Contents
This chapter was first presented as an outline of a talk at a meeting at Oberlin College in 1954. I tried to combine in a more complete and clear form some of the concepts of psychotherapy that were maturing in me. Later, the material was somewhat reworked.
As usual, I tried to keep my thought closer to the roots of real experience reflected in psychotherapeutic conversations. Therefore, as a material for generalization, I often used recordings of such conversations.
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While working at the University of Chicago Counseling Center, I had the opportunity to interact with people who came to me with many personal problems. For example, a student concerned about failing college exams; a housewife disillusioned with her marriage; a person who feels that he is on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown and psychosis; a responsible worker who spends most of his time in sexual fantasies and fails to do his job; a bright student, paralyzed by the conviction that he is hopelessly bankrupt; a parent dejected by their child’s behavior; a charming girl who, for no reason, is overcome by bouts of deep depression; a woman who fears that life and love are passing by, and her diploma with good grades is too little compensation; a person who is convinced that powerful or sinister forces are plotting against him. I could go on listing these many and unique problems that people come to us with. They represent the fullness of life experience. However, I am not satisfied with this list because, as a consultant, I know that the problem stated by the client in the first conversation will not remain unchanged in the second and third conversations, and by the tenth conversation it will turn into a completely different problem or a whole range of problems.
I’ve come to believe that despite this bewildering horizontal diversity and layered vertical complexity, there’s probably only one problem. In delving into the experiences of many clients during the psychotherapeutic relationships we are trying to create for them, I come to the conclusion that every client asks the same question. Behind the problematic situation that he complains about, behind the problems with his studies, his wife, his boss, behind the problem of his uncontrollable or strange behavior, frightening feelings, lies what constitutes the true object of his aspirations. It seems to me that in the depths of the soul every person asks: “Who am I really? How can I get in touch with my true self, which underlies my superficial behavior? How can I become myself?
The process of becoming.
Look under the mask
Let me try to explain what I mean when I say that, in my opinion, the goal that a person most wants to achieve, the goal that he consciously or unconsciously pursues, is to become himself.
When a person comes to me who is worried about his own unique difficulties, I am sure that the best thing is to try to create such a relationship with him in which he feels that he is free and safe. My goal is to understand how he feels in his inner world, to accept him as he is; create an atmosphere of freedom in which he can move wherever he wants, along the waves of his thoughts and states. How does he use this freedom?
My experience is that he uses this freedom to become more and more himself. He begins to break down the fake facade, throw off his masks and abandon the roles in which he has so far dealt with life. It turns out that he is trying to find something more important; something that more truly represents himself. First, he throws off the masks, the presence of which he was somewhat aware of. Here is a young student describing one of the masks she uses in a conversation with a consultant. She strongly doubts whether there is any real «I» with its own beliefs behind this pacifying all ingratiating facade.
“I thought about this obligation to comply with the norm. I’ve kind of developed a bit of a knack, I guess… well… a habit… of trying to make people around me feel at ease, or to act so that everything goes smoothly. There should always be a person who pleases everyone. At a meeting, or at a small party, or whatever… I could make things go well and still seem like I was having a good time too. Sometimes I myself was surprised that I defended a point of view opposite to my own, fearing to offend the person who expressed it. In other words, I never had a firm and definite attitude towards things. And now — about the reason why I did it: probably because I was at home like this too often. It’s just that I didn’t stand up for my beliefs until I didn’t know if I even had any beliefs to stand up for. To tell the truth, I wasn’t myself, and didn’t really know what I was; I was just playing some kind of fake role.”
In this passage, you see the client examining his mask, conscious of his displeasure with it, and wanting to know how to get to the real self behind the mask, if there is one.
In this attempt to discover «themselves,» the psychotherapeutic relationship is usually used by the client in order to explore, to explore the various aspects of his experience, to recognize and be ready to face the deep contradictions that he often discovers. He learns how unreal his behavior and the feelings he experiences, how far they are from the true reactions of his body, representing a facade, a wall behind which he hid from life. He discovers how much he corresponds to what he has to be, and not to what he really is. He often finds that he exists only as a response to the demands of other people, it seems to him that he does not have his own «I» and that he only tries to think, feel and behave in the way that others think he should think, feel and behave.
