SOURCE: Rogers, Carl, and Mary Harrington Hall. “Carl Rogers Speaks Out on Groups and the Lack of a Human Science.” Psychology Today 1, no. 7 (December 1967): 19-21, 62-66.

[In the following interview, Rogers and Harrington discuss group therapy methods, and Rogers criticizes modern psychology for ignoring patients' personal needs.]

[Hall]: Shall we talk about groups—encounter groups, T-groups, sensitivity-training groups, group therapy? The group phenomenon demands exploration and explanation. And I've wondered … are people drawn toward this intense group experience because they feel loneliness and alienation in our strange society?

[Rogers]: Of course that's a major reason. Out of the increasing loneliness of modern culture, we have in some social sense been forced to develop a way of getting closer to one another. I think encounter groups probably bring people closer together than has ever been true in history except with groups of people together during crisis. You put men together during war, for instance, and they really know each other to the depths, and so it is in groups. So often someone will say at the end of a group experience: “I just can't believe that I have known you people here better than I know members of my own family, and you know me better than my family knows me.”

We have found a way for closeness to develop with amazing rapidity. I think that group work is a far more important social phenomenon than most people realize. Group encounters, by whatever name you call them, are becoming a major force.

A lot of people in and out of psychology question the useful purpose of such closeness with groups of people who have an experience together for a week or for a weekend, get to know each other's problems and dreams, and then may never see each other again, Carl. Perhaps you're one of the best people in the country to answer this argument. You developed the form of therapy in which the therapist permits himself to become involved with his patient, in a frankly caring relationship with the therapist both permissive and involved. And Rogerian therapy certainly is based on interaction.

You're actually putting two questions in a polite way, Mary. What you're questioning is the usefulness and the legitimacy of the group experience. There is a good deal of argument and furor about the intensive group experience. There have been vituperative articles about how terrible group encounters are, how they take on the Communist brainwashing technique, and such nonsense. You get even more people who think the group experience is simply great. This is a very potent phenomenon. One can't just take it or leave it alone. You either become involved, in which case group encounter does bring about changes in you, or you can resist it completely. The group experience is not something people remain neutral about.

Let's differentiate between group therapy and encounter groups.

They are really two rather different dimensions. Group therapy is for the person who is already hurting, who has problems, and needs help. Encounter groups are for those who are functioning normally but want to improve their capacity for living within their own sets of relationships. And the leader role is, of course, quite different. One leader must be therapeutic, the other more of a facilitator. Traditional group therapy, with its weekly meetings over a long period, well may be replaced one day by an intensive week or month, or even weekend experience. The intense encounter seems to work wonders in therapy, too.

You know that I always have been somewhat of a skeptic, or possibly afraid, about the group experience, and thus a questioner of the purpose for people getting together to talk a lot—and cry a lot. But I really want to know: what do people bring home to their daily lives from group encounters?

There are so many hundreds and thousands of examples to give. The most common report is that people behave differently with their families and with their colleagues. A school administrator (in a workshop we ran for a California school system not long ago) is typical. She said she felt different but was unprepared for how quick her family's response would be. She wrote that her daughters sensed a change in her immediately. Before she had been home a day, she and her daughters had talked over a whole list of things—God, death and hell, menstruation, nightmares, a whole range of things.

Both her 14-year-old and her ten-year-old daughter wanted to be bathed by her, the first time in years they had been so intimate. Finally, the young one said: “What did they teach you at that meeting—how to be nice to kids?” The woman wrote that she replied: “No, I learned how to be myself and found out that was pretty nice.” Now, this woman is a teacher. I think she is going to be different with her students, too.

What about the argument that encounter groups are fine for those who are emotionally stable but may be very upsetting indeed for those with problems—and our number is legion?

The possibility of damage concerns me, too, but I think the risk is much, much less than is ordinarily presumed. I did a questionnaire study, a six months' follow-up, of more than 500 people involved in groups which I either led or in which I was responsible. Out of 481 people who responded, only two felt the experience had been more hurtful than helpful. You know, a deep relationship is a very rare experience for anyone, and it always means change.

