1

Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Psychotherapy

and Christian Humanistic Education:
A Single Vision for the Human Person

Paul Richard G. Dy
Pastoral Psychology and Counselling
December 5, 2017

Loyola School of Theology

Ateneo de Manila University
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Introduction

Carl R. Rogers (1902-1987), an American psychologist, pioneered a major new approach

to psychotherapy known as the “non-directive”, “client-centered”, and “person-centered”

approach. A leader in the humanistic psychology movement of the 1960s through the 1980s, his

approach exerted a profound influence on society and the counselling profession. In his person-

centered approach, Rogers clarified the characteristics and dynamics that work in a helping

relationship such as therapy as well as its goals, and he and his followers applied them to several

helping professions and to many areas of daily living – therapy, office, school, hospitals among

others.1 This research paper examines once again the elements and dynamics of Rogers’ person-

centered approach in psychotherapy – its process, characteristics, nature – so as to highlight the

novelty of the psychotherapy approach that remains relevant in the counselling profession up to

this day. Although humanistic psychology is largely still considered by modern society as a

secular discipline, this research paper draws insights from Christian theologians who offer a

distinctly Christian perspective by reconciling several elements of the Christian faith into

Rogers’ process conception of psychotherapy – particularly its ability to provide a psychological

framework in the formation of conscience as well as the Christian’s mystical journey of

discovering one’s vocation from God, along with the gifts or charisms one brings to the service

of the Christian community and of the world. Finally, the author of this research reflects on his

religious context to draw out elements of Rogers’ process-centered psychotherapy that can be

integrated into the pastoral works of the Diocese of Masbate, the local church of which the

author belongs. Specifically, the author saw the need for Rogers’ broad framework and

understanding of the human person to evaluate the effectiveness of the Diocese of Masbate’s

1
Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Land Henderson, eds.. The Carl Rogers Reader: Selections from the
Lifetime Work of America’s Prominent Psychologist, author of “On Becoming a Person” and “A Way of Being”
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989), i-xvi.
 3

ministry in rural education, and possibly in providing the future direction of its philosophy as

well – particularly in the administration of its Catholic schools for poor children across the

province. Thus, this research paper draws parallelisms in the content of Rogers’ humanist

psychology and in another related field – humanistic education. The author drew much of the

insights in this paper from the Jesuit educational system – with its long tradition of giving

humanities a special place in its curriculum – and studied the dynamics involved in providing

young people a humanistic education. In the end, both underscore the same principles and

processes, albeit in different settings and contexts, with the same end goal – helping people

becoming more and more attuned to their truest and most authentic selves, and providing them a

path towards a new way of being.

The Conditions for Person-Centered Psychotherapy

In the 1960s, the clinical psychologist Carl Rogers pioneered the person-centered

psychotherapy. This approach focuses on a client-centered process that lead to the development

of a person’s “self-appreciation”, “personal freedom”, and “growing purposefulness.” What was

unique at that time to Rogers’ approach was the stress on the need for the client to be treated by

the therapist as a “subject” rather than as an “object” - as they both enter into a subject-to-subject

I-Thou relationship. In this highly personally subjective relationship, it is the role of the therapist

to promote and facilitate the restructuring of the subject’s experience and lead the client into a

greater self-affirmation and self-acceptance of the dynamic discovery of one’s true self. And to

facilitate the process, Rogers outlines six conditions which promote growth in the interpersonal

relationship between the therapist and the client:2 (1) Two persons are in contact and they come

2
Paul J. Philibert, O.P., “Conscience: Developmental Perspectives from Rogers and Kohlberg.” Horizons 6
(Spring 1979): 9 quoting Sigmund Koch, “A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships,” 213.
 4

to recognize each other as equally significant in their experience. (2) The client comes to therapy

because one is anxious and is in a vulnerable state of incongruence. (3) The therapist seeks to

integrate the relationship by sensing one’s own feelings and meanings in relation with the client.

(4) The therapist manifests an accepting and warm attitude toward the subject. And this involves

a genuine acceptance of whatever feeling is going on in the client at that moment – an

“unconditional positive regard.” (5) The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the

client’s internal frame of reference. (6) The client perceives to some extent the unconditional

positive regard and empathy coming from the therapist.