In this connection, I was surprised when I discovered how exactly, with what deep psychological understanding more than a century ago, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described the problem of the individual. He pointed out that we often encounter despair that comes from the inability to make a choice or unwillingness to be ourselves; but the deepest despair comes when a person chooses «to be not himself, to be different.» On the other hand, the desire to «be the» you «that you really are» is, of course, something opposite to despair, and for this choice a person bears the greatest responsibility. When I read some of his writings, I almost feel that he must have heard everything our clients said as they worried, frustrated, and tormented as they sought and explored the reality of their Self.
This search becomes even more exciting when they discover that they are pulling off those false masks, which they did not suspect were false. With fear, they begin to explore the whirlwinds and even storms of feelings that rise up inside them. Throwing off the mask that has been part and parcel of you for a long time is deeply exciting; however, the individual continues to move towards the goal, which includes freedom of feelings and thoughts. This is illustrated by several statements by a woman who participated in a number of psychotherapeutic conversations. She uses many metaphors to describe her struggle to reach the core of her personality.
“As I see it now, layer by layer, I got rid of defensive reactions. I will build them, test them, and then discard them when I see that you have remained the same. I didn’t know what was at the bottom, and I was very afraid to reach the bottom, but I had to keep trying to do it. At first I felt that there was nothing inside me — only a huge emptiness was felt where I wanted to have a solid core.
Then I felt that I was standing in front of a massive stone wall, too high to climb over and too thick to walk through. The day came when the wall became more transparent than impenetrable. After that, the wall seemed to disappear, but behind it I found a dam holding back the furiously churning waters. I felt that I, as it were, were holding back the pressure of this water, and if I made even a tiny gap, I and everything around me would be destroyed by the subsequent flow of feelings that seemed to me in the form of water. In the end, I could no longer withstand this tension and let go of the flow. In fact, all my actions were reduced to the fact that I succumbed to a feeling of acute self-pity that seized me, then to a feeling of hatred, then to love. After this experience, I had the feeling that I jumped over the edge of the abyss to the other side and, staggering a little on the very edge, I finally felt that I was safe. I don’t know what I was looking for and where I was going, but then I felt, as I always felt when I really lived, that I was moving forward.
It seems to me that this passage conveys the feelings of many people quite well: if a fake facade, a wall, a dam does not hold up, everything will be swept away by the violent flow of feelings that they keep under wraps in their inner world. However, this passage also shows the overwhelming desire experienced by man to seek himself and become himself. Here also emerges the way in which a person determines the reality of his inner world — when he fully experiences his feelings, which at the organic level are himself, just like the client in the above example, experiencing self-pity, hatred and love. , feels confident that this is part of her true «I».
Feelings
I would like to say one more thing about the experience of feelings. In fact, this is the discovery of the unknown components of one’s «I». The phenomenon that I am about to describe is very difficult to fully comprehend. There are a thousand reasons in our daily lives for not allowing ourselves to fully experience what is happening in our relationships. These are causes that stem from our past and present, causes that are rooted in the social environment. To experience feelings freely, in their entirety, seems too dangerous. But in the atmosphere of security and freedom of the psychotherapeutic relationship, these feelings can be experienced in full force, as they really are. They can be experienced and are experienced «in their purest form», so that at this moment a person really experiences his fear, really his tenderness, anger, or something else.
Perhaps I can clarify this again by giving an example from one client’s psychotherapy tapes, an example that will show and reveal what I mean. A young man, a graduate student who has been involved in psychotherapy for a long time, is perplexed by a vague feeling that he feels in himself. Gradually, he defines it as some kind of feeling of fear, for example, failing exams, not getting a doctorate. Then there is a long pause. From now on, let the recording of the conversation speak for itself.
Client: “I sort of let it seep through. But I also connected it with you and my relationship with you. I feel one thing — that the fear of this, as it were, disappears; or there is something else… so hard to grasp… I kind of have two different feelings about it. Or like two «I». One is frightened, although he is holding on to something, and I now feel this person quite clearly. You know, I kind of need something to hold on to… and I feel scared.”
Therapist: «Mr. That’s how you may feel in this minute, have felt all this time, and perhaps now you have the same feeling that you need to hold on to our relationship.
Client: «Won’t you let me do this because, you know, I kind of need it. I can be so lonely and scared without it.”
Therapist: “Yeah, yeah. Let me hold onto this, as I’ll be terribly scared without it. Let me hold on to this…” (Pause.)
Client: «It’s kind of like, ‘Will you let me have a dissertation or a PhD or something…’ because I kind of need this little world. I mean…»
Therapist: “In both cases, it’s like a plea, right? Give it to me ’cause I need it so much. I’ll be terribly scared without it.» (Large pause.)
