AHP Perspective

No matter how well you think you know Carl Rogers, his ideas and Contributions, you're going to find something fresh and even surprising in Carl Rogers: The Quiet Revolutionary. This is the story of Carl Rogers' life and professional career as told to David Russell through a series of taped interviews conducted almost entirely in the last year of Rogers' life. Consequently, the reader has an opportunity to see how Rogers' ideas developed and where his thinking was just before his death at 85 in 1987. The book also contains a foreword by Eugene Gendlin and a biographical introduction by Brian Thorne. Two bonuses of the book are its extensive endnotes for each chapter and a complete biblio-graphy of Rogers' writings along with major books and articles about client-centered therapy and the person-centered approach.

As a boy Carl Rogers emerges as a shy, introverted, somewhat isolated, sensitive, extremely bright and curious farm boy who spent much time daydreaming,often about adventurers and pioneers. Rogers learned to read long before he began school and liked to write even in elementary school. In high school, Rogers noted about his writing, "I wrote very brash things" such as "Shakespeare as an Overrated Author." His interest in science developed early and, even as a child, he engaged in rudiment-ary science projects. After complet-ing high school without a single date, Rogers entered the University of Wisconsin to become a scientific agriculturist. It was there that he began to develop friendships. It was during college that he began to question his Christian beliefs, especially during a trip to China in 1922, something that caused a strain between him and his parents. Not surprisingly, we see that even as a boy and young man, Rogers was an independent thinker.

Soon after graduating from college, Rogers married Helen Elliott, with whom he was completely smitten and for whom he wrote poems, in 1924. Soon after marriage Rogers entered Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary which he described as "a scholar's paradise" and noted, "You were allowed to think for yourself."

Although Rogers credits his time at Union for helping him develop strong and clear values, he moved to the department of psychology, where he did not develop a particu-lar theoretical orientation. Both of his children were both there: David became a prominent physician, and Natalie became a leader in person-centered expressive therapies.

In 1928, Carl and Helen Rogers were off to Rochester where he took his first job at the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children where he worked essentially as a child clinical psychologist until 1938.

Rogers experimented with a variety of approaches and initially described his work as "eclectic." His fundamental concern and guiding principle was whether or not what he did was helpful. Later he became interested in the Rankian approach, especially its emphasis on the positive characteristics of the individual, the quality of the therapeutic relationship, and a focus on responding to feelings. Thus, by the time Rogers published his first book, The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child, in 1939, the rudiments of his therapeutic approach had started to take root.

Soon after rising to the position of director of the Rochester Guidance Center, Rogers was offered a teaching position in the psychology department at Ohio State University and, with Helen's encouragement, took the position as a full professor. It was in his early years at Ohio State that Rogers found his voice and realized that he was advancing a new approach to psychotherapy. In December, 1940, Rogers gave a speech at the University of Minnesota entitled "Newer Concepts in Psychotherapy" that formed the basis of what would become nondirective therapy. Rogers later commented about the term nondirective: "There is no doubt that the term nondirective . . . was a term of rebellion. It was saying what we were against."

In my estimation, the initiation of a radical movement in the field of psychotherapy and the first humanistic psychotherapeutic approach could be dated to Rogers' Minnesota speech. This talk also contained many of the ideas elaborated in Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942). While at Ohio State, Rogers would pioneer both the audio recording of psychotherapy and careful research on the moment-to-moment process of psychotherapy. Rogers attracted

many students who later made their own contributions, including Tom Gordon, Nat Raskin, Art Coombs, Nicholas Hobbs, Virginia Axline, and Victor Raimy.

In 1945 Rogers received an offer he could not refuse and decided to leave Ohio State for the University of Chicago where he had the opportunity to create a counseling center and select his own staff. Rogers commented on his Chicago years: "I regard the Chicago years as professionally idyllic; I really had things my way, and I developed a lot and grew a lot." Some of the persons who would work at the Counseling Center read like a who's who in client-centered therapy. They included Virginia Axline, Eugene Gendlin, Jules Seeman, Tom Gordon, Nat Raskin, Don Grummon, Fred Zimring, John Shlien, and Jack Butler. When Rogers created the counseling center, he did so in a manner that was both radical and innovative,in a group-centered, democratic, and egalitarian style where power and decisionmaking were truly shared. During his years at Chicago, Rogers and his colleagues refined the concepts and practice of client-centered therapy, applied these concepts to other areas such as education and leadership, conducted the first large-scale research project evaluating the effectiveness of psychotherapy, and brought national attention to his ideas.

While in Chicago, Rogers fought battles with psychiatry for the right to practice psychotherapy. Although most of us know Rogers as a kind and soft-spoken person, he could be tough as nails when he felt strongly and decided to fight. But he tended to do so in a peculiar manner,by memo. About this style, Rogers acknowledged, " . . . I have often fought by memo, which says things about me. I can write a strong memorandum . . . no beating around the bush. It's only rarely that I can confront people that way . . . and that, I realize, is a real weakness."