In this therapist-client relationship, what is highlighted is the personal subjectivity which

demands that the therapist enter into a personal relationship that is sensitive to the other

“person.” Such inter-subjectivity gives enough space for genuine respect, trust, and openness that

allows the therapist to effectively facilitate the client’s “unity of experiencing” – the client begins

to understand one’s feelings and freely experience them in their complete intensity without the

“intellectual inhibitions and contradictory feelings”, and comes to a complete “letting go” to

reach a “complete unity, singleness and fulness of experience”. Rogers describes this moment as

a real “I-Thou” experience - “a timeless living in the experience” which carries both the client

and the therapist into a “process of becoming”. As the client comes to a greater self-acceptance

of the dynamics of oneself, one becomes more courageous and daring “to become himself in

spite of all the dread consequences which he is sure will befall him if he permits himself to

become himself”; and “he feels more unique and hence more alone, but he is so much more

real.” With it, the client comes to a profound experience of moving in the direction of being
3
“himself” and thus opens up to a new way of living. Self-acceptance thus leads to autonomy

and a heightened self-esteem.

3
Carl Rogers, “Persons or Science? A Philosophical Question.” Cross Currents 3 (Summer 1953): 290.
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In other words, Rogers’ theory is established upon a conviction that the subject is able to

gradually accept oneself when there is another person understanding one’s feelings in the most

empathic manner. Once the client is exposed to the growth facilitating conditions mentioned

above, one gets in touch with what is going on within oneself, and begins to recognize and listen

to feelings which have largely gone undetected – no matter how terrible and disorganizing they

may seem. In this process, once the proper support and encouragement is established, the person

slowly becomes responsible for oneself and is ready to move toward genuinely accepting one’s

freedom and realizing one’s inner potencies.4

Rogers’ Stages in the Development of a Personal Self

This journey towards self-discovery and self-acceptance is sketched by Rogers in stages

that outline the changes which take place inside a person as that person becomes more

comfortable and more responsible in a world of “other persons.” Rogers calls this phenomenon

“the experience of becoming a more autonomous, more spontaneous, more confident person.” It

is the experience of freedom to be one’s self.5

At stage one, the client still speaks of externals and does not communicate about oneself.

The person’s problems are perceived as external; personal constructs are rigid; feelings and

personal meanings are not recognized and owned as belonging to the self. As such, the desire to

change is not yet felt by the client.

At stage two, the client opens up by talking about topics other than the self. However,

problems are still perceived as external. But as the client begins to communicate about oneself,

4
Paul J. Philibert, O.P., “Conscience: Developmental Perspectives from Rogers and Kohlberg.” Horizons 6
(Spring 1979): 9.
5
Paul J. Philibert, O.P., “Conscience: Developmental Perspectives from Rogers and Kohlberg.” Horizons 6
(Spring 1979): 4 quoting Carl Rogers and Barry Stevens, Person to Person (New York: Pocket Books, 1971), 40.
 6

contradictions may be expressed with very little awareness that they are contradictions. At this

stage, it is important that the therapist makes the client experience that one is accepted and fully

received.

At stage three, the client begins to reflect on oneself as an “object” upon reflections on

the reaction to others. At this point, personal constructs are slowly recognized as constructs, but

remains firm and rigid in defining them as such. Personal choices begin to be expressed but are

deemed to be ineffective.

At stage four, the client begins to own one’s feelings and choices by expressing more

intense feelings described as “objects in the present”; and by differentiating among personal

feelings, personal constructs, and personal meanings and relationships. By doing so, the client

recognizes the contradictions between personal feelings and the real situation at hand, and

becomes concerned about one’s incongruency. However, there remains fear and mistrust in

owning these feelings and choices.

At stage five, the client experiences immediate feelings pertaining to the present

condition. While these feelings continue to bring fear and anxiety, there is now an urgency in the

need to own these feelings as real. At this point, the client sees oneself less as an object but as a

subject who accepts these feelings as belonging to the self despite the fear and apprehension. The

desire to become the “real me” grows and recognizes the inner conflict within oneself.

