Conflict Within the Person

Person-centered therapy has a trivial view of conflict within the person. That is why it has been described as instinctual utopianism; it suggests perfect inner congruence at the deepest levels for the healthy person. Christianity suggests that our good impulses and our bad impulses, our love for and rebellion against God, are both representative of our true selves. Conflict is real, and goes on in the deepest dimensions of the person. Christianity views conflict as both internal and external, and evident at both the individual and corporate levels.

In person-centered therapy the true self is aware, through the organismic valuing process, of internal needs, but can be totally unaware of anything external like the needs and wants of others. In Christian beliefs, the true self is the person who loves God with all his heart, but still loves others as himself. A more complete understanding of the true self goes beyond self-awareness and subjective experience to a keen awareness and knowledge of others. In a very real sense, we find our identity in being and doing.

The person-centered therapy ideal of health is the person without a past (we are always to live in the now), a person without any need to submit to authority (we are our own ultimate truth), a person without real dependence on anyone else (we contain all our resources within ourselves) and a person with no firm commitment to truth (all meanings are held tentatively and revised according to changing experiences). This sounds a lot like the New Age teaching.

In contrast, Christianity presents humans as having pasts, presents and futures. We are part of a community of faith that has a stable identity. We are not our own gods, rather we submit to the rightful Lord of the universe.

There are absolutes in the Christian faith, but few if any in person-centered therapy, where external authority is seen as obtrusive. Yet we as Christians are profoundly dependent on God: “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). We also believe in a truth that is constant because it ultimately depends on a truth-speaking God who is “. . . the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). When anyone says, “There are no absolutes!” and that is their teaching, are they not proclaiming an absolute? Isn’t that as much of an absolute as “God is love.”?

Person-centered therapy runs the risk of indifference to or ignorance about the full range of human misery and suffering. Since careful assessment is seen as futile according to this model (because of the emphasis on experiencing), important clinical symptoms can be missed or minimized.

A fundamental flaw in the humanistic and relativistic philosophy behind person-centered therapy is what appears to be a lack of willingness to seriously confront the depravity of persons and the reality of evil (Peck, 1983. People of the Lie.). There is so much focus on affirmation of the person that it seriously neglects those matters for which we are to be held accountable. There is a danger that the person-centered therapist can begin “to view evil as innocuous, worn out, and generally to be dealt with by a wave of the finger and a genteel ‘tsk . . . tsk.’” [C. McLemore, The Scandal of Psychotherapy.] Using explicitly theological terms, the therapist’s approach is a one-sided emphasis on “grace” and how we “image God,” to the neglect of the Law and human sin [J. Ortberg, “Accepting our acceptance: some limitations of a Rogerian approach to the nature of grace,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 1, 1981].

Again, the tradition is so hung up on the affirmation of the client that it overlooks self-hate as a source of human suffering. After all, the root of self-hate is the tendency to make more of self than is healthy. We set ourselves up as something to be esteemed or worshipped, as a god, and then we despise ourselves for not meeting up to our own standards. Surely self-love is as much a cause of problems in living as is self-hate [D. Browning, Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies.]

The similarities between the new psychology and mysticism did not go unnoticed, even by its founding fathers. Maslow placed the transcendent at the top of his list of hierarchical needs. To him, self-actualization could not be complete until his transcendent dimension was satisfied. Neither God nor biblical revelation could satisfy that longing. Maslow was talking about that dimension of an individual that intersected with other spiritual realities of the cosmos. His self-actualized man was truly a man who was full of himself.

Maslow’s influence didn’t stop with his pyramid of hierarchical needs. His notion that human consciousness linked humanity with the fundamental realities of the universe became the basic premise of transpersonal psychology, the newest kid on the humanistic psychology team.

This is not the conclusion of this section, but it is as far as I have gone. I will share next some of the research I have done on the New Age in our schools.