How much change and what kind?

I think encounter groups help make people more open to experiences that are going on within them, more expressive of their feelings, more spontaneous in their reactions, more flexible, more vulnerable, and probably more genuinely intimate in their interpersonal relationships. Now, I value this type of person, don't you?

That sounds like the ideal man.

Well, there are whole cultures built on exactly the opposite ideal. And many people in our own culture feel also that a person should be contained, disciplined, preferably unaware of his feelings, and should live in terms of a firm set of disciplines that are handed down by someone—God, or someone up there—whomever he looks to as an authority. The person who emerges from encounter groups is likely to be more self-directed and not so easily persuaded by others. I think the absence of open debate about what is the desirable sort of personal development has stirred up misunderstanding and public reaction against the intense-encounter technique.

But, Carl, you can measure attitude change and you can do empirical studies of behavior change, yet you can't measure the essential experience in groups that brings those changes, can you? How can you explain the phenomenon so people will understand?

It troubles me, and troubles me deeply, whether we really do know how to have a human science, Mary. Groups are potent, and something very significant is going on. I have gotten increasingly restive about the point you raise, that we can't measure the essential experience that brings about those changes. I feel very perplexed. A lot of my life has been devoted to measuring; I keep being sure it can be done with the group experience, and then failing.

Last year Michael Polanyi, the British philosopher of science, said something I really didn't like at the time, but he may be right. He said we should lay aside the word science for the next decade or two and give people the freedom to find out that we need more knowledge. He said the word science is so wrapped up with the machinery of science that it was stifling rather than helping us at this point, at least in the behavioral sciences. I know that many of us in psychology have gotten so wound up with methodology that we forget to be curious, really. With today's knowledge, we don't know how to study what happened to a businessman for whom the encounter experience had an on-going effect for sixteen years. I don't know how to study that. Or why was an intense-encounter experience something a high-school girl told me she had found to be the most important and beautiful experience in her relatively short life?

You seem to be saying that psychology is groping now toward being a more human science. If that is so, what will happen when you break through?

I don't know. The closer one gets to trying to assess the intangible things which probably are most important in personality change, the less are customary instruments being used, and the more suspect are the only instruments that seem to me to make any sense. I think that in those intangibles the only person who can help us out is the person to whom something has happened. We need to get more pictures of what it seems like to the person inside, who has experienced the change.

If we adapted Polanyi's suggestion and just said: “Well, science or no science I'm trying to find out something about this,” we might have taken a valuable and freeing step. One of the unfortunate things about psychology is that it has tried to make one great leap and become a science like physics. I think we will have to recognize the fact that people observed things, and thought about things, and fiddle around with things a long time before they came up with any of the precise observations which made a science out of physics.

We may have to go back and do much more naturalistic observation, make more of an attempt to understand people, behavior, and the dynamics of things.

Then, perhaps someday, out of that might grow a real psychological science, not an imitation of physics, a human science that should have as its appropriate subject, man. I think the reason so much psychological experimentation is done on rats and cats, and such, is that we realize perfectly that we don't have the tools for understanding human beings.

But, after all, we do learn about humans by animal study. Do you think psychologists have been defensive because psychology is sometimes seen as a stepchild of science?

I guess psychologists are about the most defensive professional people around today. We have this terrific fear of looking unscientific. A terrific fear of spinning out wild theories to see how they sound, and a fear of trying them out. We think we must do everything from a known base with known instruments. Actually, this is not the way in which creative scientists, even in the hard sciences, operate. For instance, I think one of the real tragedies of graduate education in psychology is that graduate students in many, many institutions become less and less willing to spout original ideas for fear they will be shot down by their colleagues, and by their professors. This is not the way to do things.

The great intuitive chemists and physicists certainly aren't afraid. They spend a lifetime on hunches, don't they? I'm thinking particularly of one of our mutual close friends, Harold Urey.

That's it! They aren't afraid. What psychology needs are ideas that someone dreams up on the basis of hunches and intuition, from experience, or to try to make sense out of some complex set of phenomena. It may take a lifetime to find out if it was a worthless dream or a really significant pattern of thought. We need that kind of dreaming in psychology, and graduate departments of psychology have no time for dreams. I think they are definitely fearful.