At stage six, the client no longer denies and fights off the immediate feelings. Daring to

live the feelings, the client places the person subjectively inside what one does and feels – and

unites the self into an existentially spontaneous reality. Thus, the client begins one’s journey into

autonomy.
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At stage seven, the client comes to experience situations as new and open, and expresses

a growing trust in one’s own process of feeling and deciding things. The client begins to feel

“motion, flow, and changing-ness” in every aspect of one’s psychological life, and freely

integrate various aspects of one’s life in constant communication with each other.

Rogers is convinced that once the client reaches the sixth stage, the therapist begins to

fade away as the client enters the seventh and final stage with minimal help from the therapist as

one begins to attain moral autonomy (“Now that I am finding out what was wrong, I can do

something about it”). Furthermore, it is the recognition of the incongruity between ideas

(personal constructs) and feelings that appears at stage four and the elaboration of the means to

integrate feelings with experience that energizes the client. And it is the recognition of a “real

presence of a worthy good” that appears amidst the different context of human conditions that

makes the client (as a subject) freer to embrace the good with “some delight” and to move

toward acceptance.6 This knowledge which comes from the whole self helps the client

personally appreciate the good as good for oneself rather than something imposed upon from

outside.7 Thus, there is a progressive acceptance of a person’s actual, changing, personal

feelings, and self-awareness - each stage representing a progressive accumulation of strengths

that would integrate the total resources of the person and allow one to choose to become a unique

personal self.8

Personal Self vs. Socialized Self

Lest Rogers’ person-centered therapy becomes another form of ethical egoism and

subjective relativism, it should be stressed that the becoming of a self is a project which is

6
Philibert, “Conscience: Development Perspectives”, 21-22.
7
Philibert, “Conscience: Development Perspectives”, 23.
8
Philibert, “Conscience: Development Perspectives”, 10.
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inconceivable apart from a social context because one only discovers the existence of a “personal

self” when one is unsettled by merely being a “socialized self”. In spite of this discomfort, the

human person, according to Rogers, is “incurably social” and would always have a deep need for

relationships – and it is in these relationships that he always moves in the direction of actualizing

himself. One discovers more one’s true self in the encounters (albeit the tension) with others.

Rogers likens the human person to an infant who is a whole and integrated organism in itself, but

at a certain point during one’s growth, one learns a form of alienation and estrangement through

contacts with other people – thus “he has interjected the notion that he is bad, where actually he

is enjoying the experience, and it is this estrangement between what he is experiencing and the

concepts he links up with what he is experiencing that seems to me to constitute the basic

estrangement”. As such, there is ambiguity in the process of self-actualization, and the person’s

estrangement could only be healed in a relationship of affirmation wherein one experiences

forgiveness and acceptance of the unacceptable.9

A Christianization of Rogers’ Person-Centered Psychotherapy

The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, in a documented dialogue with Carl Rogers in

1965, gave a Christian framework for Rogers’ therapy approach by affirming that it is indeed

necessary that the person experiences forgiveness and acceptance from another person – “not

judging him, not telling him first he should be good, otherwise I cannot accept you, but accepting

him just because he is not good, but he has something within himself that wants to be good” – for

one to experience the unconditional forgiveness and acceptance of God. And it is precisely the

person’s experience of being fully accepted in all that one has been able to express, and yet still

prized as a person – which is really “the center of what we call the ‘good news’ in the Christian

9
Carl Rogers and Paul Tillich, “Theologian meets Psychotherapist”, New Black Friars, 71 (March 1990):
166-171.
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message”. In a person’s greater openness to one’s experiences so “he can be more fully himself”,

Tillich reminds us that it is necessarily such openness that opens up the person to the possibility

of having an “ultimate experience” of God because once the person realizes one’s true self, one

is simply bringing into actuality what is essentially given to us – and that is “to become the way

in which God sees us, in all our potentialities”. And what reunites the person to himself and to

others from estrangement and isolation is an agape love (and not self-love) that accepts one’s

self and the other as persons. Thus, it is faith (in the sense of being related to God), and love (in

the sense of affirming the other person and one’s own person), that justifies the self-affirmation

and self-acceptance. And finally, when the person opens up to the experience, one is able to

listen with love as to whether each moment and behaviour is related to one’s own self-fulfilment

and one’s own actualization – it is essentially a reaction and evaluation of one’s whole being. 10

