Lacy Hanson's Archive

I particularly enjoyed studying Rogers and his theory about client centered therapy. For as long as I could remember, I always thought about counseling and therapy as a setting where the therapist controlled the conversation and directed the client toward the goal of therapy, which a lot of different kinds of therapies do. But in reading about Rogers, I really liked that he put the goal of therapy and how to get there in the client’s hands. Most people don’t like being told what to do or how to do it, since that it human nature to an extent, and client centered therapy gives them that reign of control for themselves. I went through therapy myself when I was younger for some family issues, but the therapist was always directing our sessions and I always felt like I wasn’t in charge of anything. They even told me how I was supposed to feel on some occasions. (That I vaguely remember because it was about 6 years ago) But I feel as though if I had gone through some type of therapy like Rogers described in his theory, I would have had a better experience than I did.

Thinking about the theory of evolution and what kinds of impact it has today on society, I thought of the movie “Planet of the Apes” in particular. (Mostly because of the movie clip that was shown in departmental chapel before Spring Break) In that film, the apes rule the world and the humans are slaves. I started to think about all the theories that have sprang up over the years about how we as humans evolved into who we are today. Many have said that we come from apes and that we were once what they called “cave men”, which is between ape and man. The movie showed what would happen if we reverted back to that in a way. The apes were smarter than humans. This got me thinking. Are we as humans any different than animals emotionally? I’m not saying that we are, but if you look at our behaviors, they have similarities. Take anger, for example. When we are angry, our natural instinct is to fight, correct? Now look at the animal kingdom. When two animals are aggressive toward one another, it usually ends in a fight of some sort, whether that is over food, a mate, or even territory. The same could be said for the human world. Men have fought for centuries over land, women, and even the right to lead a country. All of this goes to say that while we may not have evolved from animals, I believe that God gave both humans and animals the capacity for emotions and the minds to deal with it in their own way. Humans, however, have more intelligence to use other means of dealing with the emotions and don’t always revert back to the violence of animals. Just a thought.

The Renaissance was a time of great intellectual growth and development, but it was also a time of great growth for religion and beliefs of the religious leaders. One of the most forward thinkers of the time was Martin Luther. In my studies over his work and beliefs, I found his thoughts on marriage and intimacy to be quite uncharacteristic for his time period. Luther was by no means prude about what he believed for marriage and physical intimacy between two people. In fact, he celebrated sexual enjoyment while many people in the church hushed that kind of talk about what went on in the bedroom. This is one reason that he was one of the most forward thinkers of his time. One thing I found really out of character for someone of that time was that Luther basically condoned affairs outside of marriage, stating that a man could sleep with a household maid if his wife would not please him as he wished. In the same sense, the wife could turn to her husband’s brother and if any children were fathered, they would be considered her husband’s. Luther’s views on marriage and sex weren’t always seen with great pleasure by the rest of the world during his time, but are completely applicable now. And while I don’t agree with him condoning affairs outside of marriage, I do agree that he was far beyond his time.

Everything is reason. And reason is rational. This was a belief that Plato held fast to in his teachings. Plato was one of the most rational minded of the theorists in the Greek times in my belief. He thought that everything was grounded in what you could see, touch, and perceive with your senses. Plato was also a believer in inductive reasoning, meaning that he drew generalized conclusions from specific observations. He believed that the source of knowledge came from remembering things…that we already have the knowledge within us and are supposed to draw on it. His student, Aristotle, was the exact opposite of his teacher. Aristotle was an empiricist and believed in deductive reasoning, which was reasoning that constructs or evaluates deductive arguments. His belief was that the source of our knowledge came from our experiences and laws of association.

In studying these two men, I started to think about one television show I watch in particular. Bones is a drama show based around solving impossible murders through the clues left behind in their bones. The main character is a forensic anthropologist named Temperance Brennan. Dr. Brennan is hyper-rational in her beliefs, thinking through the lens that the world is only tangible through science. Everything she believes has to be founded in some scientific belief or proven fact. Emotions, like love, are foreign for her to understand and grasp because she cannot tangibly prove it with something rational. In the clip linked, she talks about how aliens wouldn’t come to earth, provided they existed, because they would have such higher technology and wouldn’t need to come to earth in the first place.