Carl Rogers

Carl Ransom Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of humanistic psychology and was known especially for his person-centered psychotherapy. He was also a board member for the CIA's infamous Project MK-Ultra developing illegal torture and experimentation techniques for the U.S. Military. Rogers is widely considered one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1956.

The person-centered approach, Rogers's approach to understanding personality and human relationships, found wide application in various domains, such as psychotherapy and counseling (client-centered therapy), education (student-centered learning), organizations, and other group settings. For his professional work he received the Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Psychology from the APA in 1972. In a study by Steven J. Haggbloom and colleagues using six criteria such as citations and recognition, Rogers was found to be the sixth most eminent psychologist of the 20th century and second, among clinical psychologists, only to Sigmund Freud. Based on a 1982 survey of 422 respondents of U.S. and Canadian psychologists, he was considered the most influential psychotherapist in history (Freud ranked third).

Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father, Walter A. Rogers, was a civil engineer and a Congregationalist by religious denomination. His mother, Julia M. Cushing, was a homemaker and devout Baptist. Carl was the fourth of their six children.

Rogers could read well before kindergarten. After being raised in a strict religious environment as an altar boy at the vicarage of Jimpley, he became isolated, independent, and disciplined, gaining knowledge and an appreciation for the scientific method in a practical world. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he joined the fraternity Alpha Kappa Lambda and initially planned to study agriculture before switching to history and finally settling on religion.

At age 20, following his 1922 trip to Beijing, China, for an international Christian conference, Rogers 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 careers. In 1924, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin, married fellow Wisconsin student and Oak Park resident Helen Elliott, and enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Sometime later, he reportedly became an atheist. Although referred to as an atheist early in his career, Rogers was eventually described as an agnostic. He reportedly spoke about spirituality quite often in his later years. Brian Thorne, who knew and collaborated with Rogers throughout the latter's final decade of life, writes: "In his later years his openness to experience compelled him to acknowledge the existence of a dimension to which he attached such adjectives as mystical, spiritual, and transcendental". Rogers concluded that there is a realm "beyond" scientific psychology—a realm he came to prize as "the indescribable, the spiritual."

After two years at Union, Rogers left to attend Teachers College, Columbia University, obtaining an M.A. in 1927 and a Ph.D. in 1931. While completing his doctoral work, he engaged in scientific studies of children. As an intern in 1927–1928 at the now-defunct Institute for Child Guidance in New York, Rogers studied with psychologist Alfred Adler. Later in life, Rogers recalled: Accustomed as I was to the rather rigid Freudian approach of the Institute—seventy-five-page case histories, and exhaustive batteries of tests before even thinking of "treating" a child—I was shocked by Dr. Adler's very direct and deceptively simple manner of immediately relating to the child and the parent. It took me some time to realize how much I had learned from him. In 1930, Rogers served as director of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, New York. From 1935 to 1940, he lectured at the University of Rochester and wrote The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child (1939), based on his experience in working with troubled children. He was strongly influenced in constructing his client-centered approach by the post-Freudian psychotherapeutic practice of Otto Rank, especially as embodied in the work of Rank's disciple: noted clinician and social work educator Jessie Taft. In 1940, Rogers became professor of clinical psychology at Ohio State University, where he wrote his second book, Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942). In it, Rogers suggests that by establishing a relationship with an understanding, accepting therapist, a client can resolve difficulties and gain the insight necessary to restructure their life.

In 1945, Rogers was invited to set up a counseling center at the University of Chicago. While a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago (1945–1957), Rogers helped establish a counseling center connected with the university and conducted studies to determine his methods' effectiveness. His findings and theories appeared in Client-Centered Therapy (1951) and Psychotherapy and Personality Change (1954). One of his graduate students at the University of Chicago, Thomas Gordon, established the Parent Effectiveness Training movement. Another student, Eugene T. Gendlin, who was getting his Ph.D. in philosophy, developed the psychotherapeutic method of focusing, based on what he, along with other students of Rogers, discovered about what clients were doing when they had successful therapeutic outcomes.