As such, to concerns on whether such unconditional acceptance of a person’s humanity presents

problems in matters of moral issues, the person being naturally good in himself, any antimoral

act would be a contradiction to an authentic self-realization of the individual.11

The Need for Person-Centeredness in the Catholic Educational System

In a region characterized by extreme poverty as in the Diocese of Masbate, one has to ask

in light of Carl Rogers’ humanistic psychology (which has as its goal no less than the person’s

becoming more fully himself), how the local Church can bring about people’s real discovery of

their authentically human selves. At present, the Diocese of Masbate runs eight parochial high

schools spread out all over the province – most of which cater to poor rural children in the

agricultural countryside. In a place where there are no available state colleges where young

10
Rogers and Tillich, Theologian meets Psychotherapist, 173-175.
11
Rogers and Tillich, Theologian meets Psychotherapist, 166.
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people could pursue higher education, and where there are very limited employment

opportunities for everyone – we ask how Catholic education could play its role in helping the

Church live out her mission, and whether it is enough that the Catholic schools limit their

functions in providing young people with job skills to get them a good job, and in instructing

them in the Catholic faith. Admittedly, the Catholic schools in Masbate are unable to compete

with the educational institutions of much higher academic standards and skill-sets in

neighbouring Cebu City and Legazpi City, which compels the Diocese of Masbate to reflect on

the role of Catholic education in the formation of young people in its particular local context.

And Rogers’ person-centered approach provides valuable insights on how education in Masbate

could likewise be approached. After all, education culminates in the coming of age of an adult

when he assumes conscious responsibility for oneself and for one’s world. As such, like Rogers’

therapist, the schools can create a climate of freedom for young people where they can learn

important life-skills that would enable them to trust the directions that will move them towards

self-actualization later in their lives. Hopefully, in an environment of trust, acceptance and

freedom, young Catholics would move towards deeper self-understanding and more social

behaviour. This is where a Christian humanistic education would play an important role in

redefining the aims and goals of Catholic education. In contrast to the traditional university

system where educators have struggled to balance their goals of preparing students for successful

professional lives and pursuing knowledge for its own sake, a humanistic education provides an

alternative in that it places more importance on the human development of the student – physical,

moral, religious, and cultural. Its ultimate aim is to help students develop skills and motivations
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that would later enable them to “lead satisfying lives and be responsible and constructive agents

in their towns, cities, countries – in the Church and in the world at large”.12

The Jesuit Educational System: A Humanistic Alternative

The Jesuits, which had a long tradition of humanities in their schools, highlight seven key

principles that characterize the humanistic alternative to the traditional university system that

gives priority to professional and technical skills13: (1) Humanistic education is radically student-

centered, imbued with cura personalis – or care for the well-being of the person. (2) The center

of a humanistic curriculum is literature as studia humanitatis (“humane letters”) – the study of

what it means to be human for they treated questions pertinent to human life that includes

“questions of life and death, of virtue and vice, of greed and redemption, of the ambivalence in

human decision making”. (3) Humanistic schooling highlights the “breadth of human

experience”, especially the “experience of the good”. (4) Ideally, graduates of a humanistic

education would eventually become “responsible participants in the community in which they

lived, concerned for the common good, and ready to make sacrifices for it”. (5) It is important

that the students are taught how to “communicate effectively to one’s peers and to ordinary

people and win their backing”. Eloquence, “the art of saying with grace and clarity what one

means and meaning what one says”, is thus given a special place in the system. (6) Subsequently,

it believes that an essential part of the process of thinking is cultivating one’s expression through

the written and spoken word. (7) Finally, this education is also concerned with the body as well

as the mind and the soul – mens sana in corpore sano (“sound mind in sound body”). Thus, the

12
John W. O’Malley, S.J., “Jesuit Schools and the Humanities Yesterday and Today”, Studies in the
Spirituality of Jesuits 47 (Spring 2015): 11.
13
O’ Malley, “Jesuit Schools”, 12-15.
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aim of a humanistic education is to produce well-rounded and socially aware persons engaged in

the affairs of the community.