Client: “I have such a feeling… I somehow can’t go any further… It’s like a little boy with a prayer, somehow even… What kind of gesture is a prayer? (Puts palms together as if in prayer.) Isn’t that funny? Because…»
Therapist: «You put your hands together as if in supplication.»
Client: «Yeah, that’s right! Won’t you do it for me Oh, it’s terrible! Who, I beg?
Perhaps this passage will shed some light on what I’m talking about — experiencing feeling to its limits. Here he is, at this moment feeling like nothing more than a begging little boy, begging, begging, dependent. In this moment he is all — this prayer. Of course, he almost immediately recoils from this experience, saying, «Who, I beg you?» – but it left its mark. As he says a moment later, “It’s so beautiful when, when all this, something new comes out of me. Every time I am so amazed, and then I again have this feeling, like a feeling of fear, that there is so much in me that I may be hiding something. He understands that it has broken through and that in this moment he is addiction itself, and it amazes him how this happened.
It’s not just addiction that’s experienced this way. It can be pain, grief, jealousy, destructive anger, strong desire, trust, pride, tenderness, or outgoing love. It can be any of the emotions that a person is capable of.
Gradually, through such experiences, I came to understand that at such moments the individual begins to be who he is. When a person in the course of psychotherapy feels all the emotions that arise in him organismically, and being aware of them and openly manifesting them, he will feel himself in all the fullness that is hidden in his inner world. This is how he becomes who he is.
Opening oneself in direct experience
Let’s continue with the question of what it means to become oneself. This is a very confusing question, and I will try to answer it again, albeit in the form of a guess, based on the statements of the client recorded between conversations. The woman tells how the different facades with which she lived seemed to be crushed and collapsed, causing not only a feeling of confusion, but also relief. She continues:
“You know, it seems as if all the effort spent on keeping the elements in that arbitrary pattern is completely unnecessary, in vain. You think you have to make the pattern yourself, but there are so many pieces and it’s so hard to figure out how to fit them together. Sometimes you put them wrong, and the more elements don’t fit, the more effort it takes to put the pattern together, until finally you get so tired of it all that you think this terrible mess is better than continuing to work. And then you find that these lumped together pieces naturally fall into place, and without your participation a living pattern emerges. You just have to discover it, and in the process you find yourself and your place. Moreover, you must allow your experience to reveal its meaning by itself; the moment you tell him what it means, you will be at war with yourself.”
Let me bring out the meaning of this poetic description, the meaning it has for me. I believe she is saying that to be herself is to discover the pattern, the underlying order, that exists in the ever-changing stream of her experience. To be herself is to reveal the unity and harmony that exists in her own feelings and reactions, and not to try to use a mask to hide this experience or try to give it a structure that it does not have. Therefore, the true «I» is that which can be calmly revealed in one’s own experience, and not that which is imposed on him.
In citing excerpts from these clients, I have tried to suggest what goes on in the warm, understanding atmosphere of a developing relationship with a therapist. It seems that the client is gradually painfully exploring what is behind the masks facing the world; or what lies behind the masks with which he deceived himself. Deeply, often very vividly, the client experiences different sides of himself that were hidden inside. In this way he becomes more and more himself — not a mask, not a conformist conforming to others, not a cynic who rejects all feelings, not a façade of intellectual rationalizations, but a living, breathing, feeling, pulsating process — in short, he becomes a person. takes on its own face.
The person who appears
I imagine some of you will ask, “But what does he become? It is not enough to say that he gets rid of facades. What face is behind them? It is not easy to answer this question. Since one of the most obvious facts is that each individual tends to become an independent, different, unique person, I would like to highlight several, in my opinion, characteristic directions of becoming. No person will fully embody these characteristics, no one will fully fit the description I offer, but I see that some generalizations can be drawn here based on my experience in psychotherapeutic relationships with so many clients.
Openness to your experience
First of all, I would like to say that the individual becomes more open to his experience. This statement is of great importance to me. This is the opposite of protection. Psychological research has shown that if the data of our sense organs contradict our idea of ourselves, these data are distorted. In other words, we cannot perceive everything that our senses convey to us, but only what corresponds to our ideas about ourselves.
And now, in the safe atmosphere of the relationship that I spoke about, in place of these defensive reactions or rigidity ↑ (Rigidity — difficulty in the necessary change in activity. — Approx. ed.) Gradually comes an ever-growing openness to experience. The individual becomes more and more open to the awareness of his own feelings and sensations, as they exist in him at the organic level, as I have tried to describe it. He also begins to more adequately, impartially recognize the reality that exists outside of him, without squeezing it into previously accepted schemes. He begins to see that not all trees are green, not all men are harsh fathers, not all women reject him, not all failures indicate that he is bad, and so on. He is able to accept what is happening as it is, without distorting it for the sake of conformity to his previously formed perception stereotypes. As you might expect, this growing openness to experience makes it more realistic to meet new people, new situations, and new problems. This means that he does not have fixed beliefs and he can normally relate to the revealed contradictions. He can receive a lot of conflicting information and not try to reject it outright. The openness of consciousness to what currently exists within it and in the situation around it seems to me an important characteristic of the personality that appears in the process of psychotherapy.
Perhaps this statement will become more understandable if I illustrate it with an excerpt from a taped conversation. The young specialist in the forty-eighth conversation talks about how he became more open to his bodily and some other sensations.
Client: “It seems impossible to me that anyone can talk about all the changes that he feels. But I actually recently felt that I became more attentive and more objective about my physical condition. I mean, I don’t expect too much from myself. Here’s how it works in practice: I feel like in the past I used to struggle with the fatigue that came over me after dinner. Well, now I am completely sure that I am really tired, that I do not invent this fatigue at all, I just have a breakdown. It seems that in the past I spent most of my time criticizing this fatigue.”
Therapist: «So you can allow yourself to be tired instead of feeling critical of it along with being tired.»
Client: “Yes, that I shouldn’t be tired or anything. And I think it’s kind of wise, in a way, that I can just not fight this tiredness right now; at the same time, I feel like I need to slow down. So being tired is not so bad at all. And I think I can kind of relate why I shouldn’t have behaved like that to the kind of father I have and how he views it. For example, let’s say I got sick and would tell him about it. Probably, outwardly it will seem that my father wants to help me with something, but at the same time he will say: “Well, another trouble is on my head, damn it!” You understand, something like that.»
Therapist: «It’s like if you’re sick, there’s actually something unfortunate about it.»
Client: «Yeah. I am sure that my father treats his body with the same disrespect as I do. Last summer, I somehow unsuccessfully turned around and dislocated something in my back; I heard it crackle and everything. At first I was in sharp pain all the time, really bad pain. I called the doctor to take a look at me. The doctor said that it’s okay, it will go away on its own, you just need not to bend over too much. Well, that was a few months ago, and only recently I noticed that … damn, it really hurts, and now it still hurts … And it’s not my fault at all.
Therapist: «That doesn’t make you look bad at all.»
Client: “No… and one of the reasons why I’m more tired than I should be is because I’m constantly stressed out with this pain, and so… I’ve already made an appointment with the doctor to have me examined, x-rayed or anything else. In a way, I think you can say that I began to feel more true … or feel all this more objectively. And it really is, as I say, a profound change; and of course, my relationship with my wife and two kids… well, you wouldn’t recognize me if you could see how i feel… how do you… i mean… it just seems like there really is nothing more beautiful than sincere and actually… really feeling love for your children and being loved by them at the same time. I don’t know how to express it. We have so much respect… both of us for Judy… and we noticed… as soon as we started doing this… we noticed such a huge change in her… It seems to be a very deep thing.»
Therapist: “I think what you’re trying to tell me is that you can hear yourself more correctly now. If your body tells you that it is tired, you hear it and believe it instead of criticizing it; if you are in pain, you can hear it; if you feel that you really love your wife or children, you can feel it, and it seems that this also manifests itself in changes in themselves.
Here, in a relatively small but important passage, you can see much of what I was trying to say about openness to experience, openness to any experience. Previously, this person could not freely feel pain or illness because the father did not accept them. He could not feel tenderness and love for his children, because these feelings would speak of his vulnerability, and he needed to demonstrate the “I am strong” facade. But now he is able to be truly open to the experiences of his organism: he can be tired when he is tired; he can feel pain when he is in pain; he is able to freely feel the love he feels for his daughter; he can also feel and express annoyance towards her. As he reports in the next part of the conversation, he can live the experience of his whole organism, and not close it from consciousness.
Trust in your body
Of particular difficulty is the description of the second quality that appears in a person after psychotherapy. This person seems to be increasingly discovering that he can trust his body; that the organism serves as a suitable tool for choosing the behavior most appropriate in a given situation.
I will try to convey this to you in a more intelligible form. Perhaps you can understand my description by imagining an individual who is faced with a real choice, for example: “Will I go on vacation with my family or alone?”, “Should I have a third cocktail?”, “Is this the person who can be my partner in love and in life? How will a person behave in such situations after psychotherapy? To the extent that this person is open to all his experience, he has access to all the data he has, on the basis of which he can choose his behavior in a particular situation. He is aware of his feelings and urges, which are often complex and contradictory. He can easily feel the whole set of social requirements: from relatively rigid social «laws» to the desires of children and families. He has access to memories of similar situations and the consequences of different behaviors. He has a relatively correct perception of the situation in all its complexity. He can allow his whole organism, with the participation of conscious thought, to consider and weigh every stimulus, need and demand, to assess their relative importance and strength. Having made such a complex weighing and comparison, he is able to find a course of action that seems to best satisfy all his constant and momentary needs in a given situation.
In weighing and comparing the components of a given life choice, his organism will, of course, make mistakes. There will be wrong decisions. But thanks to the desire to be open to his experience, over time he is more and more aware of the unsatisfactory consequences of this or that choice, and more and more quickly corrects erroneous decisions.
It may be helpful to understand that for most of us, the shortcomings that hinder this weighing and finding balance are that we include in our experience that which does not belong to it, and exclude that which does. Thus, an individual may insist on such a self-image as «I know the measure when drinking,» while openness to his past experience shows that this is hardly true. Or a young woman is only able to see the good qualities of her future husband, while openness to experience would show that he also has flaws.
As a rule, when a client is open to his experience, he begins to find his body more trustworthy. He feels less fear of his emotional reactions. There is a constant growth of faith and even disposition to a complex, rich, diverse set of feelings and inclinations that exist in a person at the organismic level. Consciousness, instead of being the guardian of numerous and dangerous unpredictable impulses, of which only a few can be allowed to come into being, becomes a contented inhabitant of a society of impulses, feelings and thoughts, which are found to govern themselves very well when not watched over. fear.
Internal locus
Locus — location. — Note. ed.
Another direction evident in the process of becoming a person relates to the locus, or place in which the choice of his decisions or value judgments is made. The individual increasingly begins to feel that the locus of evaluation is within him. Less and less he seeks from others the approval or disapproval of decisions, choices and standards by which to live. He realizes that the choice is his own business; that the only question that makes sense is, “Does my lifestyle fully satisfy and truly express me?” I think this is probably the most important question for a creative individual.
Obviously, you will understand me better if I illustrate this with one example. I would like to present a small part of a taped conversation with a young woman, a graduate student, who turned to a counselor for help. In the beginning, she was troubled by many problems, and she even wanted to commit suicide. During the conversation, she became aware of one of the feelings in herself — her great desire to be dependent, namely the desire to give someone the opportunity to direct her life. She was very critical of those who did not provide her with sufficient guidance. She talked about all her teachers, bitterly worried that none of them taught her something that would have a deep meaning. Gradually, she began to realize that part of her difficulties were due to the fact that she, as a student, did not show initiative in participating in classes. And then comes the passage that I want to quote.
I think this passage will give you some idea of what it means to experience an inward shift in the locus of evaluation and decision making. This passage refers to a later conversation with this young woman, when she began to realize that perhaps she, too, was in some way responsible for the shortcomings in her education.
Client: «Well, now I’m wondering if I’ve just beaten around the bush, getting only a superficial knowledge and not seriously dealing with the subjects themselves?»
Therapist: «Maybe you were poking here and there instead of really digging deeper.»
Client: «Yeah. That’s why I say… (slowly and very thoughtfully) well, from that point of view it really depends on me. I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me that I can’t rely on anyone else to educate me. (Very quietly.) I’ll really have to get it myself.»
Therapist: “You really start to realize that there is only one person who can educate you; you begin to realize that perhaps no one else can educate you.”
Client: «Uh-huh. (Long pause. She sits in thought.) I have all the symptoms of fear. (Laughs softly.)
Therapist: «Fear? Is that what scares you? Is that what you mean?»
Client: «Uh-huh. (Very long pause, obviously struggling with his feelings.)
Therapist: “Would you like to be more specific about what you mean? What really makes you feel afraid?
Client (laughs): “I… uh… I don’t know for sure if that’s true… I mean… well, I actually feel like I’m a cut piece… (pause) and that I’m very… I don’t know… in vulnerable position, but I… umm… I endured it, and… it came out almost without words. It seems to me… that something… I let it escape.”
Therapist: «It’s not even like a part of you.»
Client: «Well, I felt surprised.»
Therapist “It’s like, ‘Oh God, did I really say that?’” (Both chuckle.)
Client: “I really don’t think I’ve had this feeling before. I… uh… well, it really does feel like I’m saying something that really is a part of me. (Pause.) Or… uh (completely confused) I feel like I… I don’t know… I feel strong, and yet I have a feeling… I recognize it as fear, a feeling of fear «.
Therapist: «So you’re saying that when you say something like that, you also have a feeling of fear from what you said, don’t you?»
Client: “Hmmm… I can feel it. For example, I feel it now inside … as if strength rises or some kind of vent appears. Like it’s something really big and strong. And yet… uh… it was almost a physical feeling that I was left alone and sort of cut off from… from the support that I always had.”
Therapist: «You feel like it’s something big and strong rushing out, and at the same time you feel like saying it cut yourself off from any support.»
Client: «Um… Maybe it’s… I don’t know… It’s a break in some structure that has always held me together, I think.»
Therapist: «It kind of loosens the structure, its connections.»
Client: “Um (silent, then cautiously, but with conviction), I don’t know, but I feel that after this I will start to do more than I think I need to do. How much more do I have to do! I seem to need to find a new way to behave on so many paths of my life … but maybe I’ll see that I’m better at something.
I hope that the above dialogue gives you some idea of the power that a person feels when he recognizes himself as a unique, self-responsible being. Here you can see the anxiety that accompanies the acceptance of responsibility. When we realize that “no one else makes the choice” and that “it is I who determine the value of experience for myself,” this both empowers us and scares us.
Wanting to be a process
I would like to highlight one last characteristic of these individuals when they make an effort to open themselves to themselves and become themselves. The fact is that they seem to be more satisfied with the existence as a process, rather than a frozen entity. When one of them first enters a psychotherapeutic relationship, he probably wants to come to a more stable state: he strives to get closer to that level, behind which the solutions to his problems are hidden or where the key to family well-being is hidden. In the atmosphere of freedom of the psychotherapeutic relationship, such an individual usually gets rid of these fixed goals and comes to a more correct understanding that he is not a frozen entity, but a process of becoming.
So, one client at the end of psychotherapy says in confusion:
“I have not yet finished the work of integrating and reorganizing my personality; it only makes you think, but does not discourage, especially now that I understand that this is a long process … When you feel in action, knowing where you are going, although not always realizing it, it all excites, sometimes upsets, but always upholds the spirit.
In this statement, you can see both faith in your body, which I spoke about, and also awareness of yourself as a process. This is a personal description of the state when you accept that you are a stream of becoming, and not a finished product. This means that a person is a current process, and not a frozen, static entity; it is a flowing river of change, not a piece of solid material; it is an ever-changing inflorescence of possibilities, not a frozen sum of characteristics.
Here is another expression of the same fluidity, or, in other words, current existence at a given moment:
“This whole chain of sensations and the meanings that I have found in them so far seem to have led me to a process that is both delightful and frightening at the same time. It seems to be to allow my experience to carry me, it seems to me, forward towards goals that I can only vaguely define when I try to understand at least the current meaning of this experience. There is a feeling that you are floating along with a complex stream of experience, having a delightful opportunity to understand its ever-changing complexity.
Conclusion
I tried to tell you what happens in the lives of people with whom I was lucky enough to be in a relationship at a time when they were struggling to become themselves. I have ventured to describe as precisely as possible those meanings that seem to be involved in the process of becoming a person. I am sure that psychotherapy is not limited to this process. I am sure that my perception of this process is fuzzy and incomplete, as its understanding and comprehension are changing all the time. I hope that you will accept it as a current hypothetical description, and not as something definitive.
I emphasize that this description is hypothetical, just to make it clear that I’m not saying, “This is what you should be. That’s your goal.» Rather, I am saying that there are several meanings to these experiences that my clients and I shared. Perhaps describing the experience of others can clarify or make more meaningful your own experience.
I pointed out that each individual probably asks himself two questions: «Who am I?» and “How can I become myself?”. I argued that the process of becoming starts in a favorable psychological climate; that in it the individual throws off, one after the other, the protective masks in which he met life; that he fully experiences his latent qualities; that he discovers in these experiences the stranger who lives behind the masks, the stranger who is himself. I have tried to give a description of the characteristic qualities of the personality thus appearing; personality, more open to all components of its organismic experience; a person who develops confidence in his body as an instrument of sensory life; a person who believes that the locus of evaluation lies within her; a person who learns to live by participating in the stream of directly experienced experience and constantly discovering his new qualities in it. These are some of the ingredients that I think make up the process of becoming a person.