Patterns of Growth and Transformation in Crime and Punishment and Carl Rogers
Zachary Brooks
BIO: Zachary Brooks grew up in Davis, California, and he decided to attend Whitworth University because of the unique opportunity that Whitworth afforded to play football and experience a liberal arts education. While at Whitworth, Zachary played on the varsity football team, served as a co-president of the Whitworth Student-Athlete Advisory Committee for two years, and actively participated in the English department and honors program. He delivered two presentations at the Spokane Intercollegiate Research Conference: in 2023, he presented an essay titled “The Blurred Line Between Myth and Reality in Early America,” and in 2024, a literary analysis paper titled “An Epistemic Physician: A Study of Behavior and Belief in Dracula.”
MAJOR: English
Minors: Psychology, Theology
He also presented a research study proposal at the Whitworth Undergraduate Psychology Research Conference titled “How Individuality Colors our Perception of Reality.” In addition to his athletic and academic endeavors, Zachary also worked as a writing consultant at the Whitworth Composition Commons.
After graduation, Zachary intends to work for Marsh McLennan Agency as an associate client manager, and he looks forward to exploring his intellectual interests beyond the walls of academia over the next few years.
Project Overview: In an era where over 15,000 self-help books are published in the United States each year, everyone seems to have two cents to share about how we can improve our lives. Despite these countless publications, each quick-fix or new mindfulness appears ephemeral. Self-help needs help.
I elected to research Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and the psychological theories of Carl Rogers because both figures touch on the prescient question of human growth and transformation. Despite writing in different centuries, both Dostoevsky and Rogers show a fraternal concern for the direction in which people grow and the consequences of the beliefs held and actions performed by individuals. Rogers, who revolutionized the field of psychotherapy by applying research methods to clinical interviews confessed that his whole life revolved one question: what are the effective conditions for growth?
In this project, I pursue the same question by placing the tenets of Rogerian psychology in conversation with the travails of Raskolnikov that Dostoevsky depicts in Crime and Punishment.
After a life dedicated to the pursuit of his question, Rogers posited human beings continually strive to realize their potential in the world. This constant striving, or self-actualizing tendency, as it is more technically known, is an inherent trait that each person possesses. While he believes all humans attempt to self-actualize, Rogers caveats that sometimes humans grow and transform in maladaptive ways, especially if their physical, psychological, or social environment is impoverished. Whether adaptive or maladaptive, however, Rogers argues that humans continually grow and transform in the pursuit of self-actualization.
By placing this self-actualizing tendency in conversation with Crime and Punishment, I discovered a curious pattern of unfolding growth and transformation that occurs as Dostoevsky forces Raskolnikov to confront his true motivation for murdering Alyona Ivanova, the pawnbroker. Over the course of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky dramatizes a series of confessions that culminate with a confrontation between Raskolnikov and the raw, amoral egoism that led him to believe he had the right to murder. Through this series of confessions and the culminating image of Raskolnikov and his love interest, Sonya, grasping hands at the end of the epilogue, Dostoevsky presents a pattern of growth and transformation that characterizes growth and transformation as processes that requires a demanding harmonization of honesty, humility, and a willingness to consider the ramifications of a way of being and renounce it entirely.
In this manner, both Rogers and Dostoevsky approach the topic of growth and transformation, not through quick-fixes or fad diets, but through these questions: Who are we? And, who are we becoming?