The Foundations of Creating a Christian Humanistic Education

Donald Gelpi, an American Jesuit theologian, infuses Bernard Lonergan’s theology of

conversion to outline how a Christian humanistic education leads a long process by which

students eventually become people living “fully satisfying lives” as they reach self-actualization

in their adult age. Lonergan’s theory of conversion draws similarities to Rogers’ process of self-

actualization in that a conversion is a decision one makes that will create a horizon – “a new

frame of reference for perceiving oneself and one’s relationship to reality”. 14 It involves both a

“turning from” and a “turning to”. But more than just a restructuring of the mind, a conversion

likewise has a social and relational character that implies a responsibility – to oneself, to others,

and to God. And a Christian humanistic education aims that students eventually assume full adult

responsibility for their lives, and this has as its foundation a human conversion at different levels

– affective, intellectual, personal moral, socio-political, and religious. Gelpi highlights two types

of conversion that hopefully occurs in the student: a religious conversion that involves a turn

from unbelief to faith in a self-revealing God; and a secular conversion that comes in four forms

– affective conversion, intellectual conversion, personal-moral conversion, and socio-political

conversion.15

(1) In an affective conversion, a humanistic education cultivates in the young healthy

emotional attitudes and an intuitive imagination expressed through symbols, and

eventually integrate their developing intuitive and perceptions of reality. Because

14
Donald Gelpi, S.J., “Creating the Human Theological Foundations for a Christian Humanistic Education”,
Horizons 24 (Spring 1997): 56 quoting Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder,
1972), 237.
15
Gelpi, “Creating the Human”, 57-58.
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emotional pathology cripples the human mind’s ability to make sound intuitive

judgments, it is important that the young are taught how to deal creatively and

constructively with shame, guilt, fear, and anger – and to integrate these emotions in

life-giving ways into their maturing personalities. Besides nurturing emotional health,

humanistic education attends to imaginations through symbolic expressions (i.e.

literature and the arts) for the young to clarify their own perceptions of reality

through artistic and literary expression. Hopefully, the young are taught how to

coordinate their intuitive judgments of the heart with their rational judgments about

reality.16

(2) In an intellectual conversion, a humanistic education inculcates in the young a

healthy respect for the human mind’s fallibility and finitude. In other words, students

hopefully learn that the truth may be reached if one is willing to risk present beliefs

by subjecting them to open inquiry, serious criticism, and in dialogue with others –

and take responsibility for the truth or inadequacy of one’s frame of reference.

Students also benefit from understanding how the human mind works for them to

validate how they arrive at intuitive and rational perceptions of reality.17

(3) In a personal moral conversion and socio-political conversion, a humanistic

education communicates to the young that there is a difference between private and

public morality. The young are taught that their choices have moral consequences

and they should take personal responsibility for their dealings with one another, and

they are challenged to commit their lives to a universal ethical cause which entails

collaboration with others in the search for a just social order. It is worth noting that

16
Gelpi, “Creating the Human”, 60-62.
17
Gelpi, “Creating the Human”, 63-64.
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moral thinking conditions responsible affective and intellectual growth, and how

responsible affective and intellectual growth also conditions responsible moral

development.18

(4) Finally, a Christian humanistic education desires to foster in the young at least an

initial Christian conversion. The students, in their adult stage later on, hopefully

transition from conventional faith that accepts uncritically everything that the faith

community stands, to an autonomous faith that takes responsibility for the

authenticity of their faith-response. This presupposes a genuine Christian conversion

that begins in their heart when the attitudes and feelings that inhibit an encounter

with God are confronted. Gelpi observes that there is spontaneous conversion when

non-believers are challenged by the lives of believers who live out the message of the

gospel. “Once the beauty of lived holiness touches the heart, it generates a personal

desire to imitate and appropriate that same beauty; and religious desire prepares the

way for a felt encounter with God. And by stressing the importance of humanizing

the Christian, Christian humanistic education hopes to nurture emotionally healthy,

intellectually honest, morally committed, and politically responsible adult Christians

who “perceive and appropriate their life-project as a vocation from God”.19

18
Gelpi, “Creating the Human”, 64-66.
19
Gelpi, “Creating the Human”, 67-72.
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Conclusion

