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. 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. Haggbloom et al. combined three quantitative variables: citations in professional journals, citations in textbooks, and nominations in a survey given to members of the Association for Psychological Science, with three qualitative variables (converted to quantitative scores): National Academy of Sciences (NAS) membership, American Psychological Association (APA) President and/or recipient of the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, and surname used as an eponym. Then the list was rank ordered. 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).
Biography 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, Rogers's mother's maiden name is Cushing. was a homemaker and devout Baptist. Carl was the fourth of their six children. Oak Park, Cook, Illinois; Roll T624_239; Page: 2B; Enumeration District: 70; Image: 703. Carl is fourth of six children of Walter A. and Julia M. Rogers.
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.Michael Martin (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Cambridge University Press. p. 310. . "Among celebrity atheists with much biographical data, we find leading psychologists and psychoanalysts. We could provide a long list, including...Carl R. Rogers..." 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".Thorne, Brian (2003). Carl Rogers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pg IX. 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: 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.
In 1947, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association. In 1956, Rogers became the first president of the American Academy of Psychotherapists. He taught psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1957–1963). During this time, he wrote one of his best-known books, On Becoming a Person (1961). A student of his there, Marshall Rosenberg, went on to develop Nonviolent Communication. Rogers and Abraham Maslow pioneered a movement called humanistic psychology, which reached its peak in the 1960s. In 1961, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Rogers was also one of the people who questioned the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s. In articles, he criticized society for its backward-looking affinities.
From the late 1950s into the '60s, Rogers served on the board of the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA-funded organization that provided grants to researchers looking into personality. In addition, he and other people in the field of personality and psychotherapy were given a lot of information about Khrushchev. "We were asked to figure out what we thought of him and what would be the best way of dealing with him. And that seemed to be an entirely principled and legitimate aspect. I don't think we contributed very much, but, anyway, we tried."
Rogers continued teaching at the University of Wisconsin until 1963 when he became a resident at the new Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla, California. Rogers left the WBSI to help found the Center for Studies of the Person in 1968. His later books include Carl Rogers on Personal Power (1977) and Freedom to Learn for the '80s (1983). He remained a La Jolla resident for the rest of his life, doing therapy, giving speeches, and writing.
In his later years, Rogers focused on applying his theories to address political oppression and social conflict globally. He facilitated dialogue between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast, Blacks and Whites in South Africa, and people transitioning to democracy in Brazil. In the U.S., he worked with health consumers and providers. At 85, his final trip was to the Soviet Union, where he conducted workshops that promoted communication and creativity, impressed by the awareness of his work among Russians.
Between 1974 and 1984, Rogers, his daughter Natalie Rogers, and psychologists Maria Bowen, Maureen O'Hara, and John K. Wood convened a series of residential programs in the U.S., Europe, Brazil, and Japan: the Person-Centered Approach Workshops. The workshops focused on cross-cultural communications, personal growth, self-empowerment, and learning for social change.
In 1987, Rogers suffered a fall that resulted in a fractured pelvis; he had life alert and was able to contact paramedics. He had a successful operation, but his pancreas failed the next night, and he died a few days later after a heart attack.
Theory Rogers's theory of the self is considered humanistic, existential, and phenomenological.Dagmar Pescitelli, An Analysis of Carl Rogers' Theory of Personality It is based directly on the "phenomenal field" personality theory of Combs and Snygg (1949).Snygg, Donald and Combs, Arthur W. (1949), Individual Behavior: A New Frame of Reference for Psychology. New York, Harper & Brothers. Article on Snygg and Combs' "Phenomenal Field" Theory 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."
Nineteen propositions 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. A portion of the total perceptual field gradually becomes differentiated as the self. As a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluative interaction with others, the structure of the self is formed—an organized, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the "I" or the "me", together with values attached to these concepts. The organism has one basic tendency and striving—to actualize, maintain and enhance the experiencing organism. The best vantage point for understanding behavior is from the internal frame of reference of the individual. Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced, in the field as perceived. Emotion accompanies, and in general facilitates, such goal directed behavior, the kind of emotion being related to the perceived significance of the behavior for the maintenance and enhancement of the organism. The values attached to experiences, and the values that are a part of the self-structure, in some instances, are values experienced directly by the organism, and in some instances are values introjected or taken over from others, but perceived in distorted fashion, as if they had been experienced directly.