Tag: books

Posted on

On Becoming a Person ( or A Book Review of Carl Rogers’ 1961 Classic Book on Psychotherapy)

This classic book by Carl Rogers, first published in 1961, will likely be the most important book I read this year.

Useful and enlightening, Carl Rogers’ approach to psychotherapy resonates with what I believe to be my own take on life: that humans are deeply unique, and that one of our most primary tasks in Life is to give full expression and flowering to the most singular and delightful aspects of our human existence.

Unlike other luminaries of psychotherapy such as Freud and Jung, Rogers believed in a far more grounded and almost ridiculously basic approach to therapy: that the primary responsibility of the therapist is to provide a safe and confidential space for persons to learn to listen to themselves, and to fully experience the entire spectrum of their emotions. His belief was that when patients rediscover what it means to become and be themselves, they will learn that they already have the resources within themselves to recover their own dignity and self-worth.

Most importantly: Rogers walks the talk. Through his flowing and honest prose, the reader gets a sense of who he is – humble, curious, empowering, democratic, authentic, sincere, perhaps even a touch naive.

Rogers also brought two novel approaches to psychotherapy. The first was his conviction that the efficacy and usefulness of what he called “client-centred therapy” or “person-centred approach” could be proven scientifically, through rigorous experiments which were carefully documented and published in the leading psychology journals of his day. His other innovation, which was to grow to become a leading preoccupation for him in his later years, was that the basic principles of his approach to psychotherapy had real and vital applications in fields far beyond the therapist’s room: in the classroom, amongst married couples, and even in the drawing rooms and conference halls of high diplomacy. He was certain that the greatest problems of his age could be solved by an appeal to the fundamentals of human creativity and decency.

Most importantly, from my point of view, his perspective on human communications suggests that we already have the tools we need to form a better life for ourselves:

  1. The faith that every single human being is, at their core, a decent and dignified human being, and that rediscovering that core humanity requires us to actively work towards listening to and understanding ourselves and others.
  2. The courage to be sincere with how we feel, at any given moment, and to embrace the implications of those emotions in how we deal with others.
  3. The curiosity to truly listen to what others have to say, to fully experience the words and the tone and the music with which others communicate themselves to us.
  4. The commitment to constantly work towards becoming better versions of who we are, to lean into our self-knowledge and self-understanding and bring ourselves to the fullest flowering of our unique and indivisible selves.

Some books come along at the moment when you most need them. Reading this book gave me further validation that the way I see the world is a way that could work well, and I finished the book with the hope that here was a roadmap that I could walk in my every day to become a better person.

In other words, this was a 5-star read that I would highly highly recommend to anyone interested in an engaging and coherent approach towards living a Good Life.

Posted on

Book Review I (2023): Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

I’ve been on a Cormac McCarthy binge in the past few months, having read Blood Meridian (his most celebrated work, and probably his best), and also having finished his most recently-published books, the literary duet of The Passenger and Stella Maris. These books, like the rest of Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre, carry within them a heady concoction of stoic characters, cinematic vistas, Faulknerian complexity, biblical cadences, and elemental violence. So, I suppose it was natural that I would move on next to reading Suttree.

Some of his fans think of Suttree as his best work. I would probably beg to differ, but Suttree is certainly McCarthy’s funniest book that I have read so far, and probably the most merciless in the way that McCarthy puts his main character through the most harrowing episodes: that bit with typhoid fever had me shaking my head in pity and disbelief.

Suttree tells of the adventures and travails of Cornelius Suttree, who makes a living as a fisherman on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee. Throughout the novel, Suttree makes his way through life amidst poverty and squalor, as we meet the vagabonds, ne’er-do-wells and po’ folk that make up his community. The writer hints at an educated man who chooses this hard life, descending down into the Hades of the American South to swim with the flotsam and jetsam of humanity. He makes many bad choices, but is ultimately saved by the constancy with which he keeps faith with the friends that he surrounds himself with, and the wry amusement with which he views the world and its happenings . 

As always with McCarthy, the joy is in his inimitable style of writing: frequently cinematic, sometimes ethereal, often garrulous, and never shrinking from the bare-knuckled truths of human existence. 

It is often said that Suttree is the most autobiographical of his novels, and I can only surmise, after having read Suttree, that most of this book must have been written from personal experience, for it to be so searing and achingly painful. The violence and drama is often leavened by humour – mainly from the capers of the memorable Harrogate – but for the most part, this is not a book to be read while you are holidaying by the beach. 

I would give this book a 4-star rating: the writing is muscular and also beautiful in the way that only Cormac McCarthy can make it, but also painfully merciless, that by the end, the reader is almost glad that Suttree’s suffering would hopefully come to an end.