Person, paideia, politeia: the person, education, and politics in person-centered psychology

This article, based on a keynote speech delivered at PCE2024 in Athens, Greece, aims to strike some keynotes on the theme(s) of the conference, that is, person, paideia (education), and politeia (politics). Despite its centrality to person-centered psychology, the concept of the person is under-theorized. First, expanding on Schmid’s identification of two strands in Rogers’ thinking about the person (the individualistic and the relational), the article explores the contextual person, that is a person who is inevitably embedded in a number of contexts, not least their culture. Second, the article revisits the radicalism of Rogers’ ideas about education, including that of educating therapists, and considers this in the light of the pressures on training as manifested in neoliberal institutions–and institutes–of education/training. Third, the article considers person-centered politics, specifically, the politics of theory, and how person-centered psychology can represent itself externally with more coherence and confidence–for the betterment of people, education and the (political) world. Notwithstanding this presentation as a journal article, its style retains something of the directness of the original form in addressing the original in-person and online audience–and, now, the reader.