Carl Rogers

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Carl Ransom Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an influential American psychologist. Along with Abraham Maslow, Rogers was the founder of the humanistic approach to psychology and was instrumental in the development of Nondirective psychotherapy, which was initially called "Client-centered therapy," and later changed to the "Person-centered approach" to reflect his belief that it applied to all interactions between people, not just therapist-client relations.

Biography

Carl Ransom Rogers was born on January 8, 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was housewife and devout Christian; Carl was the fourth of six children.

He could already read by the age for entering kindergarten, and so he started his education directly in the second grade. When Carl was 12, his family moved to a farm, where he spent his adolescence in a strict religious and ethical environment. He became a rather isolated, independent, and disciplined person, acquiring an appreciation for the scientific method in a practical world.

He entered the University of Wisconsin initially studying agriculture, and later changing to religion. At age 20, he spent time in Beijing, China, at an international Christian conference, which led him to broaden his thinking and he started to doubt his religious convictions. However, after graduation in 1924, he enrolled in Union Theological Seminary in New York to continue his religious studies. At that time he also married Helen Elliot. They had two children, David born in 1926 and Natalie, born in 1928.

While at Union Theological Seminary, he attended a seminar entitled Why am I entering the ministry?, after which he changed his major to psychology. He graduated with a Masters degree in Clinical psychology, and in 1931, received his Ph.D. in psychotherapy. While completing his doctoral work, he engaged in clinical work at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC), in Rochester, New York, where he became familiar with Otto Rank's work. In 1929 he was appointed director of the Child Study Department at the SPCC in Rochester.

He was offered a full professorship in Clinical psychology at Ohio State University in 1940. In 1942, he wrote his first book, Counseling and Psychotherapy. In it, Rogers made the startling suggestion that the client, not the therapist, is the one with the resources to resolve difficulties and gain the insight necessary to restructure his or her own life.

In 1945, he was invited to set up a counseling center at the University of Chicago. Rogers served as president of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1947. While working in Chicago, he published his major work, Client-Centered Therapy (1951), wherein he outlined his theory. Rogers received the first Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the APA in 1956, the first year this award was given. In 1957, he returned to the University of Wisconsin to teach. However, following several internal conflicts within the psychology department, Rogers became disillusioned with [[higher education].

In 1964, Rogers was selected "humanist of the year" by the American Humanist Association, and received an offer to join the research staff of the Western Behavioral Studies Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla, California. He lived in La Jolla for the rest of his life, providing therapy, giving public talks, facilitating Person-Centered Approach workshops, and writing. As well as his contributions to psychology, Rogers also made significant impact in the field of education, particularly with the publication of Freedom to Learn in 1969, which outlined his ideas of "Experiential learning."

His wife, Helen, died in 1979. During the last decade of his life, Rogers traveled worldwide in efforts to apply his theories to areas of national social conflict, such as Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the Soviet Union.

During his years in La Jolla, he continued to produce numerous publications, which totalled 16 books and over 200 professional articles, and also received various awards and recognitions for his contributions to psychology. These included the first APA award for for Distinguished Contributions to Applied Psychology as a Professional Practice in 1972, and a distinguished psychologists award from the Division of Psychotherapy. Carl Rogers died of a heart attack in 1987.

Work

Carl Rogers, as the founder of [[Carl Rogers#Person-centered Therapy|Person-centered therapy] and a well-known therapist, personality theorist, and a key developer of Humanistic psychology, may be best known for his work in psychology. However, his contribution to the field of education, in the form of Experiential learning is equally profound.

Person-centered Therapy

Carl Rogers developed his Person-centered approach to psychotherapy after becoming frustrated by the standard methodologies and procedures used in Freudian psychoanalysis and other therapies. He found that he obtained better results by listening to his patients and allowing them to direct the course of treatment. In his book, On Becoming a Person, he wrote "Unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for direction of movement" (Rogers, 1961).

Initially called "Nondirective therapy" and then "Client-centered therapy," Rogers finally changed the name to the "Person-centered approach," reflecting his belief that his theories applied to all interactions, not just those between client and therapist. It has most commonly been referred to simply as "Rogerian psychotherapy" after Carl Rogers. This approach became widely influential, embraced for its humanistic approach.

Rogers' basic tenet was that if unconditional positive regard (Respect), genuineness and honesty (Congruence), and empathic understanding (Empathy) was present in a relationship, 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. In other words, for Rogers, an effective therapist does not need any special technique, just the three qualities of respect, congruence, and empathy; without these three qualities, though, no technique will be successful.

The main technique Rogers recommended is that of "Reflection," or the mirroring of emotional communication. For example, if a client says "I hate all men!" the therapist responds, "So you hate all men?" By doing so, the therapist is letting the client know that he or she is listening and trying to understand, as well as clarifying what the client is communicating. In this case, the client may well acknowledge that she does not hate all men, certainly not her brother, or father, or some others, hopefully including the therapist if he is a man. Finally, she may realize that hate is the wrong emotion, in fact she feels a lack of trust toward men as a result of being hurt by a particular man.

