Carl Rogers

Carl Ransom Rogers (January 8, 1902– February 4, 1987) was an influential American psychologist, who, along with Abraham Maslow, was the founder of the humanist approach to psychology. He was also instrumental in the development of non-directive psychotherapy, which he initially termed Client-Centered Therapy. He later renamed it as the Person-Centered Approach (PCA) to reflect that his theories were meant to apply to all interactions between people, not just to those between therapist and client. Today PCA is also called person-centered psychotherapy.

Biography
Rogers was born in Oak Park, Illinois a Chicago suburb. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a housewife and devout christian; Rogers was the fourth of six children.

Rogers could read by kindergarten, and his education started in the second grade. Following an education in a strict religious and ethical environment, he became a rather isolated, independent and disciplined person, and acquired a knowledge and an appreciation for the scientific method in a practical world. His first career choice was agriculture, followed by religion. At age 20, following his 1922 trip to Beijing, China, for an international Christian conference, he started to doubt his religious convictions. To help him clarify his career choice, he attended a seminar entitled Why am I entering the Ministry?, after which he decided to change career.

After two years he left the seminary and took his M.A. (1928) and his Ph.D. (1931) from Columbia University's Teachers College. While completing his doctoral work, he engaged in child study at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, in Rochester, New York, becoming the agency's director in 1930.

He was offered a full professorship at Ohio State University in 1940. In 1942, he wrote his first book, Counseling and Psychotherapy. In it, Rogers suggested that the client, by establishing a relationship with an understanding, accepting therapist, can resolve difficulties and gain the insight necessary to restructure his life.

Then, in 1945, he was invited to set up a counseling center at the University of Chicago. It was while working there, in 1951, he published his major work, Client-Centered Therapy, wherein he outlines his basic theory. In 1956 Rogers became the first President of the American Academy of Psychotherapists. In 1957 he arrived at the University of Wisconsin. However, following several internal conflicts at the department of psychology at Wisconsin, Rogers became disillusioned with academia.

In 1964, Rogers was selected 'humanist of the year' by the American Humanist Association, and he received an offer to join the staff of the Western Behavioral Studies Institute (WBSI) for research, which he accepted and then moved to La Jolla, California. He remained in La Jolla, doing therapy, speeches and writing until his sudden death 23 years later.

Contributions to psychology
'Rogerian psychotherapy' became widely influential, embraced for its humanistic approach. Rogers also made significant contributions to the field of adult education, with his Experiential theory of learning. Rogers maintained that all human beings have a natural desire to learn. He defined two categories of learning: meaningless, or cognitive learning (e.g., memorizing multiplication tables) and significant, or experiential learning (applied knowledge which addresses the needs and wants of the learner).

Rogers' basic tenet was that if unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathic understanding, was present in any relationship (though he started out by focusing on counselor-client relationships), that growth and psychological healing would occur. According to Rogers, these tenets were both necessary and sufficient to create a relationship conducive to enhancing the client's psychological well being, by enabling the client to fully experience all of themselves. He saw one of the chief causes of mental, emotional and existential suffering as people not being able to accept or allow themselves to fully experience all of who they are - which includes aspects that are not always socially acceptable.

Writing about the role of the clinician, he remarked that, "In every respect in which we make an object of the person&mdash;whether by diagnosing him, analyzing him, or perceiving him impersonally in a case history&mdash;we stand in the way of our therapeutic goal. [...] We are deeply helpful only when we relate as persons, when we risk ourselves as persons in the relationship, when we experience the other as a person in their own right.  Only then is there a meeting at a depth that dissolves the pain of aloneness in both client and therapist."

Rogers' idea of the fully functioning person involved the following qualities, which show marked similarities to Buddhist philosophy:


 * Openness to experience: The accurate perception of one's feelings and experience in the world


 * Existential living: Living in the present, rather than the past (gone) or the future (yet to come)


 * Organismic trusting: Trusting one's own thoughts and feelings as accurate; do what comes naturally


 * Experiential freedom: To acknowledge one's freedoms and take responsibility for one's own actions


 * Creativity: Full participation in the world, including contributing to others' lives

Rogers and some colleagues founded the 'Group Encounter' (for young people, managers etc.) and 'Marriage Encounter' (ME).

Major criticisms of Rogers include the fact that he fails to address the stages of development or the unconscious, and that his theories are not precise enough to be useful.

Quotes
"Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience.  No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience.  It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me.  Neither the Bible nor the prophets -- neither Freud nor research --neither the revelations of God nor man -- can take precedence over my own direct experience.  My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible.  It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways.  In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction." Carl Rogers, from 'On Becoming a Person

"If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-intitiated learning." Carl Rogers

Publications

 * Rogers, CR(1961)] On Becoming a Person
 * Rogers, CR(1969)] Freedom to Learn