34. Do You Like Who You Are Now? | Rogers on the Real and Ideal Self To Your Unique Self: 40 Lessons in Personality Psychology

To Your Unique Self: 40 Lessons in Personality Psychology

Wang Fang

Carl Rogers: Finding the Self

Hello, I’m Wang Fang. If Maslow’s work highlighted one crucial task in life—being yourself—then today’s subject, another leading humanistic psychologist,Carl Rogers,introduced its inseparable twin:finding yourself.。

Maslow said self-actualization is our innate calling: everyone needs to become the person they can be. But how do we know who we are and what we can become? Rogers believed that everyone possesses a natural force toward the positive, mature, and whole. If people are allowed to develop according to their nature, they can self-actualize. Being yourself may not be difficult; the problem is that people reject their real selves, while the gulf between who they hope to be and who they believe they are often leaves them unable to find themselves.

Carl Rogers (1902–1987)

Rogers himself went through such a process. Born to a middle-class Chicago family, he was materially comfortable but unhappy as a child. His deeply religious household imposed many restrictions, including prohibitions on associating with outsiders and numerous moral rules. Long afterward, he still remembered the guilt he felt the first time he drank a carbonated beverage.

A journey in 1922 began his search for himself, and by coincidence its destination was Beijing. At twenty, as one of twelve American student delegates, Rogers attended the World Student Christian Federation conference at Tsinghua University. He met people of different cultures and faiths and, for the first time, belonged to a lively, creative small group. His need for autonomy grew so strong that after returning home he declared his independence from his parents’ conservative values.

Throughout his career as a counselor and psychotherapist, Rogers helped all kinds of people find themselves. He compared himself to ‘a midwife to a new personality,’ watching each new self emerge with awe. In this work he was repeatedly moved and encouraged by the powerful positive tendency deep within people. He also discovered that troubled clients themselves knew best what had hurt them, which issues mattered most, and what direction they needed to take.

Episode editor: 夏夏、小蒲

2022.03.31

Audio in Chinese