Rogers did not limit his theory to the therapeutic situation, believing his ideas on the healthy human personality applied to all social interactions, such as those in marriage, parenting, education, and could even be applied to conflict situations involving larger social groups.

Rogers' idea of the fully functioning person involved the following qualities:

  • 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, which has gone, or the future, which does not yet exist.
  • Organismic trusting: Trusting one's own thoughts and feelings as accurate; doing what comes naturally.
  • Experiential freedom: Acknowledging one's freedoms and taking responsibility for one's own actions.
  • Creativity: Full participation in the world, including contributing to society as a whole, whether through one's work, social relationships, or creative work in the arts or sciences.

Rogers regarded human beings as basically good, with an inherent motivation to actualize its potential to the fullest possible extent, referred to by Abraham Maslow as "self-actualization." Mental health and mental illness|Mental health]] is, therefore, a process of psychological development, and mental illness, criminality, and other human problems are distortions of the natural tendency for growth.

Experiental Learning

Rogers also made significant contributions to the field of 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: cognitive (meaningless) learning, which involves academic knowledge such as multiplation tables and experiential (significant) learning, which is applied knowledge such as how to repair a car. The key distinction is that experiential learning addresses the needs and wants of the learner, and thus has the qualities of personal involvement, self-initiation, self-evaluation, and long-lasting effects.

Experiential education (or "learning by doing") is the process of actively engaging students in an authentic experience that will have benefits and consequences. Students make discoveries and experiment with knowledge themselves instead of hearing or reading about the experiences of others. Students also reflect on their experiences, thus developing new skills, attitudes, and ways of thinking (Kraft & Sakofs, 1988).

Experiential education empowers students to take responsibility for their own learning. Whether teachers employ experiential education in service learning, environmental education, or more traditional school subjects, it involves engaging student voice in active roles for the purpose of learning. Students participate in a real activity with real consequences for the purpose of meeting learning objectives.

Legacy

Carl Rogers had a profound impact on psychotherapy, personality theory, and education. His theories continue to inspire therapists working with individuals, couples, families, and larger groups.

Carl Rogers coined the term, "The Basic Encounter Group," to identify encounter groups that operated on the principles of the person-centered approach, which offers a unique paradigm for group therapy. The community group evolved with Rogers’ expanding interests, applying the principles of person-centered therapy to areas other than psychotherapy. Rogers and his colleagues started to experiment with the concept of large community groups of fifty to three-hundred or more individuals (Rogers, 1977), and subsequently to include individuals from different cultures and nationalities. The work of Chuck Devonshire in developing client-centered training programs in Europe added to the focus on cross-cultural groups. Eventually, the cross-cultural groups provided Rogers with a foundation in which to attempt workshops focusing on client-centered principles for societal change. One of his major intentions was to assist with the diminishing of international tensions among nations. John K. Wood (1984; 1994a; 1994b) has pointed to some of the difficulties in such groups including the difficulty of operating in the way that Rogers proposed. I have been told that in 1987, Rogers was recognized for this societal effort by being one of the individuals nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Ironically, when he received this nomination he was in a coma preceding his death.

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

There are other examples. High school English classes in Rabun Gap, Georgia have published the Foxfire books and magazines for over 25 years (Wigginton, 1985). Students research the culture of the Appalachian mountains through taped interviews and then write and edit articles based upon their interviews. Foxfire has inspired hundreds of similar cultural journalism projects around the country.

One widely adopted form of experiential education is learning through service to others (Kielsmeier & Willits, 1989). An example is Project OASES (Occupational and Academic Skills for the Employment of Students) in the Pittsburgh public schools. Eighth graders, identified as potential dropouts, spend three periods a day involved in renovating a homeless shelter as part of a service project carried out within their industrial arts class. Students in programs such as these learn enduring skills such as planning, communicating with a variety of age groups and types of people, and group decisionmaking. In carrying out their activities and in the reflection component afterward, they come to new insights and integrate diverse knowledge from fields such as English, political science, mathematics, and sociology.

Other approaches at the university level include laboratory courses in social sciences and humanities that seek to parallel laboratory courses in the natural sciences. In social science laboratory courses, students combine theory with tests of the theory in field settings and often develop their own social models in disciplines as far ranging as history and philosophy to economics, political science and anthropology (Lempert, 1996).

Friends World Program, a four-year international study program operating out of Long Island University, operates entirely around self-guided, experiential learning while immersed in foreign cultures. Regional centers employ mostly advisors rather than teaching faculty; these advisors guide the individual students in preparing a "portfolio of learning" each semester to display the results of their experiences and projects.

Other projects and "capstone" programs have included everything from student teams writing their own international development plans and presenting them to Presidents and foreign media and publishing their studies as textbooks, in development studies, to running their own businesses, NGOs, or community development banks (Lempert, 1996).

