For me, Carl Rogers is one of the most important people of the 20th century, along with Paul Goodman. And indeed Carl Rogers is considered the most influential psychotherapist, even ahead of Sigmund Freud. His psychotherapy concept is essentially based on parrhersia.
His insights can greatly help us to make parrhesia the dominant factor in our daily lives. The influence Carl Rogers has had on my life can hardly be overestimated.
The Rediscovery of Cynicism in the USA
In the early days of his career as a psychotherapist and counselor, Rogers was not very successful. He believed that all one had to do was educate people, inform them of their faults and show them the right way. Then they would change and approach everything better in the future. But instead of changing, the opposite often happened. They persisted in their neuroses and their self-destructive ways, which led them to more loneliness, addiction, poverty or prison.
It was a woman, a social worker, who advised him to first try to make sure that the delinquent youths he was trying to help, among others, felt understood by him.
Rogers radically changed his approach.
After many decades as a psychotherapist, he knew that it all came down to encouraging people to tell the truth about themselves. And he had found out that a prerequisite for achieving this goal was that the therapist also not hide the truth about himself.
Self-congruency
Like us Cynics, Rogers, although he considered himself for a time as an atheist after turning away from the church, assumed that humans were inherently good. Evil or neuroses were consequences of the lack of Self-love and the formation of an Ideal Self. This ideal self sees in the real Self something weak, evil, in any case to be fought.
My 9 year old S daughter’s received a report card a few days ago. In it, for example, was the typical teacher’s curse that she should try harder next school year. So children are condemned to construct an ideal self and reject their real self. This ideal self corresponds roughly to the top dog of Gestalt therapy.
Contact with the real self is thus lost. In the language of Gestalt therapy, the under dog takes over: you should really…, you should better… and so on — but you won’t make it anyway.
In the accepting conversation, the real self comes to power again. Thus, the basis for parrhesia is created in the first place. Because neither the ideal self (top dog) nor the resistance against it (under dog) speak the truth about the real self.
Rogers conceived of his approach as an art of living rather than an expert knowledge only for manipulating disturbed personalities. This is precisely what makes him so interesting to us cynics.
Listen to Rogers himself
There is a lot of material on Carl Rogers, also on the Internet. Course offerings, books, introductory texts. Some are terrible, especially German ones. (I will go into this in my biographic page), others are excellent. But I recommend, you first listen to Rogers himself, not only to the video linked here, but also to the one that follows automatically.
If you are here at gocynic.com not just to increase your general knowledge and be able to explain to people at the next party that cynicism has a long history and is not at all like what many associate with it, but if you really want to achieve eudaimonia, that is deep lasting happiness, then reading about cynicism is not enough. You have to jump in the water and learn how to swim. (And you will soon realize that the water is not as cold and hostile as it may seem at first.)
Especially if you dare to do it alone, without a coach or already existing Encounter group you can just go to, Rogers’ insights on how to put Parrhesia into practice may help you more than just old stories about the follies of a Diogenes. I will post some methods from Rogers, as well as from Gestalt therapy here.
I would like to emphasize right away that Rogers himself also used Gestalt therapy methods in his institute. Even methods of cognitive behavioral therapy, which are not based on cynicism, but on the daughter of cynicism, stoicism, are listed here in the Gocynic project without any fear of contact. Unless a demarcation seems necessary to avoid falling into one of the many traps of the coercive society and turning cynicism into its opposite: Biopolitics, control, instead of empowerment.
An illustration of the radical difference of the person-centered approach from all other forms of psychotherapy is perhaps to compare it to a student/teacher relationship. This is reversed in Rogers’ client-centered approach: the patient, in which he is only encouraged to tell the truth about himself, to practice parrhesia, becomes the teacher, the therapist his student.
