On Becoming a PersonA Therapist's View of
Psychotherapy From The Book 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.
The good life is a process, not a state of being.
It is a direction not a destination.
The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected
by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in
any direction.
This organismically selected direction seems to have certain discernible
qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique
individuals.
The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process
of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is
inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of
this selected direction appear to have a certain universality.
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January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987
Carl was born in Oak Park, Illinois and was part of a family with six
children.
His mother and father were very strict and provided an ethical
upbringing for their family. By that time he had entered kindergarten he
could read. He soon went to the University of Wisconsin to study
agriculture, followed by religion and history.
At the age of 20 on a trip to Peking, China for an International
Christian Conference he soon finds himself having doubts about following
Christianity. To answer the question of what he wanted to do with his
life, one of the problems we all seem to face at one time, he chose to
attend a seminar entitled Why Am I Entering the Ministry.
That was all it took for him to change his career and he left the
seminary.
He went on to attend the teachers College at Columbia University and
received an M. A. in 1928 and a Ph.D. in 1931. He soon went to work for
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and later became
the director.
In 1939 he wrote his first book The Clinical Treatment of the Problem
Child and this led to a full professorship at Ohio State University.
He had spent much of his life jumping around from university to
university while writing other books while influencing thousands of
people.
Carl suffered from a fall in 1987 that fractured his hip, the operation
was a success but soon after his heart failed and he died in few days
later.
He spent his final years in La Jolla California.
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| I have not read any of Carl Rogers books. More From
The Book
He is more able to experience all of his feelings, and is less afraid
of any of his feelings; he is his own sifter of evidence, and is more
open to evidence from all sources; he is completely engaged in the
process of being and becoming himself, and thus discovers that he is
soundly and realistically social; he lives more completely in this
moment, but learns that this is the soundest living for all time. He is
becoming a more fully functioning organism, and because of the awareness
of himself which flows freely in and through his experience, he is
becoming a more fully functioning person.
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