After presenting a brief outline of the conversion process implicit in a Christian

humanistic education, we go back to the end goal of this educational tradition, in the same way

that the end goal for Rogers was to create a climate of freedom, acceptance and understanding to

liberate the person to move toward the direction of being oneself without undermining one’s

social context. Likewise, humanistic education hopes to produce “an inner-directed person, a

human being who acts not from superficial conformity to ethical standards, but out of sincere,

heartfelt, and discerning appropriation of them” 20 – deeply engaged in active life in the church

and in society, and working committedly for the good of one’s community. Like Rogers’ client

whose self-concept and understanding of reality has to be challenged by the therapist’s empathy

and unconditional positive regard for the other, the young student of a Christian humanistic

education has to escape from the confines of one’s comfort zone of thinking and unexamined

assumptions and prejudices, expand one’s awareness and explore “the other”, recognize that we

cannot understand ourselves and the situations in which we find ourselves unless we have some

idea of how we got to be where we are, learn how to say precisely what one means with clarity

and conviction, mirror the ambiguities of our own life-experiences and invite reflection upon

them, and direct one’s skills and talents for the good of one’s country and fellow citizens – so as

to develop into adults who make humane decisions for themselves and their families, decisions

that are appropriate to a given situation. 21 In all these, one person cannot teach the other for the

teaching would destroy the learning. The most that one person can do is to create certain

conditions which make this type of learning possible for the student or the client to realize the

state of one’s being and to move toward a state in which one is more truly oneself. 22 The school

20
O’Malley. “Jesuit Schools”, 17.
21
O’Malley. “Jesuit Schools”, 28-31.
22
Rogers, “Persons or Science?”, 292.
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is a breeding ground where the young, precisely at a very delicate age, can develop the basic

skills, attitudes, and behaviour that would help one to move towards greater integration as a

“whole person”. Implicit to this approach is that even if the institution subscribes to the ideal, it

will be meaningless unless the teachers and staff themselves strive for it in their own persons.

Similar to Rogers’ idea of the importance of a congruence in the therapist, teachers and staff as

formators are to be reconciled in themselves for them to have a chance of being reconciled in

their students, and of affecting the way of life in their local communities.23 The goals are and will

always remain ideals, imperfectly and approximately fulfilled. But there is no reason not to strive

to fulfil them – for when an environment which refuses to condemn and instead allows the space

and time for a young person to examine and question one’s own beliefs is created, when an

unconditional acceptance and tolerance is shown to a young person, that is a way of modelling

God’s unconditional love and affirming the divine image present in every man. 24 Thus, the

movement towards self-actualization is not just a journey of self-discovery, but a striving

towards holiness and achieving one’s potentials that God has generously gifted us.

23
O’Malley. “Jesuit Schools”, 32-33.
24
Gerard Sowney, “Rogerian Youth Ministry: Self-centered or Selfless?”, The Pastoral Review 8 (May/June
2012): 42-44.
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Bibliography

Cross, Richard W. “Can Catholics Counsel? The Loss of Prudence in Modern Humanist
Psychology.” Faith and Reason 20, 1 (Spring 1994): 87-111.

Gelpi, Donald, S.J. “Creating the Human Theological Foundations for a Christian Humanistic
Education.” Horizons 24, 1 (Spring 1997): 50-72.

Henderson, Valerie Land, and Kirschenbaum, Howard, eds. The Carl Rogers Reader: Selections
from the Lifetime Work of America’s Prominent Psychologist, author of “On Becoming a
Person” and “A Way of Being.” Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989.

Idinopulos, Thomas A. “Humanistic Education in an Inhuman Age.” Cross Currents 26, 4

(Winter 1976): 407-415.

O’Malley, John W., S.J. “Jesuit Schools and the Humanities Yesterday and Today.” Studies in
the Spirituality of Jesuits 47, 1 (Spring 2015): 1-33.

Philibert, Paul J., O.P. “Conscience: Developmental Perspectives from Rogers and Kohlberg.”
Horizons 6, 1 (Spring 1979): 1-25.

Rogers, Carl. “Persons or Science? A Philosophical Question.” Cross Currents 3, 4 (Summer

1953): 289-306.

Rogers, Carl and Tillich, Paul. “Theologian meets Psychotherapist.” New Black Friars 71, 836
(March 1990): 166-175.

Sowney, Gerard. “Rogerian Youth Ministry: Self-centered or Selfless?” The Pastoral Review 8,
8 (May/June 2012): 39-44.