And maybe it takes someone like you—a former president of the American Psychological Association, a man with every honor his profession and the academic world can bestow—to be so fearlessly critical of his own profession. Or maybe you're impatient to have psychology take that major leap forward to answer your own questions about why group encounters do seem to affect people so deeply?

Or maybe I'm just used to being involved in controversy? Perhaps all three, Mary. But still, psychology is a defensive profession. I'll give you an example. At a conference last year on “Man and the Science of Man,” all the discussions were taped. These were all top scholars. Only three participants refused permission to trust editors to put their taped remarks in shape for future listeners. Two of those three were psychologists. Another example was the dialogue I had in Duluth with B. F. Skinner, the father of operant conditioning, the creator of the modern study of behaviorism. He was unwilling to have the tape of our dialogue transcribed. I thought it was understood in advance that it would be transcribed. I call that needlessly fearful.

By the way, Fred told on interesting anecdote about you in his interview with us in September, Carl.

Yes, the ducks. Funny story, but he knows that it's not true. He said I was duck hunting and used the art of gentle agreement to get for myself the duck another man shot. Actually, my brother and I were hunting, we shot at the same time, and tossed a coin to see who got the duck. And I've told Fred I lost the toss. Fred and I actually are friends, you know. He's a marvelous mind. Another friend, Rollo May, whom you rightly labeled in your wonderful interview as “Mr. Humanist,” told the story that I once questioned the existence of tragedy by saying that Romeo and Juliet might have been all right with just a little counseling. I probably did say that. I'm more optimistic than Rollo. He is an existentialist—so am I, but my philosophy has more room for hope.

Your background and Rollo May's are quite similar, though, aren't they?

We're both from the rural Midwest. I was a farm boy, he from a small town. This is a good, strong background, you know. He graduated from the Union Theological Seminary. After I graduated in history from the University of Wisconsin, I studied there, and then I went across the street to get my Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia. In 1926, the Seminary was a freewheeling, stimulating place to be. Arthur McGifford, a real scholar, was president. A group of us students decided we didn't have enough chance to talk about issues that really concerned us, so we asked for a seminar which we would run ourselves and for which we would receive credit. Any institution today would drop dead if you made such a suggestion. The Seminary agreed and in many ways it well may have been the very first encounter group, although it was a little more intellectual than most encounter groups as we know them today. Many of us left the Seminary and went into allied fields. I still was very much interested in working with people but I didn't want to tie myself to some particular creed.

I worked for the New York Institute for Child Guidance, and for the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children before getting into the University life, you know. I earned the glorious sum of $2,900 a year on my first job, with a wife and child to support.

Then, of course, I went to Ohio, to the University of Chicago and to Wisconsin, before I got fed up finally with the restrictions of the academic life, particularly with the frustrations for graduate students, and became a fellow of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in Southern California.

Your book, Counseling and Psychotherapy, was published in 1942, Carl, but didn't your major impact come about after Client-Centered Therapy was published in 1951?

I think so, really. Acceptance came very slowly.

When did you become interested in groups?

My first groping toward using the intensive-group experience in a constructive way came in 1946, when I was in charge of the University of Chicago's Counseling Center. We had a Veterans Administration contract for training all personal counsellors for returning servicemen and we had to make them into effective counsellors within six-week training programs. They all had Master's degrees, but none of them had done much counseling. We couldn't give them individual counseling, which we thought would be the best way for them to learn, so we put them together in small groups. It worked very well.

There was no such thing as encounter groups then, but was there any group therapy?

There was some group therapy just beginning. I remember that in about 1945 I told a group of my students that I would be glad to try to conduct a group-therapy program for them, but it would be my first experience. Now, the National Training Laboratories in Bethel, Maine, started at about this time, but I was unaware of that.

