1. Deepening our Understanding of the Person
PCE Symposium Lausanne 2016
Deepening our Understanding of the Person
Dr. Judy Moore
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Jean-Marc Randin
IFAACP, Lausanne, Switzerland

2. Growing a Person-Centered Society in Europe

3. PCE psychotherapy and counselling: years of experience
PCE view of the person?
What is psychotherapy for us?

4. This book is about the suffering and the hope, the anxiety and the satisfaction, with which each therapist’s counseling room is filled. It is about the uniqueness of the relationship each therapist forms with each client, and equally about the common elements which we discover in all these relationships. This book is about the highly personal experiences of each one of us. It is about a client in my office, who sits there by the corner of the desk, struggling to be himself, yet deathly afraid of being himself – striving to see his experience as it is, wanting to be that experience and yet deeply fearful of the prospect. The book is about me, as I sit there with that client, facing him, participating in that struggle as deeply and sensitively as I am able.

5. It is about me as I try to perceive his experience, and the meaning and the feeling and the taste and the flavor that is has for him. It is about me as I bemoan my very human fallibility in understanding that client, and the occasional failures to see life as it appears to him, failures which fall like heavy objects across the intricate, delicate web of growth which is taking place. It is about me as I rejoice at the privilege of being a midwife to a new personality – as I stand by with awe at the emergence of a self, a person, as I see a birth process in which I have had an important and facilitating part.

6. It is about both the client and me as we regard with wonder the potent and orderly forces which are evident in this whole experience, forces which seem deeply rooted in the universe as a whole. The book is, I believe, about life, as life vividly reveals itself in the therapeutic process – with its blind power and its tremendous capacity for destruction, but with its overbalancing thrust toward growth, if the opportunity for growth is provided. Rogers, 1951, pp. x-xi

7. Psychotherapy Therapist as someone who « takes care of »
Who is a « devoted servant »
A new profession which “covers a frame far beyond the psychiatric and medical model”

8. What is new is the awareness of living amputated from a part of oneself, whatever the reasons are, … … it is the desire of finding (again) one’s integrity. Lucien Tenenbaum

9. Impression that I could be more than what I actually am
The outside isn’t the limit
What gets in the way comes from me
Psychological growth is also a human issue

10. Implications for the therapist
Not an expert in pathologies and diagnosis
Concerned with human growth
Therefore the person is the issue
Not the problems and (even) suffering
Being at ease with uncertainty

11. Learning from our clients
Not a victim
A person using his/her personal power
Afraid of what I will discover

12. It seems to me that at bottom each person is asking, “Who am I, really
It seems to me that at bottom each person is asking, “Who am I, really? How can I get in touch with this real self, underlying my surface behavior? How can I become myself?” Rogers (1961), On Becoming a Person

13. [Kierkegaard] points out that the deepest form of despair is to choose “to be another than himself”. On the other hand “to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair”, and this choice is the deepest responsibility of man.
Rogers (1961), On Becoming a Person

14. Truly understanding that we are beings in ‘process’

15. Truly understanding that we are beings in ‘process’
Knowing that we need to stop and listen directly to that process

16. Truly understanding that we are beings in ‘process’
Knowing that we need to stop and listen directly to that process
Being willing to follow that process to the edge of our awareness and understanding

17. Truly understanding that we are beings in ‘process’
Knowing that we need to stop and listen directly to that process
Being willing to follow that process to the edge of our awareness and understanding
Being willing to ‘let go’ of the ‘self’ that we know

18. Truly understanding that we are beings in ‘process’
Knowing that we need to stop and listen directly to that process
Being willing to follow that process to the edge of our awareness and understanding
Being willing to ‘let go’ of the ‘self’ that we know
Accepting the role that the body plays in this process

19. Truly understanding that we are beings in ‘process’
Knowing that we need to stop and listen directly to that process
Being willing to follow that process to the edge of our awareness and understanding
Being willing to ‘let go’ of the ‘self’ that we know
Accepting the role that the body plays in this process

20. …not a façade of conformity to others, not a cynical denial of all feeling, not a front of intellectual rationality, but a living, breathing, feeling, fluctuating process- [When someone is able to do this] he becomes a person. Rogers (1961), On Becoming a Person

21. Knowing that we need to stop and listen directly to that process
Truly understanding that we are beings in ‘process’
Knowing that we need to stop and listen directly to that process
Being willing to follow that process to the edge of our awareness and understanding
Being willing to ‘let go’ of the ‘self’ that we know
Accepting the role that the body plays in this process

22. ‘Focusing’, or more exactly, continuous focusing, is the whole process which ensues when the individual attends to the direct referent of experiencing. ‘Focusing’ refers to how one mode of experiencing, the direct referent, functions in ongoing personality change.
Gendlin (1964), ‘Experiencing: a variable in the process of therapeutic change’

23. In formulating my current description, I have drawn on the concept of “experiencing” as formulated by Gendlin… This concept has enriched my thinking in various ways… Briefly, it is his view that at all times there is going on in the human organism a flow of experiencing… to which the individual can turn again and again as a referent in order to discover the meaning of those experiences. An empathic therapist points sensitively to the “felt meaning” which the client is experiencing in this particular moment, in order to help him or her to focus on that meaning and carry it further to its full and uninhibited experiencing.
Rogers (1980), A Way of Being

24. Truly understanding that we are beings in ‘process’
Knowing that we need to stop and listen directly to that process
Being willing to follow that process to the edge of our awareness and understanding
Being willing to ‘let go’ of the ‘self’ that we know
Accepting the role that the body plays in this process

25. I find that when I am closest to my inner, intuitive self, when I am somehow in touch with the unknown in me, when perhaps I am in a slightly altered state of consciousness, then whatever I do seems to be full of healing. Then simply my presence is releasing and helpful to the other. There is nothing I can do to force this experience, but when I can relax and be close to the transcendental core of me, then I may behave in strange and impulsive ways…[which] turn out to be right in some odd way: it seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and becomes a part of something larger. Profound growth and healing and energy are present.
Rogers (1980), A Way of Being; original emphasis

27. Whatever you hunger for is right in the rock being a rock, the grass being grass, the tree a tree, a flower has only to be a flower to be whole, to be in harmony with everything else…But how does a person just be human? People are confused about what it means to be human so you will have to spend the rest of your life looking for the answer yourself. Look not with your mind, but with your body. If you can find a way to live in your body and not reject any of it. then you will be guided into discovering the wisdom you sense in nature all around you. McMahon (1993), Beyond the Myth of Dominance

28. Being willing to ‘let go’ of the ‘self’ that we know
Truly understanding that we are beings in ‘process’
Knowing that we need to stop and listen directly to that process
Being willing to follow that process to the edge of our awareness and understanding
Being willing to ‘let go’ of the ‘self’ that we know
Accepting the role that the body plays in this process

29. When one studies Buddhism one studies oneself; when one studies oneself, one forgets oneself; when one forgets oneself one is enlightened by everything and this very enlightenment breaks the bonds of clinging to both body and mind not only for oneself but for all beings as well. Great Master Dogen (1200–1253)

30. Accepting the role that the body plays in this process
Truly understanding that we are beings in ‘process’
Knowing that we need to stop and listen directly to that process
Being willing to follow that process to the edge of our awareness and understanding
Being willing to ‘let go’ of the ‘self’ that we know
Accepting the role that the body plays in this process

31. Your own body is the key, is the key that will tune you in to this vast and awesome presence, the source of all wisdom.
McMahon (1993) Beyond the Myth of Dominance