Phenomenology: Introduction and
Application
Applied Phenomenology: Carl
Rogers
 Personal
Background
– Devout fundamentalist Protestant parents
– Very early training in scientific agriculture
– Evangelical outlook: “evangelize the world in our
generation”
– Academic training: Union Theological Seminary
 What
would you expect this background to
produce?
– An empirically-minded thinker with a devout implicit
Protestant morality.
 Rogers
as classical Protestant
– Eradication of the devil, so to speak
– Evil arises as a consequence of the absence of good
(human agency)
– Vs. Jung’s evil as an “independent entity” (divine
temptation)
Basic Rogerian Concepts
 The
phenomenal field: reality as
fundamentally subjective
– end of the mind/body problem?
– Science as intersubjectivity: construction of the object
 an “as if” game -- we act as though those things we
can agree about constitute a “real” world
 not
everything is conscious (labelled?)
– feelings may not be conscious (labelled) but still
experienced
– symbolic representation vs experience
 mental and organic realms
 procedural/episodic/semantic distinction (?) and
dissociation (?)
 “Man
lives essentially in his own personal
and subjective world, and even his most
objective functioning, in science,
mathematics and the like, is the result of
subjective purpose and subjective choice.”
The self (the ego or persona, in
Jungian or analytic terms)
A
differentiated articulation on the ground of
the phenomenal field
– “We may look upon this self-structure as being an
organization of hypotheses for meeting life -- an
organization which has been relatively effective in
satisfying the needs of the organism.”
 a self-gestalt
A
symbolic representation of the organism?
– Guided in construction by social processes?
– Guided in construction by observation of the organism
and consequent symbolic representation?
 An episodic representation of procedural action?
The necessity for accurate
symbolization of experience:
 we
must get in touch with our feelings
(subception)
– equivalent to preconceptual experience (presemantic (?))
-- emotional/episodic
– equivalent to Damasio’s affect?
 “We
may say that freedom from inner tension,
or psychological adjustment, exists when the
concept of self is at least roughly congruent
with all the experiences of the organism.”
The organismic valuing process
 the
wisdom of the body
 socialization vs organismic valuing
 the need for self-consistency:
– all phenomena must be rendered devoid of contradictory
implications, meanings or affective significances
– “pragnanz” -- from Gestalt theory: “psychological
organization will always be as ‘good’ as the prevailing
conditions allow.
 regular, simple, symmetrical, simplified
 self-inconsistency
as threat
– why is left somewhat unanswered
 Consequence of contradiction for action/perception?
Motives
 Organismic
enhancement as central motive
 All living organisms strive to maintain, further
and actualize their experience
– the self and the organism as positive creative striver
– motivated by (positive) needs
 “no behavior except to meet a present need” -- little
reliance on past for interpretation
 Anxiety
as incongruity
– needs of the self are not always congruent with the needs
of the organism
Grounds of pathology
 Potential
for conflict between needs of self
(cultural construct?) and needs of organism
– self needs (popularity) vs organismic needs (to thine own
self be true)
– Incongruence, as root of psychopathology, arises when
the personality system:
 “denies to awareness, or distorts in awareness,
significant experiences, which consequently are not
accurately symbolized and organized into the gestalt
of the self-structure, thus creating an incongruence
between self and experience.”
– This is anxiety; vulnerability is subjugation to anxiety
Anxiety
 disparity
between self and total organismic
experience
– motivates “introjection” of non-self values
– repression as failure to symbolize organismic needs
 distortion: meaning twist to eliminate disparity
– rationalization
– pathological “locus of evaluation”
 “an internal locus of evaluation, within the individual
himself, means that he is the center of the valuing
process, the evidence being supplied by his own
senses.
 When the locus of evaluation resides in others, their
judgement as to the value of an object or experience
becomes the criterion of value for the individual.”
 Why
does this occur?
 Contradiction of attitudes (the social vs the
personal)
– how things “should” appear, vs how they do?
– “conditional” love from parents and environment
 I am only good when I manifest certain
needs/behaviors, and not others
 I am the “good self” and not the bad needs
 Pathology
and anxiety
– “the state is one of tension and internal confusion, since
in some respects the individual’s behavior will be
regulated by the [organismic] actualizing tendency, and
in other respects by the self-actualizing tendency, thus
producing discordant or incomprehensible behaviors.”
 Threat to goal structure (self) perceived in
experiential field (unresolved organismal needs)?
– Growth in personality as increase in congruence;
consequent move towards “self-actualization.”
Development
 Development
of self from organismic field
– Why? Why? Why?
 Necessity
for unconditional positive regard
during upbringing:
– “I can understand how satisfying it feels to you to hit your baby brother
– and I love you and am quite willing for you to have those feelings.
– But I am quite willing for me to have my feelings, too, and I feel very
distressed when your brother is hurt, and so I do not let you hit him
– Both your feelings and my feelings are important, and each of us can
freely have his own

