Carl Rogers: emozioni e memoria nel counselling centrato sulla persona

During his professional life, Carl Rogers devoted ample space in his works to the role of emotions as markers of human behavior. Any personal attitude could be read as a functional expression of emotional states internal to the subject. According to Rogers, problems usually have their origin in emotional factors which are not fully recognized and seldom are purely of intellectual nature (Rogers, 1942). This statement by the American psychologist suggests a clear predominance of emotional components on cognitive ones, as regards to the possible sources of discomfort that a human being can experience in his everyday representation of reality. But emotions are not only harbingers of problematic issues: for Rogers they are the prerequisite to carry out a proper organismic estimation of those phenomena processed by the subject and directed towards those experiences that preserve, enhance and contribute to the full development of the organism, refusing the ones that do not serve to this purpose (Rogers, 1964). Emotions behave as a sort of physiological detector, capable of guiding the person towards the realization of his functional goals. The purpose of this contribution is to offer an updated reading at a neuroscientific level of some postulates of the paradigm of the person-centered approach, and to further clarify the processes by which emotions become the guide of human behaviour.