My groups of personal counsellors and students at Chicago became more and more personal in their discussions and revealed more and more of what was going on within them. It was similar to what goes on in an encounter group today. However, I didn't carry on in this field, partly because I didn't think that group work was a good field for research. I thought that there were enough complexities with the one-to-one-relationship so that we couldn't possibly study a group situation.

You certainly have changed your mind since that time.

Oh, yes, I have certainly revised my opinion. The next time I was closely involved in a group experience was in the autumn of 1950 when I conducted a postgraduate seminar type of therapy held just before the A.P.A. meetings. I remember that for one hour each day I counseled a client in front of a group of twelve. It started off on a somewhat academic basis, but as we got into it, sharing more and more deeply of our personal experiences, our failures, and our difficulties, it became a moving personal experience. All of us left there feeling we had gained deeply. What amazed me was the long, lasting effect from the experience. It was then that I began to realize the potency of group experience.

Didn't the National Training Laboratories, in Bethel, Maine, begin the sensitivity-training programs for executives, the famous T-Groups, at about the same time you did your first group work at Chicago?

At just the time I began putting on summer workshops organized by the Counseling Service Center, I heard that something was going on in the East. Then, one of our members took part in one of the N.T.L. groups, and came back rather unimpressed. We were following different patterns; our groups focused more on the interpersonal relationship and on building a climate where people could express or withhold as much as they wished.

Over the years there has been cross-fertilization, and it is no longer accurate to say we are working two different ways. I conduct N.T.L. workshops every year—the Presidents' Lab program for top executives.

Where does the term T-Group come from, Carl?

T-Groups originally were thought of as Training groups. I don't think we are in the business of training. The term is misleading. I think there still is a different flavor between N.T.L. workshops—and all Eastern approaches—and what is going on in the West.

N.T.L. did the real pioneering in the encounter-group movement, and really have been the prime moving force in the whole thing. They have put on thousands of groups, and they are responsible for getting the business community involved to the point where the top men in the country attend N.T.L. Presidents' Labs. All groups start from there. What a great thing they did, and yet the West Coast is far more active than is the East, the home of groups.

Someone once said—me, I think—that the West is on a great group binge. Why is it that groups are more popular on the West Coast? Do you agree with May, who says it's because the West is anti-intellectual?

Actually, I think the East Coast shows signs of being an older culture. Their procedures are more rigid, with too much stress on paper credentials. On the West Coast, partly because it is a newer part of the country, partly because the California psychological climate, in particular, is freer, there is more regard for essentials of the work. We've used nonprofessional leaders in groups. N.T.L. would frown on anyone without the proper paper credentials.

Do you find the West more experimental in its approach to psychology?

I certainly do, and I approve. It will be sad if the West settles into a fixed mold. I believe every organization and every profession ought to be upset—put through the mixer—every decade or so, and start again fresh and flexible.

What makes California especially so different? Is it the fluid population?

I cannot account for it. What gives the particularly loose, freewheeling character to the California psychological climate, I don't know. I just know that you can feel it.

Ann Roe, a research psychologist, did an extensive study some years ago on 100 creative physical and social scientists who were most highly regarded. Fifteen years later she said that out of the 100, some 70 now live in California—and they aren't retired for the most part—they're still swingers. The great universities are only part of the answer, I think, but an important part.

Tell me about your Honker group at Cal Tech, Carl. I know that elimination of the grading system for Cal Tech freshmen and sophomores came out of those sessions.

I was surprised to be asked by Cal Tech to serve as a consultant on human and educational problems, and I decided that if I worked with students, it might cause a student rebellion—so I chose faculty.

We weren't a committee or a group with any legal authority. I didn't want that. We put together top faculty and administration people and I think I was able to develop a freer discussion climate than they ever had. We began to take up issues of deep concern, and since they didn't have to arrive at any motions and pass them, they discussed frankly.

Did the name Honker come from the gabbling of the group?

We met first at the Honker Restaurant. The original group met for two years, and finally we had faculty-student groups, and new faculty groups.

We had to break up the original Honkers because the faculty began to fear them as an elite power group. And the new groups were just as effective.

The grading system and a number of good new things just naturally evolved. Most faculty members, incidentally, have never been willing to get off the intellectual level and into the intensive experimental encounter. But there is quite an encounter program now among students.