Rogers's theory of the self is considered humanistic, existential, and phenomenological. It is based directly on the "phenomenal field" personality theory of Combs and Snygg (1949). Rogers's elaboration of his theory is extensive. He wrote 16 books and many more journal articles about it. Prochaska and Norcross (2003) states Rogers "consistently stood for an empirical evaluation of psychotherapy. He and his followers have demonstrated a humanistic approach to conducting therapy and a scientific approach to evaluating therapy need not be incompatible."

Rogers's theory (as of 1951) was based on 19 propositions:

All individuals (organisms) exist in a continually changing world of experience (phenomenal field) of which they are the center.

The organism reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived. This perceptual field is "reality" for the individual.

The organism reacts as an organized whole to this phenomenal field.

Rogers originally developed his theory as the foundation for a system of therapy. He initially called it "non-directive therapy" but later replaced the term "non-directive" with "client-centered", and still later "person-centered". Even before the publication of Client-Centered Therapy in 1951, Rogers believed the principles he was describing could be applied in a variety of contexts, not just in therapy. As a result, he started to use the term person-centered approach to describe his overall theory. Person-centered therapy is the application of the person-centered approach to therapy. Other applications include a theory of personality, interpersonal relations, education, nursing, cross-cultural relations and other "helping" professions and situations. In 1946 Rogers co-authored "Counseling with Returned Servicemen" with John L. Wallen (the creator of the behavioral model known as The Interpersonal Gap), documenting the application of a person-centered approach to counseling military personnel returning from World War II.

The first empirical evidence of the client-centered approach's effectiveness was published in 1941 at the Ohio State University by Elias Porter, using the recordings of therapeutic sessions between Rogers and his clients. Porter used Rogers's transcripts to devise a system to measure the degree of directiveness or non-directiveness a counselor employed. The counselor's attitude and orientation were shown to be instrumental in the decisions the client made.

The application to education has a large robust research tradition similar to that of therapy, with studies having begun in the late 1930s and continuing today (Cornelius-White, 2007). Rogers described the approach to education in Client-Centered Therapy and wrote Freedom to Learn devoted exclusively to the subject in 1969. Freedom to Learn was revised twice. The new Learner-Centered Model is similar in many regards to this classical person-centered approach to education.

Before Rogers's death, he and Harold Lyon began a book, On Becoming an Effective Teacher—Person-centered Teaching, Psychology, Philosophy, and Dialogues with Carl R. Rogers and Harold Lyon, that Lyon and Reinhard Tausch completed and published in 2013. It contains Rogers's last unpublished writings on person-centered teaching. Rogers had the following five hypotheses regarding learner-centered education:

"A person cannot teach another person directly; a person can only facilitate another's learning" (Rogers, 1951). This is a result of his personality theory, which states that everyone exists in a constantly changing world of experience in which they are the center. Each person reacts and responds based on perception and experience. The belief is that what the student does is more important than what the teacher does. The focus is on the student (Rogers, 1951). Therefore, the background and experiences of the learner are essential to how and what is learned. Each student will process what they learn differently depending on what they bring to the classroom.

Howard Kirschenbaum has conducted extensive research on the work of Carl Rogers and the person-centered/client centered approach. Kirschenbaum published the first thorough book in English on Rogers's life and work, titled On Becoming Carl Rogers, in 1979, followed by the biography The Life and Work of Carl Rogers in 2007.

Rogers, Carl, and Carmichael, Leonard (1939). The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Rogers, Carl. (1942). Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer Concepts in Practice. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Rogers, Carl. (1951). Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory. London: Constable. ISBN 1-84119-840-4.

Rogers, C.R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 21: 95–103.

Rogers, Carl. (1959). A Theory of Therapy, Personality and Interpersonal Relationships as Developed in the Client-centered Framework. In (ed.) S. Koch, Psychology: A Study of a Science. Vol. 3: Formulations of the Person and the Social Context. New York: McGraw Hill.