Carl Rogers (1902-87)

 

"It seems to me that at bottom each person is asking, 'Who am I really? How can I get in touch with this real self, underlying all my surface behaviour? How can I become myself?'"

--Carl Rogers

 

Carl Ransom Rogers was born in Illinois, USA, the fourth of six children. His father was a civil engineer and contractor who had a successful construction business. A rather sickly boy, Rogers lived his childhood in a close-knit family in which hard work and a highly conservative, almost fundamentalist Protestant Christianity were almost equally revered. Rogers was a shy boy who was teased a lot at home. Included among reasons for the teasing were that he was rather a bookworm and extremely absent-minded; in fact, his family called him "Professor Moony" after a famous comic-strip character (Cohen, 1997).

When Rogers was twelve his parents bought a farm and this became the family home. Rogers regarded his parents as masters of the art of subtle, loving control. He shared little of his private thoughts and feeling with them because he knew these would have been judged and found wanting. Until Rogers went to college he was a loner who read incessantly and adopted his parents' attitude towards the outside world, summed up in the statement: "Other persons behave in dubious ways which we do not approve in our family" (Rogers, 1998, p. 28).

Such "dubious ways" included playing cards, going to the cinema, smoking, dancing, drinking and engaging in other even less mentionable activities. He was socially incompetent in other than superficial contacts and, while at high school, had only two dates with girls. He relates that his fantasies during this period were bizarre and would probably have been classified as schizoid by a psychological diagnostician.

Rogers entered the University of Wisconsin to study agriculture, but later switched to history, feeling that this would be a better preparation for his emerging professional goal of becoming a minister of religion. His first real experience of fellowship was in a group at university who met for a YMCA class. When he was twenty, Rogers went to China for an international World Student Christian Federation Conference and, for the first time, emancipated himself from the religious thinking of his parents, a fundamental step towards becoming an independent person. At about this time Rogers fell in love, and, on completing college, married Helen Elliott, an artist. The marriage lasted until she died in 1979.

In 1924, Rogers went to Union Theological Seminary but after two years moved to Teacher's College, Columbia University, where he was exposed to the instrumentalist philosophy of John Dewey, the highly statistical and Thorndikean behavioural approaches of Teacher's College and the Freudian orientation of the Insitute for Child Guidance where he had an internship. Along with his formal learning he was starting to understand relationships with others better, and was beginning to realise that, in close relationships, the elements that "cannot" be shared are those that are the most important and rewarding to share.

Rogers received his MA from Columbia University in 1928 and then spent twelve years in a community child guidance clinic in Rochester, New York. In 1931, he received his PhD from Columbia University and in 1939 published his first book, entitled The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child. During this period Rogers felt that he was becoming more competent as a therapist, not least because his experience with clients was providing him with valuable learning and insights which contributed to a shift from diagnosis to listening. Furthermore, such a relationship approach met his own needs, since stemming from his early loneliness, the therapy interview was a socially approved way of getting really close to people without the pains and longer time-span of the friendship process outside therapy.

In 1940, Rogers accepted a position as Professor of Psychology at Ohio State University and two years later published Counselling and Psychotherapy, the contents of which were derived primarily from his work as a counsellor rather than as an academic psychologist. After initial poor sales, the book became well known because it offered a way to work with veterans returning from the Second World War. From 1942 Rogers had undertaken consultancies relating to the war effort, including training counsellors. After leaving Ohio State University, Rogers spent a brief spell as Director of Counselling for the United Services Organisation, a serviceman's welfare organisation. From 1945 to 1957 Rogers was Professor of Psychology and Executive Secretary of the University Counselling Centre at the University of Chicago, where non-directive, or client-centred therapy, as it came to be called, was further developed and researched. In 1951, Rogers published Client-Centred Therapy, which contained a theoretical statement as well as a series of chapters related to client-centred practice.