You have a grant to do research in the effect of encounter experiences in an educational system, haven't you?

We have a two-year Babcock Foundation Grant of $80,000 a year, with an additional $30,000 personal gift from Charles Kettering to see whether the basic encounter group can be an instrument for self-directed change in school systems. Many school systems were interested but I selected the Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. It's a marvelous school, and it also certifies about 70 teachers a year, and staffs and supervises eight high schools and 50 elementary schools.

Carl, I was terribly excited when you told me a year ago that you hoped to do a vertical thing in a school system, starting with administrators in groups, then teachers, parents, and students—and then putting them together. This might end the crashing boredom of most school systems.

Well, we've begun now. We've held six weekend workshops, for college faculty, for high-school faculty and student leaders, and for elementary-school principals and teachers. I am hopeful. We'll know in three years.

What has happened? Are people getting involved?

The student councils have asked if our program leaders can meet on a weekly basis to help them iron out interpersonal problems. Lay faculty members have asked for a weekend encounter group for themselves and their spouses. Various departments are asking for encounter groups. Everyone is excited. (Sister Mary Corita, the artist and the most joyous soul anywhere, is in the Immaculate Heart Art Department, you know. So you can imagine what a grand place this college is.)

And just as in all school systems, faculty members resisted group encounters with students, but that is working out.

We meet for solid weekends. Groups may meet Friday evening and all day Saturday, then again until Sunday noon. Or perhaps for a very long Saturday till midnight, and then again for a long Sunday.

All right, let's say I'm a school principal in an encounter group. What is this going to do for the school system?

It will affect the system because you are going to be more democratic and more willing to take feedback from your staff, Mary. The teacher I told you about who suddenly was closer to her own daughters had attended one of our Immaculate Heart workshops.

Some people say, “Well, this approach can't change a system.” I say it will make systems more open to innovations.

What do you think frightens people about intense encounter groups?

I think many of us live in kind of a precarious balance. We have learned to get along with ourselves and our world in some way, and the possibility that this balance might be upset is always a frightening one. Almost invariably in groups, every person finds the balance is disturbed, or possibly upset, but finds that in a climate of trust he is enormously supported in being more himself.

As you were talking, I thought of the last lines of Cyrano de Bergerac. Dying, he reaches for his gaudy hat and says: “My plume, my sacred plume. My pride, my pose, my lifelong masquerade.”

That moves me. In an encounter group, people learn they really do not need to keep that masquerade. In our last workshop, there was a man who came across as being very competent, very efficient, very self-sufficient. You just felt, here's a guy who really has it made. He has an important job and everything is rosy. It turned out that he is so hungry for appreciation and love; he feels he lets other people know that he appreciates them but who in the hell listens to him, or cares about him—nobody. I am thinking of one Navy commander, who appeared to be a complete martinet. We weren't very many days into the workshop before he was telling us some of the personal tragedies that he had in his life, particularly of his son—he felt terrible about what he had helped to do to his son. Then he got to telling about how he was known as a disciplinarian, but that when he was the commander of a ship during the war he got himself in trouble with his officers because of one enlisted man who was always in trouble. This officer felt he was really so much like the bad guy that he couldn't punish him. Others would come up with minor offenses and they got so much time in the brig, and this guy would do horrible things and the officer couldn't bear to punish him because the sailor did things he himself never dared to do. Among the many things that happened during his group experience, he decided to go back and try to rebuild his marriage—I don't know how much success he had in that. When he got back he was going to tell his top staff about the real softy he was inside, and try to loosen up his organization. This is the sort of thing where you see that people can change and do change and do become more human.

This interview with you leads off a special section on the group phenomenon, Carl. The article following this interview is by a very bright young Harvard psychologist, Tom Cottle, who has experimented with self-analytic groups of Negro and white high-school students just before their school integration. He thinks such encounters can greatly ease racial tensions.

I'm sure he's right. Group encounters can help end the tragedy of two races which meet fearfully and don't know what to do.