freedom and “I do not let you hit him” and “each of
us can freely have his own”
– ?
– But at least the possibility of negotiation is left open (?)
Psychotherapy: rules and
regulations
 Organismic
enhancement (and selfdevelopment)as central (instinctive) motives
 Client-directed developmental process
– “… we may say that the counselor chooses to act consistently
on the hypothesis that the individual has a sufficient capacity to
deal constructively with all those aspects of his life which can
potentially come into conscious awareness.
– This means the creation of an interpersonal situation in which
material may come into the client’s awareness, and a meaningful
demonstration of the counselor’s acceptance of the client as a
person who is competent to direct himself.”
The pathological personality & transformation

first stage
– fixity and remoteness of experience

second and third stages:
– developing awareness

fourth stage:
– relaxed, objective, more aware of contradictions existing
between feelings and everyday experience

fifth stage
– upwelling of feelings of great importance
– surprising and informative

sixth stage
– working through and “integration” of such feelings

seventh stage
– fully functioning person
Procedure of therapy
 Implicit
Axiomatic Preconditions:
– Necessity for admiration for independence (as a core
value)
 only independent-valuing individuals were suited for
client-centered therapy
– (western protestant values) (?)
 Explicit
Axiomatic Preconditions, continued
– “Assuming a minimal mutual willingness to be in contact
and to receive communications,
– we may say that the greater the communicated
congruence of experience, awareness and behavior on
the part of one individual,
– the more the ensuing relationship will involve a tendency
toward reciprocal communication with the same qualities,
 mutually
accurate understanding of the
communications, improved psychological
adjustment and functioning in both parties,
 and mutual satisfaction in the relationship.”
Provision of therapeutic
environment
 Modification
of experiential space shared with
therapist
 Understanding
– verified by process of dialectic labelling: facilitation of
congruence between organic and mental realms
– Uselessness of diagnostic categories
 No sense construing subjective processes
“intersubjectively” or objectively
 Therapist
as healing personality (attitude of
therapist)
–
–
–
–
honesty (openness; genuineness)
empathy
unconditional positive regard
congruence
 The
importance of “insight”
– establishment of relationship between feeling and
labelling,
– or between feeling and action,
– or labelling and action
– (or even, dare it be said, all three) (?)
Unconditional positive regard as
prerequisite for substantive change
 Necessity
for comprehension of alternative
phenomenal field
– “Real communication occurs, and [the] evaluative
tendency avoided, when we listen with understanding.
– What does this mean? It means to see the expressed idea
and attitude from the other person's point of view, to
sense how it feels to him, to achieve his frame of
reference in regard to the thing he is talking about.
 Stated
so briefly, this may sound absurdly
simple, but it is not. It is an approach which
we have found extremely potent in the field of
psychotherapy.
 It is the most effective agent we know for
altering the basic personality structure of an
individual, and improving his relationships
and his communications with others.
 If I can listen to what he can tell me, if I can
understand how it seems to him, if I can see
its personal meaning for him, if I can sense
the emotional flavor which it has for him, then
I will be releasing potent forces of change in
him.
 If
I can really understand how he hates his
father, or hates the university, or hates
communists  if I can catch the flavor of his fear of insanity,
or his fear of atom bombs, or of Russia  it will be of the greatest help to him in altering
those very hatreds and fears, and in
establishing realistic and harmonious
relationships with the very people and
situations toward which he has felt hatred
and fear.
 We
know from our research that such
empathic understanding - understanding with
a person, not about him - is such an effective
approach that it can bring about major
changes in personality.
 Some of you may be feeling that you listen
well to people, and that you have never seen
such results. The chances are very great
indeed that your listening has not been of the
type I have described.
 Fortunately I can suggest a little laboratory
experiment which you can try to test the
quality of your understanding.
 The
next time you get into an argument with
your wife, or your friend, or with a small
group of friends, just stop the discussion for
a moment and for an experiment, institute this
rule.
 "Each person can speak up for himself only
after he has first restated the ideas and
feelings of the previous speaker accurately,
and to that speaker's satisfaction."
 You see what this would mean.
 It
would simply mean that before presenting
your own point of view, it would be necessary
for you to really achieve the other speaker's
frame of reference - to understand his
thoughts and feelings so well that you could
summarize them for him.
 Sounds simple, doesn't it? But if you try it
you will discover it is one of the most difficult
things you have ever tried to do.
 However,
once you have been able to see the
other's point of view, your own comments will
have to be drastically revised.
 You will also find the emotion going out of the
discussion, the differences being reduced,
and those differences which remain being of
a rational and understandable sort.
Courage as prerequisite for
empathic understanding
 “If
you really understand a person in this way,
if you are willing to enter his private world
and see the way life appears to him, you run
the risk of being changed yourself.
 You might see it his way, you might find
yourself influenced in your attitudes or
personality.
 This
risk of being changed is one of the most
frightening prospects most of us can face.
 If I enter, fully as I am able, into the private
world of the neurotic or psychotic individual,
isn’t there a risk that I might become lost in
that world?
 Most of us are afraid to take that risk....
 The
great majority of us can not listen; we
find ourselves compelled to evaluate,
because listening is too dangerous.
 The first requirement is courage, and we do
not always have it.”
Maturity
 “The individual exhibits mature behavior when he