Rogers' years at the University of Chicago were probably the most productive and creative years of his career. During this period he had become a prominent figure in the field of psychology. He served as president of the American Psycho-logical Association (APA) in 1946, published Client-Centered Therapy in 1951, and received APA's Distin-guished Scientific Award in 1956.

Once again Rogers would receive an offer he couldn't turn down,this time at the University of Wisconsin where he received joint appointments in the departments of psychology and psychiatry. What do we learn about Rogers from his stay at Wisconsin (1957'1963)? First he undertook a daunting research study of client-centered therapy with hospitalized schizophrenics despite the fact that neither he nor his colleagues had ever worked with this population. In retrospect he realized that the project may have been more successful had he and the others involved spent some time working with schizophrenics before beginning the research, but I suspect his natural optimism and desire to test his approach with more difficult populations prevailed. Rogers was also appalled at the harsh treatment of the graduate students in psychology and wrote a paper highly critical of such programs. He also found that he had had enough of the rigidities of institutional life and left in frustration. During this period he published On Becoming a Person (1961) which he said "pretty well distill[ed] both the scientific and personal sides of me."

In his 60s, Rogers got involved in the encounter group movement and was one of its leaders. He was also happy to be away from academia and relished the freedom he felt. Consequently, he engaged in a number of projects that intrigued him, including helping found the Center for Studies of the Person where he remained a "resident fellow" the rest of his life. Previously he had had a bitterly disappointing experience at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. Rogers' comments about how he handled this disappoint-ment gives us a glimpse into how he handled the trials and tribula-tions he experienced throughout his life. He commented: "I completely blotted out the agony of it, and I guess that's typical of me. Once a situation has been dealt with, no matter how painful it is, it's in the past and I don't dwell on it."

Dissatisfied with what he saw in American education, Rogers put a great deal of effort into educational reform, punctuated with the publi-cation of Freedom to Learn (1969).

In the last ten or so years of his life, Rogers involved himself in large community groups and in efforts to achieve peace in a number of troubled areas of the world. It was like Rogers to push the envelope again, even late in his career. As he looked back at his professional career, he reflected: "I have been very bold, adventure-some, quite a maverick and definitely a pioneer . . . I guess there's no doubt: I like risks. That's what makes life exciting." He adds, "I do like to put things to the test ,myself to the test too, I guess."

In a telling comment he states: "Most psychotherapists today have not had enough experience in farming." By this he meant that "too many therapists think they can make something happen" as opposed to creating nurturing conditions for growth. Other telling comments about his view of therapy include his use of the word "client" instead of "patient," reflecting his view that the interviewee was self-responsible and retained his locus of judgment and decision. He became dissatis-fied with the term "reflection," stating that " . . . when good therapy is going on, the therapist is not trying to reflect feelings. He is trying to check understanding or test perceptions." Rogers believed that working with more difficult clients/problems required a deepening of the therapist-offered conditions. He felt that being real as a therapist "does not involve us doing anything we want to do; it means a disciplined approach . . . there's a discipline involved in being deeply empathic. It means you shut things out and are focused." Rogers believed that the essence of client-centered therapy was "very simple and yet extremely profound," but that it "probably takes a life-time to become a good therapist."

What could be more profound than the discovery that one's sensitive listening along with a desire to understand and communicate our understanding of the other's experience could have such a powerfully therapeutic effect? With perhaps a wink to the interviewer, Rogers states, "I realize more and more that the way I operate is very different from the way most therapists operate, and I think,and being totally unbiased,I feel it is the best way."

So what might one conclude from reading Carl Rogers: The Quiet Revolutionary?" First, Rogers was just as he seemed to be. The therapist, author, and person were the same. Yet there was a complexity to him that is not easily recognized unless one knew him well. Rogers was extraordinary, yet ordinary and approachable; aware of his enormous stature and con-tributions yet unpretentious and humble; tenacious in fighting for what he believed was right but not mean-spirited; shy but present; direct and truthful but kindly; a brilliant thinker and theorist whose simple concepts seemed both right and appealing. In my estimation, Rogers' greatest contribution to the field of psychotherapy was that he taught us to listen and to trust the resources of the person. His optimistic view of the person profoundly affected the way he and generations of therapists would engage with the client,not as sick and pathological beings, but as persons fully capable of learning to live in more functional and satisfying ways.

DAVID CAIN, Ph.D., A.B.P.P., is the editor of Humanistic Psychotherapies: Handbook of Research and Practice (2002). He is the founder of the Association for the Development of the Person-Centered Approach and was founder and editor of the Person-Centered Review. Dr. Cain is the psychotherapy editor for the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and serves on the editorial board of The Humanistic Psychologist. His primary profes-sional commitment is the advance- ment of humanistic psychology.
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