Carl Ransom Rogers
Carl Ransom Rogers (1902 - 1987) was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and is best known as the founder of 'client-centred', ‘person-centred’ or 'non-directive' therapy.
Rogers was born in 1902 to a very religious, very strict, but close family that included five brothers and sisters. He grew up on a farm, and carried his interest in agriculture over to his educational pursuits.
Rogers attended the University of Wisconsin to study agricultural science, but found that this did not challenge him enough. He took a correspondence course in psychology but found that to be boring as well. Then he began religious studies at the Union Theological Seminary in New York to become a minister. Studying theology caused Rogers to change his life and begin to question his own religious beliefs. He renewed his interest in psychology at this time also. He began taking psychology classes at Columbia University in New York, while still attending the Seminary.
Rogers left the Seminary to attend graduate school in psychology at Columbia University. He turned to clinical and educational psychology, studying at Teachers' College of Columbia University. There he grew into clinical practice drawing on such diverse sources as Otto Rank and John Dewey (the latter through the influence of W. H. Kilpatrick - a former student of Dewey's). He worked in a child guidance clinic in Rochester, NY after graduation from the graduate program. From there Rogers went on to join the faculty at Ohio State University, University of Chicago, and then in 1957, the University of Wisconsin.
He was awarded the American Psychological Association's first annual distinguished scientific contribution award in 1956. Rogers founded the Centre for Studies of the Person in 1963, in La Jolla, CA. In the 1980's, he led workshops and communications groups in the Soviet Union and South Africa. He was a prolific writer up until his death in 1987.
The diverse mix of influences - and Carl Rogers' ability to link elements together - helps to put into context his later achievements. The concern with opening up to, and theorising from experience, the concept of the human organism as a whole and the belief in the possibilities of human action have their parallels in the work of John Dewey. Rogers was able to join these with therapeutic insights and the belief, borne out of his practice experience that the client usually knows better how to proceed than the therapist.
Rogers believed that human beings become increasingly trustworthy once they feel at a deep level that their subjective experience is both respected and progressively understood We can see this belief at work in his best known contribution concerns - the 'core conditions' for facilitative (counseling) practice (congruence, acceptance and empathy.
Rogers was an accomplished communicator - both in person and through his writings and films. He was also a committed practitioner who looked to his own experiences (and was, thus, difficult to dismiss as 'academic’). He was able to demystify therapy; to focus on the person of the counselor and the client (as against a concentration on technique and method); and crucially to emphasise honesty and the destructiveness of manipulation. In the service of the latter Rogers was extremely wary of attempting to dig into, and make sense of the unconscious. In short, he offered a new way, a break with earlier traditions.
The history and focus of Carl Rogers' work was one of the reasons why he has been so attractive to successive generations of educators. This was a language to which they could relate. The themes and concerns he developed seemingly had a direct relevance to their work with troubled individuals. Informal educators also had access to these ideas. Rogers' popularity with those providing counselling training (at various levels) opened up his work to large numbers of workers. Crucially the themes he developed were general enough to be applied to therapeutic work with groups (for example, see his work on Encounter Groups (1970, New York: Harper and Row) and in education. Significantly, Carl Rogers took up the challenge to explore what a person-centred form of education might look like.
Freedom to Learn (1969; 1983; 1993) is a classic statement of educational possibility. Carl Rogers, himself, was a gifted teacher. His approach grew from his orientation in one-to-one professional encounters. He saw himself as a facilitator - one who created the environment for engagement. This he might do through making a short (often provocative, input). However, what he was also to emphasise was the attitude of the facilitator. There were 'ways of being' with others that foster exploration and encounter - and these are more significant than the methods employed. His paper 'The interpersonal relationship in the facilitation of learning' is an important statement of this orientation (included in Hirschenbaum and Henderson's [1990] collection).
Rogers’s theories influenced the development of the Life Orientations Method in four respects:
Rogers sees the human being as: "capable of evaluating the outer and inner situation, understanding herself in its context, ". This illustrates a belief in agency and free will. While humans behave rationally, Rogers maintains "The tragedy for most of us is that our defences keep us from being aware of this rationality so that we are consciously moving in one direction, while organismically we are moving in another."
He promoted the view that the role of the professional in the development of individuals is to help the client to make sense of their experience to understand the inherent rationality of their behaviour. It is for the client to make constructive choices as to the next steps in life, and to acting on those choices.
