The Formative Tendency: Person-centered Systems Theory, Interdependence and Human Potential

Even though Rogers wrote that the formative tendency ‘definitely forms a base for the person-centered approach (1980: 133), it has remained a seldom-explored construct. For example, a PsycINFO search on November12, 2006 using the term ‘formative tendency’ accounted for only 8 of the 5,190 references yielded by the term ‘clientcentered’. While the formative tendency rarely has been explored directly, recent writings concerning the person-centered approach from the perspective of systems theory (e.g. Cornelius-White, 2007a; Kriz, 2006, 2007; O’Hara, 2006/2007; Seeman, 2001, Wyatt, 2001) are rich ground for understanding how the formative tendency has been a silent but salient participant in ‘the quiet revolution’ that is the person-centered approach. With the postulation of the formative tendency, Rogers expanded his lifelong attempt to understand phenomena where order emerges, changes and develops in a system without the imposition of that order from the outside, or without someone explicitly making that order. Today, in the interdisciplinary discourse of systems theory, we speak of these phenomena as ‘self-organization’. This discourse includes sub-concepts such as ‘emergence’ (the self-organized formation of order, patterns or structure) and ‘phase transition’ (the self-organized change of order, patterns or structure), which are based on ‘interconnectedness’ (interactive, reciprocal feedback loops). The ‘formative tendency’ concept forces a recognition that actualization processes are relevant as a challenging perspective on epistemology (the study of knowing), as well as to the development of a psychology (the study of individual people). Further, it offers a means to knowledge not just of individual persons but also of groups, social forces, biodiversity, chemistry and many other areas. The following section will trace the development of Rogers’ thinking regarding actualization processes from the person to increasingly larger systems. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FORMATIVE TENDENCY Rogers was aware that the phenomena of emerging and (self-organized) changing of order must be explained by totally different principles than those of classical behaviorism