How Many New Ideas

How many new ideas and new teachings have come from homes like Rogers’? (this is interesting: Buddha was one. Blavatsky was another. Hitler. Do some more here....)

The philosophical presuppositions under girding person-centered therapy raise a number of concerns for the Christian.

The self is given the position of supreme importance in Roger’s person-centered therapy. In other words all authority is within us, we are the sole masters of our own destiny. This is a pure humanistic New Age approach to psychotherapy --- humanity is the center. This would lead to inflated notions of the self. Self is not all there is and certainly should not be the center of it all. To worship oneself us idolatry, and to proclaim oneself to be in control of his existence is the ultimate act of rebellion. C.S. Lewis once said that a good, functional definition of hell would be the kind of place where all acted as if they were the master of their own lives. [C.S. Lewis, A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C.S. Lewis.]

Person-centered therapy says when one’s self-actualizing apparatus is “in-tune” with the organismic valuing process, trustworthy self-knowledge is obtainable and should take precedence over all else.

Rogers is at the opposite end of the pole from Christianity when it comes to determining truth. Rogers says, “The truth of life in both religion and morality is mediated through the inner subjectivity of the individual.” But Christianity has always had a high view of divine revelation and the authority of Scripture, as well as the role of the discerning community. Rogers is pessimistic about the value of culture, dogma, traditions and systems of morality. He is dogmatic, however, about one’s experience as the basis of determining truth. The organismic valuing process is not an inerrant guide. No aspect of human nature is untouched by sin.

Person-centered therapy is also a system of ethics. One is ultimately responsible only to oneself: Personal wholeness then, becomes a moral imperative, often at the expense of a proper appreciation for others. Focusing only on removing barriers to our own personal growth potential is pure “self-ism” which develops into “me-ism.”

There is also a major problem with the Rogerian concept of freedom. Person-centered therapy reduces human growth to the process of pursuing self-actualization by following the direction of one’s instinctual valuing process. To Carl Rogers our instincts are sufficient to make complex moral decisions. Instinct: a specific, complex pattern of responses by an organism which is quite independent of any thought processes; the ability to form a judgment without using the reasoning process; the instinct that attracts moths to bright-colored flowers for food may also attract them to a candle flame at night and destroy them (New Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus). Just as the moth is destroyed when it flies into the candle, so is the non-reasoning approach destructive to decision making.

A healthy view of freedom requires that we choose responsibly between real options. But in the Rogerian scheme there is always only one option, that of following our biologically rooted instincts. Morality then becomes a matter of following the instinctual compass, rather than being a response of the whole person.

There are actually parts of the Rogerian model that are appealing to the Christian reader. The process of becoming a person and its emphasis on unending growth is attractive. The true self is not a person who is fixed to any specific dispositions, roles or traits, and this respects our individuality. In person-centered therapy our principal life task is thought to be that of discovering our true self. The self-concept and ideal self, at some point, move into congruence with self-experience: The first two can change, but experience is only what it is. That is why some think that we are only capable of change by discovering what we really are. We can agree with Rogers that most of us are not now our true selves and that growth really does mean that at some significant level, we become our true self. We would also agree that the notion of being born with a unique set of potentialities that we are meant to actualize is compatible with a Christian view of persons. We are, after all, created in God’s image and each person has a unique calling from God to become the person he or she was meant to become. We are not, however, fundamentally good beings, as person-centered therapy asserts, but ones whose very selves need the transforming power of God’s grace. While the concept of self-acceptance is vitally important to a hope-filled call to passionate and compassionate living, the Christian sees the need to balance a desire for self-fulfillment with self-discipline. We accept ourselves, but at the same time we want to become who and what God is calling us to be.

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.