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Introduction

1902–1987

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, PROFESSOR COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, Ph.D., 1931

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.... 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.

These words, from Carl Rogers's classic book On Becoming a Person, probably best describe Rogers's contributions to the study of psychology. Neither the Bible, from which his mother had taught him, nor the Freudian tenets so popular among his colleagues could make Rogers conform to the prevalent views of his time. He stubbornly refused to follow the perceptions of others. Rogers relied solely on his own personal experience rather than on dogma.

Carl Rogers practiced psychotherapy his way for over 50 years. He never earned the adoration of those considered the intelligentsia, either in the United States or the rest of the world, as did Sigmund Freud and other luminaries of the twentieth-century mental health movement. Yet in the introduction to The Carl Rogers Reader, a biography that was published posthumously in 1989, authors Howard Kirschenbaum and Valerie Henderson note that Rogers was "the most influential psychotherapist in American history." Five years before Rogers's death, a 1982 study published in the journal American Psychologist ranked the ten most influential psychotherapists. Carl Rogers was rated as number one.

Carl Rogers. (Copyright Roger Rossmeyer/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.)

One of Rogers's techniques, the therapist reflecting back said the patient's statement by rephrasing it and asking the person "How do YOU feel about that?" has become almost a caricature of contemporary psychotherapy. Indeed, comedian Bob Newhart, who grew up in Rogers's hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, caricatured Rogers's style of therapy in his highly successful television sitcom, "The Bob Newhart Show." But much of what Rogers contributed to psychotherapeutic theory is both remarkably simple and refreshingly optimistic. Rogers trusted people to want, and to work toward, good mental health and stability.

Yet Rogers introduced a multitude of revolutionary concepts to psychotherapy. His terminology, developed during half a century of research, helped to change mental health treatment forever. Rogers pioneered the notion that the people he saw were not "patients" who were "sick" in a medical sense, but rather "clients," people seeking help with problems of living. Today, that change in labeling from "patients" to "clients" is embraced by nearly all psychotherapists. Rogers not only perceived human beings as being primarily competent and striving toward good health, but he also viewed human ills such as insanity, criminal behaviors, and war as aberrations, anomalies superimposed upon a basic, commonly held desire for good.

Everything in Rogers's scheme starts from one life-force, a power that Rogers calls the "actualizing tendency." This life-force also exists outside the human psyche, according to Rogers. The actualizing tendency is present in all forms of life—trees that grow out of the sides of rocky cliffs, violets that push their way up through cracks in a concrete sidewalk, and men and women who struggle against the odds to do good things or create great accomplishments such as timeless works of art. This actualizing tendency is even active in the ecosystems of the world. Rogers found this life-force in the forests he roamed and in the cornfields he worked in as a youth.

Rather than identifying persons as "sick" or fundamentally flawed from childhood as the Freudians did, Rogers was interested in how he and other mental health professionals could recognize the health in people. Mentally robust people, in Rogers's view, exist in the here and now, free of defense mechanisms that would make it difficult for them to accept reality as it is. Called "the quiet revolutionary," Rogers went where no mental health professional had been before. His 1942 innovation of the tape-recording of psychotherapeutic interviews was far ahead of his time, but this method has now become standard practice for those providing mental health services. Many of these remarkable taped interviews done by Rogers over the years have been donated to the American Academy of Psychotherapists' tape library. These invaluable teaching tools are available to therapists all over the world.

Rogers is the undisputed creator of the "nondirective" or "client-centered" approach to psychotherapy. His decades-long study of how care is provided to clients resulted in the creation of several totally new mental health therapy techniques. Looking at the classic, highly directive Freudian model of therapy, Rogers noted in On Becoming a Person, "Unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement." Rogers's message to the client was also far removed from what Freud had communicated. Paraphrased, Freud's message to his patients was: I will discover the unknown flaw, developed in your earliest childhood because of psychosexual conflicts. I will root it out of your ego, superego and/or id and thus I will make you better. Conversely, Carl Rogers told clients: "I can't solve any of your problems for you, but I can help you to solve your own problems, and doing that will make you better."

Rogers was also an active participant in the development of the intensive form of group therapy sometimes referred to as the "encounter group." He is one of the first mental health professionals to conduct research regarding the effectiveness of various forms of counseling. A shy man who often refused television interviews, Rogers appeared on film interviewing clients. In 1962 he, Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, and rational-emotive therapist Albert Ellis all were filmed during separate therapy sessions with the same client for what became known as "The Gloria Film Series." In the 1970 Academy Award-winning film "Journey Into Self," Rogers also appeared leading an encounter group.

Additionally, Rogers was instrumental in changing who provided therapy to the mentally ill. What had once been the exclusive domain of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts expanded to include all of the counseling disciplines—even educators and the clergy. His work with schools and other social support systems that provided services to children at risk affected many of the helping professions. An educator himself, Rogers never lost interest in the field of education. From his early years, during which he counseled abused and neglected children, until his death Rogers developed innovative ideas for administering mental health treatment to youth.

The unbelievable abundance of written (and published) work created by Carl Rogers from his youth to old age resoundingly shows both his amazing physical stamina and his strong work ethic. From his early college years in the early 1920s until his death in 1987, Rogers, besides maintaining a flourishing practice and lecturing all over the country, published sixteen books and more than two hundred articles. His writings embraced nearly every possible aspect of his work and his life—from therapy to scientific research, education to social issues, personal reminiscences to philosophy. The variety of publications for which he wrote speaks to the wide audience Rogers reached. He wrote articles for magazines as divergent as The Family and Camping Magazine to the Journal of Consulting Psychology. Several of his books have sold more than one million copies, and there are more than 60 foreign-language translations of his works.

As one of the foremost figures in the field of humanistic psychology as propounded by Alfred Adler, Abraham Maslow, and Karen Horney, Rogers expanded many of their theories to embrace an even larger audience—the world. With his unshakable belief in the inherent goodness of people, he was convinced that proper communication could potentially stop even war. Carl Rogers acted on behalf of his beliefs. In the last decade of his life, he traveled to Belfast in Northern Ireland to reconcile Protestants and Catholics, and to South Africa to facilitate communication between black and white inhabitants of that country. Back home in the United States, Rogers tried to improve the dialogue between health care providers and consumers. At 85 years of age, Rogers made his last trip, to Russia. A modest man, Rogers was amazed to see how many Russians knew of his work and had read his writings.