On Becoming a Person: Perspectives from Carl Rogers, Huineng, Wang Yangming, and Ken Wilber

Abstract

Abstract On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy published in 1961 is believed to be the most well-known book written by Carl Rogers, the quintessential humanistic psychologist and psychotherapist. Chapter 6 seems to represent the core of this book: What It Means to Become a Person? To this seminal question, Rogers gives a four-fold answer: A person who has become himself demonstrates the following qualities: openness to experience, trust in one’s own organism, an internal locus of evaluation, and willingness to be a process. Much of Rogers’ conception of a person who has emerged from therapy and become himself sounds familiar to Chinese readers who know Huineng, the real founder of Chan Buddhism in the eighth century China and Wang Yangming, a neo-Confucian philosopher in the 15th and 16th century China. This paper will try to present a brief comparative study of the concept and performance of a highly functional person who has become himself from the standpoint of Rogers, Huineng, Wang and Wilber. We will focus the discussion on two fundamental questions: What does it mean to become oneself (Who am I)? How do we actualize ourselves? After counseling tens of thousands of clients over a couple of decades, Carl Rogers (1902–1987) summarized as a psychotherapist that the various problems of his clients boil down to one search, “‘Who am I, really? How can I get in touch with this real self, underlying all my surface behavior? How can I become myself?” (Rogers, 2020, p. 108). From this Rogers extrapolates that the purpose of education, like counseling and psychotherapy, is to provide facility to allow students to become themselves. Like the client-centered therapy, which later is renamed as person-centered therapy (Rogers, 1980), the method in education is the student-centered approach (Rogers, 1951, 1961/2020). In the following I will elucidate the views and practices of Rogers, Huineng and Wang around the two questions: Who am I? How could I become myself?