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I Accept you Completely
Becoming fully human
“So the basic discovery of psychotherapy seems to me, if our observations have any validity, that we do not need to be afraid of being “merely” homo sapiens. It is the discovery that if we can add to the sensory and visceral experiencing which is characteristic of the whole animal kingdom, the gift of a free and undistorted awareness of which only the human animal seems fully capable, we have an organism which is beautifully and constructively realistic. We have then an organism which is as aware of the demands of culture as it is of its own physiological demands for food or sex — which is just as aware as its desire for friendly relationships as it is of its desire to aggrandize itself — which is just as aware of its delicate and sensitive tenderness toward others, as it is of its hostilities toward others. When man’s unique capacity of awareness is thus functioning freely and fully, we find that we have, not an animal whom we must fear, not a beast who must be controlled, but an organism able to achieve, through the remarkable integrative capacity of its central nervous system, a balanced, realistic, self-enhancing, other-enhancing behavior as a resultant of all these elements of awareness. To put it another way, when man is less fully man — when he denies to awareness various aspects of his experience — then indeed we have all too often reason to fear him and his…