At the professional school level, experiential education is often integrated into curricula in "clinical" courses following the medical school model of "See one, Do one, Teach one" in which students learn by practicing medicine. This approach is now being introduced in other professions in which skills are directly worked into courses to teach every concept (starting with interviewing, listening skills, negotiation, contract writing and advocacy, for example) to larger scale projects in which students run legal aid clinics or community loan programs, write legislation or community development plans.

For example, at the Challenger Middle School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, service activities are an integral part of the academic program. Such nontraditional activities require teachers and administrators to look at traditional practices in new ways. For instance, they may consider reorganizing time blocks. They may also teach research methods by involving students in investigations of the community, rather than restricting research activities to the library (Rolzinski, 1990). At the University Heights Alternative School in the Bronx, the Project Adventure experiential learning program has led the faculty to adopt an all-day time block as an alternative to the traditional 45-minute periods. The faculty now organizes the curriculum by project instead of by separate disciplines. Schools that promote meaningful student involvement actively engage students as partners in education improvement activities. These young people learn while planning, researching, teaching, and making decisions that affect the entire education system.

At the university level, including universities like Stanford and the University of California Berkeley, students are often the initiators of courses and demand more role in changing the curriculum and making it truly responsive to their needs. In some cases, universities have offered alternatives for student-designed faculty approved courses. In other cases, students have formed movements or even their own NGOs like Unseen America Projects, Inc., to promote democratic experiential learning and to design and accredit their own alternative curricula (Lempert, 1996).


Adventure education is one form of experiential education that is highly effective in developing team and group skills in both students and adults (Rohnke, 1989). For example, the Kane School in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Massachusetts has been using adventure as a tool for school restructuring. The entire faculty — particularly the Faculty Advisory Council, which shares the decisionmaking responsibilities with the principal — has honed group skills through experiential education activities developed by Project Adventure. These skills include open communication, methods of conflict resolution, and mechanisms for decision making (High Strides, 1990).

Quotes from Carl Rogers

"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

"It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried." Carl Rogers, from On Becoming a Person

Major Works

  • Rogers, Carl R. 1942. Counseling and Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395053218
  • Rogers, Carl R. 1951. Client-centered Therapy. Houghton Mifflin College Division. ISBN 0395053226
  • Rogers, Carl R. 1961. On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395081343
  • Coulson, William and Carl R. Rogers. 1968. Man and the Science of Man. Merrill PUblishing Co. ISBN 0675095999
  • Rogers, Carl R. 1969. Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become. C.E. Merrill Pub. Co. ISBN 0675095190
  • Rogers, Carl R. and Barry Stevens. 1971. Person to Person: The Problem of Being Human. Pocket Publishers. ISBN 0671780573
  • Rogers, Carl R. 1978. Carl Rogers on Personal Power: Inner Strength and Its Revolutionary Impact. Trans-Atlantic Publications. ISBN 0094620903
  • Rogers, Carl R. 1980. Becoming Partners: Marriage and Its Alternative. Dell Publishing Co.
  • Rogers, Carl R. 1980. A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395299152

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Bozarth, J. D. (1986). The basic encounter group: An alternative view. The Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 11(4), 228-232.
  • Bozarth, Jerold D. (1992, August). The person-centered community group. A paper presented at the America Psychological Association symposium, Contributions of client-centered therapy to American psychology's 100 years. Chaired by Ned Gaylin, Washington D.C.
  • Bozarth, Jerold. D. (1995, May). Designated facilitators; Unnecessary and insufficient. A paper presented at the national conference for the Association of the Development of the Person-Centered Approach, Tampa, FL.


  • Calkins, L. (1991). Living between the lines. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books, Inc.
  • Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier Books.
  • Educational Writers Association. (1990). Lawrence grows its own leaders. High Strides: Bimonthly Report on Urban Middle Grades, 2 (12). Washington, DC: Author.
  • Fletcher, A. (2005). Meaningful student involvement: Students as partners in school change. Olympia, WA: HumanLinks Foundation.
  • Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. NY: Continuum.
  • Goodlad, J. (1984). A place called school: Prospects for the future. NY: McGraw Hill.
  • Kielsmeier, J., & Willits, R. (1989). Growing hope: A sourcebook on integrating youth service into the curriculum. St. Paul, MN: National Youth Leadership Council, University of Minnesota.
  • Kraft, D., & Sakofs, M. (Eds.). (1988). The theory of experiential education. Boulder, CO: Association for Experiential Education.
  • Lempert, D. and others (1996). Escape from the ivory tower: Student adventures in democratic experiential education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
  • Rohnke, K. (1989). Cowstails and cobras II. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.
  • Rolzinski, C. (1990). The adventure of adolescence: Middle school students and community service. Washington, DC: Youth Service America.
  • Sizer, T. (1984). Horace's compromise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
  • Wigginton, E. (1985). Sometimes a shining moment: The Foxfire experience. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
  • Zemelman, S., Daniels, H. & Hyde, A. (1998). Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

External links

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