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perceives realistically and in an extensional manner,
is not defensive,
accepts the responsibility of being different from
others, accepts responsibility for his own behavior,
evaluates experience in terms of the evidence coming
from his own senses
changes his evaluation of experience only on the basis
of new evidence,
accepts others as unique individuals different from
himself,
prizes himself,
and prizes others.”
The Fully Functioning Person
 Look
out, here he comes
– “… more able to live fully in and with each and all of his
feelings and reactions. He makes increasing use of all his
organic equipment to sense, as accurately as possible,
the existential situation within and without. He makes use
of all the information his nervous system can thus
supply, using it in awareness, but recognizing that his
total organism may be, and often is, wiser than his
awareness.”
 a reasonable summary of Rogers himself
Measurement of improvement
 Experimental
evaluation of therapy
– an indication of implicit Rogerian hard-headedness and
pragmatism
 despite explicit goody-two-shoeness
 Rogers as Ned Flanders
 Correlation
between self and self-ideal
– if correlation improves, therapy has worked
Everyone as therapist
 the
healing potential of the (honest)
interpersonal relationship
 the healing potential of the (encounter) group
– “In an encounter group I love to give, both to the
participants and to myself, the maximum freedom of
expression ... I do trust the group, and find it often wiser
than I in its reactions to particular situations.”
 the risky shift phenomenon, however
 polarization of group attitudes
 increased cohesiveness tends to mean increased
ethnocentrism
Unclarified issues:
 Where’s
God - source of wisdom?
– basis for organismic valuing: the wisdom of the body
 Teleological
view of evolution
– phylogenesis and ontogenesis: things move towards the
(implicit) ideal
 Comparability
with Freud
– Rogers’s anti-Id
 organismic needs as “all-good”
– Rogers’ nasty SuperEgo
 don’t tell anybody what to do
– much less emphasis on sexuality
 much less emphasis on procedure
– dream work, free-association


shared concern for clients
similar attitude with regard to possibility and even
etiology of repression
 Comparability
–
–
–
–
with Jung
difference in emphasis on shadow
similarity in teleology
implicit “collective unconscious” - ?
little formal evaluation of religion (due to implicit
religiosity?)
 Comparability
with behaviorists and behavior
therapists
–
–
–
–
less direction
more explicit reliance on teleology
more comparable to Gray in terms of field theory
more particular stress on nature of organismic valuing
process
Conclusion
 Rogers’ definition
of health
– Love of thy neighbour, as thyself, constitutes
precondition for positive personality growth
 And:
a note on the necessity of tyranny:
– “By 1970 Rogers was prepared to be as open as his
organismic valuing process spontaneously suggested, to
the point of venting great anger and irritation to other
members of the encounter group.”