Rogers, Carl R. (Carl Ransom), 1902-1987

Psychologist, psychotherapist, and educator; d. 1987.

Carl Rogers was a psychologist and psychotherapist who initiated the "third force" of humanistic psychology. He got his Ph.D. at Columbia University's Teachers College. After working at various other universities, he and his wife moved to La Jolla, Calif. and joined the staff of the Western Behavioral Studies Institute. He left that in 1968, to co-found the Center for Studies of the Person. He also wrote many books over the years, his best known being "On Becoming a Person." He died in Feb. 1987.

Psychologist, psychotherapist, and educator; died 1987.

Biographical Note

Biography

Carl Ransom Rogers (1902-1987) was a psychologist and psychotherapist who initiated what Abraham Maslow later called the "third force" of psychology, following the behaviorism of Pavlov (and later B. F. Skinner) and Freudian psychoanalysis. This "third force" of humanistic psychology has been so closely identified with Rogers that it is often called Rogerian, a term its namesake objected to. His innovation was to treat clients as if they were essentially healthy, and he felt that growth would occur when a non-judgmental, non-directive (later, "client-centered") therapist created a warm, accepting environment to nurture the client and allow self-knowledge and self-acceptance to occur. Rogers is considered by many to be the most influential psychologist after Freud.

Rogers was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Oak Park and on a farm in the city's outskirts. His early life was a blend of staunch Christianity, a heavy emphasis on education, and a scientifically-oriented interest in farming. In college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he changed his major from agriculture to history with an intent to enter the ministry after an influential trip to China with the World Student Christian Federation, a trip which, ironically, also led Rogers to question mainstream Christianity. After graduation, he married Helen Elliott, following an engagement of nearly two years. The two moved to New York, where Rogers enrolled in the liberal, intellectually-focused Union Theological Seminary. After being introduced to work in clinical psychology here, however, he changed his career path once again and entered Columbia University's Teachers College.

While completing his Ph.D. at Columbia and for several years thereafter, Rogers worked at the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSPCC) as a child psychologist. It was during this time that he wrote his first monograph, The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child, a work that brought him enough notice to be offered a full professorship at Ohio State University. While at Ohio, Rogers published Counseling and Psychotherapy, the book that summarized his own clinical experience while providing the foundation for nondirective therapy, and established the first supervised counseling practicum within an academic psychology department. In addition, it was during this time that he became the first therapist to record sessions with clients and offer them for study. All of this early work led to an offer by the University of Chicago for Rogers to establish a counseling center there.

Rogers spent twelve years at the University of Chicago, during which he developed the counseling center, served as president of the American Psychologists Association, and published Client-Centered Therapy, wherein he solidified his particular approach to therapy while shifting farther away from the traditional patient-therapist dichotomy. In Rogers's approach, the therapist frees the client from whatever impediments are keeping him or her from normal psychological growth, rather than curing the client of a previously-diagnosed neurosis or psychosis.

From 1957 to 1963, Rogers held a joint appointment as professor in both psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, with an initial idea to integrate research and training within psychology, psychiatry, and social work. He later referred to this period as "the most painful and anguished episode in my whole professional life." Rogers found the effort frustrating, and ultimately resigned from the psychology department. This period did, however, see the publication of On Becoming a Person, Rogers's popular breakthrough. But after seven years in Wisconsin, Rogers had grown disillusioned with university life, and at sixty-two he and Helen moved to Southern California to join staff of the Western Behavioral Studies Institute in La Jolla, which had been founded by Richard Farson, a former student of Rogers's at Wisconsin. The WBSI was a loosely-structured research and training organization under which staff members formed their own programs and generated their own revenues. In its success, however, the looseness eventually became formalized and rigid, a direction with which Rogers felt uncomfortable.

In 1968, along with several colleagues and literally overnight, Rogers left WBSI to form the Center for the Studies of the Person along the original lines of WBSI, but with a commitment to maintaining the democracy and informailty that they felt had been lost. Indeed, the CSP was dubbed a "nonorganization," run by a "non-director." Under the umbrella of the CSP, Rogers worked with "encounter groups" of individuals as well as larger organizations such as companies and schools. He published Carl Rogers on Encounter Groups in 1970, and Carl Rogers on Personal Power in 1977. Rogers spent the last several years of his life traveling extensively to promote his Person-Centered Approach in workshops as far-reaching as "The Central America Challenge," an international meeting of sixty-five leaders from seventeen countries.

Rogers died on Wednesday, February 4, 1987, of cardiac arrest following hospitalization for a broken hip, after having been a widower for nearly eight years.

Sources

DeCarvalho, Roy José. The Founders of Humanistic Psychology . New York: Praeger, 1991.

Kirschenbaum, Howard. "Carl Rogers." In Positive Regard: Carl Rogers and Other Notables He Influenced, ed. Melvin M. Suhd, 1-102. Palo Alto, California: Science and Behavior Books, 1995.

Kirschenbaum, Howard. On Becoming Carl Rogers . New York: Delacorte Press, 1979.

Carl R. Rogers Collection, HPA Mss 32, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Important Dates