SOURCE: Baumlin, James S. “Persuasion, Rogerian Rhetoric, and Imaginative Play.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17, no. 1 (winter 1987): 33-43.

In the following essay, Baumlin explores the role of Rogerian group therapy in persuasive argument.

Ideas can shape us, change us, and a change in beliefs enacts a change in self: witness, in an extreme literary case, Ebenezer Scrooge, or the man who admits, after years of self-deception, that he is an alcoholic. Yet teachers, preachers, politicians alike know that real change is rare and slow; we are, as a species, resistant to changes in our belief-structures. Reasons for this resistance are easy to find. When beliefs become reflexes, habits of thought engrained through a lifetime of unquestioned repetition, they become—as habits—hard indeed to change: so often we cling to a value or belief like the alcoholic to his bottle, afraid to question its effect on us, afraid of facing...