What we need is an enormous effort of the scope of the Manhattan Project. We should call in everyone who has any theoretical contribution to make, everyone who has tried out practical things such as you are describing and such as I have done. We should round up interdisciplinary knowledge that would focus on how tensions can be reduced. Such a project could contribute enormously in the resolving of racial tensions. This approach also could contribute to the resolution of labor and management tensions. I believe it could contribute to the terrifying problems of international tensions, too.

I would not be in the least afraid to be a facilitator for a massive group program in Watts. I know the tensions and bitterness would be terrific, but the people would be speaking for themselves. And I'm sure we could come to a more harmonious understanding than is possible any other way.

Fred Stoller, who with George Boch invented the marathon group you have said is effective, has an article in this group section. So does Mike Murphy, president of Esalen Institute. I know you've led workshops there. What do you think of Esalen, Carl? Murphy says he doesn't think you're sold on it.

I admire the nerve Mike has. His basic idea is very good. Living in California has made me realize that there is no sharp dividing line between the cutting edge in psychology and the too-far-out hogwash.

Mike is covering the whole spectrum in his Esalen seminars and workshops. We'll look back in ten years and find that some of the things he has sponsored helped start an important trend.

I'm pleased that he has set up a San Francisco headquarters, because I think that his Big Sur place is a little too involved with the sort of hippie culture that has tended to limit the kind of people who participate in seminars there.

How do you assess your own contributions to psychology?

If I have made a contribution it is around the central theme that the potential of the individual—and I would even add, the potential of the group—can be released providing a proper psychological climate is created. And that is an optimistic point of view!

If I, the therapist, can come through to my client as a person who cares about him and understands what he is struggling to express, he gradually will begin to choose healthier directions for himself.

Your work certainly has emphasized the importance of interpersonal relationships.

That is another aspect of whatever contribution I have made. Instead of focusing on the diagnostic or causative elements of behavior. I always have been more concerned with the dynamics of interaction. Not about how a person became what he is, but about how does he change from what he is.

I always have felt psychologically nourished by deep communication with people with whom I was working. I think sometimes people in clinical work apologize if they feel they are getting something out of it. I believe that if a therapist doesn't find particularly deep relationships with people he works with, he shouldn't be either a therapist or working with groups.

This involvement was very true for me when I was doing individual therapy. When I had to give that up because my life was just too hectic, I wondered what would take its place. And soon I found that working intensively with groups—and with individuals in those groups—provided me with the same kind of psychological nourishment.

For people who criticize the permissiveness of your approach, the way your son and daughter turned out is an answer which must make you and Helen very proud.

Well, they have nice families of their own now. Our son, David, is chairman of the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University. He was chosen one of the ten outstanding young men in the country for Life magazine's issue on the “take-over” generation. He has two daughters and a son.

Our daughter is Mrs. Lawrence Fuchs. Her husband is Professor of American Civilization at Brandeis University and they have three daughters. He organized the Peace Corps in the Philippines. Natalie took her M.A. in psychology with Abe Maslow (present APA president). She's very interested in counseling work. She's good, too.

You said you were used to being somewhat controversial, Carl. Where have your battles been?

Of course I was very much involved in the battles during the 1930's and 40's in which there were many attempts to stop psychologists from practicing psychotherapy. The last go-around on that was during the 1950's. It's a dead issue now.

Another controversy that somehow hit the clinicians' value system—and threatened many therapists—was my confidence in the potentiality of the individual.

It was my publications, based on my conviction and research, which upset many psychologists and psychiatrists. I said the individual can discover his own patterns of capabilities and his maladjustments, and that he can find insight on his own and take action to help solve his own problems.

The point of view threatens people who like to be experts. It is far more satisfying to be the man pulling the strings than to be the man who provides a climate in which another person can do something. So, there were attacks—there were famous jokes that about how all I did was agree with people.

That brings up a question. There is a classic Rogers joke … a man in therapy with you is depressed. He says so. You say: “You're depressed, aren't you?” He says he feels like jumping out the window in your office, and you say—

I know the story. My answer, for once and for all time, is that I would not have let him jump out the window.