He defined the four characteristics of a successful interaction between client and coach:
Good coaches must be able to relate to others honestly and sincerely. They don't have to be perfect, but can't be defensive when relating to others and must not play games with clients.
The coach must be able to put him/herself in your client's position. This must be accurate empathy - not just "I know what you are feeling, because I...".
Good coaches can shut up and listen. Learning is a two-way street, and the coach should benefit from the interaction also. Rogers always did 12 - 20 hrs. of therapy/ week.
The coach must genuinely like the client. They do not have to approve of his/her behaviour, but they must be able to separate the sins from the sinner.
The Life Orientations model of learning respects the individual’s knowledge of himself or herself and seeks to ground the feedback of the survey in the individual’s self-experience. The Resource book provides a menu of self-development opportunities, which ensure that the individual has ownership of, and commitment to their development using the exercises and insights available through the model.
Rogers model of coaching is the basis of the coaching method employed within the model. Powerful clues can be identified by the coach on how to manage each individual by comparing their (the coaches) own survey results with that of their client prior to working with them.
Rogers believed that we develop our sense of who we are (self) through our conscious and unconscious life experiences. Experience is the driving force in our development. Each person has a fundamental drive towards autonomy and as we develop we differentiate ourselves by choosing a set of behaviours and characteristics – our sense of self. So we develop a sense of who we are as we grow and interact with others.
The concept of "self" is a central construct in this theory. It develops through interactions with others and involves awareness of being and functioning. The self-concept is "the organised set of characteristics that the individual perceives as unique to himself/herself".
Rogers was impressed with what he saw as the individual’s innate tendency to move in the direction of growth. He came to believe that the strongest motivating force is self-actualisation - the fulfillment of all our capacities. We may not always see clearly which actions lead to growth and which are counter productive. But once we see the way, we will choose to grow rather than to regress. Rogers did not deny that there were other needs, some of them biological, he saw them as subservient to our motivation to enhance ourselves. It was this belief that formed the basis of "client-centred therapy" which assumed that every individual, given the proper circumstances, has the motivation and inclination to change and, crucially, that the individual is the best qualified to decide on the direction that such changes should take.
Research on personality has suggested that we have a sense of self by 6-9 years of age and that our personality is fairly set by the age of 28 – as indicated by test/re-test of personality using the NEO PiR personality test.
Fundamental to the Life Orientations Method of Atkins and Katcher are the values and personal goals of each individual in terms of how they expect to achieve self-actualisation, or satisfaction, in relation to other people. Personal goals can be expressed as how I want others to see me, and, of course, how I want to see myself.
Rogers’ view of human behaviour is that it is "exquisitely rational". It is driven by a need for positive self-regard and the positive regard of others. We learn what these concepts mean in our development through our experience and the influence of significant others, family, friends etc. To meet these needs we develop a sense of self that is an organised set of behaviours to achieve these goals.
Central to his theories was this concept of "self". This consisted of all ideas, perceptions and values that characterise "I" or "Me", "What I am" and "What can I do". This perceived self, which grows out of our experiences of living, influences both our perception of the world and our behaviour. We want to behave in ways that are consistent with our self-image; experiences and feelings that are not consistent are threatening.
Experience is the highest authority. If you think you are not good-looking or clever, this is part of your self-concept regardless of reality.
In the Life Orientations model we adopt a unique combination of four orientations towards others, which cover the spectrum of behaviours we expect to help us achieve our personal goals.
For some of us, one personal goal and its associated orientation is significantly stronger than the others. Some of us have two, three, or even four personal goals and our orientations may change depending on the situation.
Even though one personal goal may drive much of our behaviour, we will use another, or others, if we feel the situation requires it. The orientation which dominates, or to which we gravitate in most situations, would be described as our "most preferred" orientation and that which is least dominant, or to which we gravitate in relatively few situations, as our "least preferred".
We may have more than one most preferred orientation, or we may have one, which strongly influences our most preferred. In such a case we are most likely to pursue our primary personal goal at the expense of not achieving the other.
Rogers had concepts of congruence and incongruence. Incongruence is when there is a conflict between what we experience and our self-concept which:
Congruence is when there is harmony between experience and our sense of self – when there is both positive self-regard and positive regard from others.
The structure of the four orientations includes the concept of harmony by measuring:
The degree of alignment between these three elements in our working lives describes the individual’s degree of congruence in favourable and stress/conflict environments. This enables each person to understand better the environment and relationships with others, which will promote self-regard and encourage positive regard from others.