In 1957, Rogers was appointed Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, where he examined the impact of the client-centred approach on hospitalised schizophrenics. In 1959, Rogers published by far the most thorough statement of his theoretical position (Rogers, 1959), and in 1961, On Becoming A Person, one of his most commercially successful books. From 1962 to 1963 Rogers was a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University. In 1964, he went to the Western Behavioural Sciences Institute at La Jolla, California, as a resident fellow. Then, in 1968, with some colleagues, Rogers formed the Centre for Studies of the Person at La Jolla, where he was a resident fellow until his death. During the latter part of his career, Rogers developed a great interest in the application of person-centred ideas to groupwork, community change, and preventing "nuclear planetary suicide," and ran many large-scale workshops around the world (Kirschenbaum and Henderson, 1990). In addition, as Rogers grew older, having earlier firmly rejected his Christian past, he realised he had underestimated the mystical or spiritual dimension in life.

Rogers was a complex mixture of high intelligence, high energy, ambition, competitiveness, Protestant work ethic, strength, vulnerability, charisma, idealism, altruism, self-centredness, caring, shyness, sensitivity, warmth, and ability to touch others deeply. Arguably, as his career developed, Rogers allowed the need to become and maintain the professional persona of Carl Rogers to get in the way of his becoming a more highly developed person. Clearly very conscious of his place in the history of American counselling and therapy, Rogers left the United States Library of Congress 140 boxes of his papers as well as tapes and films of his work.

Even as an old man, Rogers was still prone to blame his parents for making him feel that he did not deserve to be loved (Cohen, 1997). A wounded theorist, Rogers was influenced by his own early emotional deprivations to design a counselling approach to overcome their effects and hence to meet his own companionship and growth needs. Other sources of learning included his clients and the stimulus provided by younger colleagues. Rogers claimed that serendipity or the "faculty of making fortunate and unexpected discoveries by accident" had also been important (Rogers, 1980, p. 64). Rogers enjoyed gardening and finding the right conditions for plants to grow. As with plants, so with people. While regarding the following saying from Lao-Tse as an over-simplification, Rogers considered that it sums up many of his deeper beliefs about human growth.

If I keep from meddling with people, they take care of themselves.
If I keep from commanding people, they behave themselves.
If I keep from preaching at people, they improve themselves.
If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves.

Richard Nelson-Jones, Six Key Approaches to Counselling and Therapy (2000).

 

Rogers' last years were devoted to applying his theories in areas of national social conflict, and he travelled worldwide to accomplish this. In Belfast, Northern Ireland, he brought together influential Protestants and Catholics; in South Africa, blacks and whites, in the United States, consumers and providers in the health field. His last trip, at age 85, was to the Soviet Union, where he lectured and facilitated intensive experiential workshops fostering communication and creativity. He was astonished at the number of Russians who knew of his work. Together with his daughter, Natalie Rogers, between 1975 and 1980, Rogers conducted a series of residential programmes in the US, Europe, and Japan, the Person-Centred Approach Workshops, which focused on cross-cultural communications, personal growth, self-empowerment and social change.

Carl Rogers, the influential American psychologist, was among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honoured for his pioneering research with the Award for the Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psycholgical Association (APA) in 1956. The person-centred approach, his own unique approach to understanding personality and human relationships, found wide application in various domains such as psychotherapy and counselling (client-centred therapy), education (student-centred learning), organisations, and other group settings. For his professional work he was bestowed the Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Psychology by the APA in 1972. Towards the end of his life Carl Rogers was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with national intergroup conflict in South Africa and Northern Ireland. In an empirical study by Haggbloom et. al. (2002) using six criteria such as citations and recognition, Rogers was found to be the sixth most eminent psychologist of the twentieth century and second, among clinicians, only to Sigmund Freud.

 

 

 

Michael Dunford
MEd (Hons) Guid. & Couns., BSc (Hons) Couns. & Psych., Dip. Psychol., Dip. Couns.
IACP NAPCP IAAAC