction is not one that Mr. Bryan himself introduced to the therapy. Let us look closely at an exchange that occurs in the very first session. Mr. Bryan is discussing his feeling of blocking and wondering how it can be overcome. He says:

I feel that there’s some sort of a hidden touchstone that provides the driving force for the oppression, and that there is—I feel it is a blind impulse, rather immune to logic, but of course not necessarily immune to change, that is, I mean, there are other ways besides logic, of course—C52. In other words, you haven’t been able to reason yourself out of it—nor has anyone else, is that it?8

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

So far so good, until we look again with closer attention. The counselor’s reflection that Mr. Bryan cannot reason himself out of his situation seems to be on the mark, but why has he added the extra clause: “nor has anyone else”? This issue does not appear atall in Mr. Bryan’s remarks. The interchange continues:

Yes. In other words, I even get the impression that I have a full cognitive appreciation of the difficulty, and that even if I were—even if there were no more new ideas to come out, that would have nothing to do with the change … I don’t believe that anybody is ever persuaded by logic or reasoning—it’s emotional undercurrents which undergo the change, and logic, that’s just
a rationalization—sort of a rack to hang your coat on.

C53. In other words, you feel that nobody could persuade you out of this situation.9 Now it is clear something is amiss. Mr. Bryan is calling attention to the difference between logical reasoning and emotional conviction.

The counselor, in distinction, is calling attention to the issue of being persuaded by another. In his first response the counselor had attended to Mr. Bryan’s issue before adding his own, and he had ended his remarks with a query: “is that it?” Now he has dropped Mr. Bryan’s issue and dropped his question whether his rephrasing is correct. And in his next remarks we find that Mr. Bryan begins to accept the shift in focus that the counselor is now pushing:

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

But what was the source for this insight that Rogers was able to contribute to the field? It appears as if it was called for by Herbert Bryan himself. Blocked by the authoritative posture of his parents and continuing to seek this authority from his counselor, it was only by finding faith in his own capacity for self-direction that he was able to overcome his impasse.

But by now we should know that what a theorist extracts from his or her observations is not only a function of the events themselves but also of his or her way of looking at them. The case of Herbert Bryan seems to make salient the issue of rejecting external authority, but there are already signals that this issue was personally salient to Rogers himself. We have seen in the brief autobiographical record so far that Rogers found his way to the field of psychology because he could not abide the external directions of religion.

And as we look now at his book on his new form of therapy, we find that he defines his approach by emphasizing the directiveness of other approaches and characterizing his own through a negation of this posture. Could it be
that Rogers was introducing this issue to the case of Herbert Bryan more than was warranted?

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

The therapeutic relationship is not, for example, a parent-child relationship, with its deep affectionate ties, its characteristic dependence on the one hand and the acceptance of an authoritative and responsible role on the other… Neither is the counseling relationship a typical teacher-pupil relationship, with its implications of superior and inferior status… Nor is therapy based on a physician-patient relationship, with its characteristics of expert diagnosis and authoritative advice on the part of the physician, submissive acceptance and dependence on the part of the patient.7

In making this claim Rogers was making a radical point for his time, seeking to overturn the dominant paradigm for psychotherapy. For it was typical in that era to use the language of “doctor” and “patient” when referring to the psychotherapy relationship, and with it to employ the attendant presumption of a hierarchical relationship between authority and subordinate. Whether in
a psychodynamic therapy where the therapist was expected to be viewed as a parent-substitute, a behavioral therapy where the therapist gave homework assignments akin to a teacher, or in a medical approach where the therapist prescribed drugs, no prevailing therapy was free of the assumption that it was the therapist who knew best.

Rogers was seeking to dismantle the authority of the “doctor” and to empower the “patient,” and he introduced the terms counselor and client to mark this departure from the prevailing convention. Indeed, Rogers would successfully revolutionize the field of psychotherapy by this transfer of power and of responsibility.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

It is by this solid refusal to direct Mr. Bryan that the counselor most powerfully conveyed his faith in Mr. Bryan’s right and capacity to direct himself, and it is when Mr. Bryan came to believe in this right and capacity himself that he became able to overcome the obstacles that blocked him. This is the primary point that Rogers sought to drive home to his readers in his 1942 book, Counseling and Psychotherapy, in which the case of Herbert Bryan appeared.

There are many ways in which we find Rogers eager to disabuse his readers of what he sees as the directive ways of traditional therapies. The first we might identify is in his very naming of his method of therapy, calling it “nondirective” so as to define it by its negation of these methods. Another appears when he first sets out to define the counseling relationship in his form of therapy, which he also defines through a negation of various other relationshipsthat are authoritative in character. He writes:

Perhaps the best way to begin the discussion is by explaining what the counseling relationship is not. In speaking of therapy at its best, we may make a number of negative statements.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest