To be that self which one truly is
Many people carry a quiet picture of who they will be once things settle. Calmer, more consistent, finally sorted out. Carl Rogers noticed that his clients, over the course of therapy, tended to let go of that picture. They did not reach the settled version of themselves. They stopped needing one.
The chapter
The phrase comes from chapter 8 of On Becoming a Person (Houghton Mifflin, 1961), titled "'To Be That Self Which One Truly Is': A Therapist's View of Personal Goals". Rogers takes the words from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death. He uses them to name what he saw clients move toward when the relationship felt safe enough to choose.
Rogers was a humanistic psychologist and the founder of client-centred therapy, not an existentialist. He read Kierkegaard anyway, and in this chapter he says so openly.
The chapter first describes what clients move away from: façades, "oughts", other people's expectations, the need to please. Then it turns to what they move toward. One of those directions is the subject here.
Toward being process
Rogers admits this observation is hard to put into words. Clients seem to become more comfortable being a fluidity, something that changes. They are less troubled to find they are not the same from one day to the next, or that they feel differently about the same person at different times. The striving for conclusions and end states, he writes, seems to diminish.
To describe this he quotes Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript. An existing individual, Kierkegaard says, is always in the process of becoming. He compares such a person to a writer and his style:
"he only has a style who never has anything finished"
— Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, quoted by Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person, chapter 8, section "Toward Being Process"
Rogers says the passage catches the direction his clients take: toward being a process of potentialities, rather than arriving at some fixed goal.
What this shifts
Much of the language around therapy assumes an end state. A person gets better, gets fixed, becomes their true self and stays there. Rogers describes something else. The self his clients move toward is not a finished object hidden under the façades. It keeps being written, the way a style is renewed each time a writer begins.
This makes inconsistency look different. Feeling one way on Monday and another on Thursday stops being evidence that something is wrong. It may simply be what being alive looks like from the inside.
Kierkegaard's own account of freedom and its dizziness is on the page about the dizziness of freedom.
Rogers never asks it outright, but the chapter leaves a question: what in myself do I treat as finished?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.