Carl Rogers is the man, again
Saturday, January 12th, 2008Still working on the paper; got a gracious extension from the professor.
The more Carl Rogers I read, the more I like him:
I love the precision and the elegance of science…. I like to create hypotheses and I like to test them against hard reality. I dislike fuzzy and personal emotional statements when they are given out as general truths, even when I respect them as expressions of the person….
But I am also a person. A therapist. An individual who has lived deeply in human relationships. Here I come up with some other values and views which have equally deep meaning for me…. such terms as personal freedom, choice, purpose, goal, have profound and significant meaning.
But there are boundaries to my regard for the subjective. I find that the elaboration of the subjective alone, as in some of the more far-out existentialists, is as unacceptable to me as the rigidity of a closed, impersonal science. As I read some of these existential writers, I feel that here we are entering into a situation in which history is repeating itself. We have suffered enough from the dogmatism of an unscientific Freudianism which initially enlightened us and then bound us into a rigid straitjacket.
[A]s a person I stand in both camps — the world of the precise, hard scientist, and the world of the sensitive subjective person.
(”Some thoughts regarding the current philosophy of the behavioral sciences,” J. of Humanistic Psych. V:2, fall 1965, pp. 183-185)
Tags: academics, Carl Rogers, history, history of science, humanistic psychology, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, psychology, research, science
