Carl Ransom Rogers (1902–87) was an American psychotherapist. The originator of humanistic psychology, he initiated person-centered, non-directive counseling.
Born in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, Rogers earned a doctorate in psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College (1931,) then worked as director of the child guidance center in Rochester, New York, and taught at Chicago University 1945–57.
Rogers’s body of research at the University of Chicago, detailed in his well-known books, Client-Centered Therapy (1951) and Psychotherapy and Personality Change (1954,) attempts to stimulate and resolve a person’s problems by verbal means. This method is in contrast to talking the client into believing any doctrinaire explanation of his/her symptoms.
Rogers’s approaches gave precedence to the individuality of a client’s perceptions of the world and limited the role of the psychologist in supporting and clarifying that perspective. His therapy technique became the norm of empirical psychotherapy and led to the proliferation of open therapy sessions and encounter groups in which clients talk about their problems under the direction of a passive therapist.
Rogers was also a pioneer in the systematic investigation of the efficacy of psychotherapy. He was Fellow at the Western Behavioral Science Institute 1964–68 and the Center for Studies of the Person at La Jolla, California, 1968–87. His other best-known books include On Becoming a Person (1961) and Personal Power (1977.)
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People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, “Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.” I don’t try to control a sunset, I just watch with awe as it unfolds.
—Carl Rogers
I believe that the testing of the student’s achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.
—Carl Rogers
Topics: Teaching
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
—Carl Rogers
Topics: Change
I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially is not very important, I hear a deep human cry that lies buried and unknown far below the surface of the person. So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person’s inner world? Can I resonate to what he is saying so deeply that I sense the meanings he is afraid of, yet would like to communicate, as well as those he knows?
—Carl Rogers
Topics: Pride, Communication
When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. I have deeply appreciated the times that I have experienced this sensitive, empathic, concentrated listening.
—Carl Rogers
Topics: Listening
The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.
—Carl Rogers
Topics: Creativity
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn … and change.
—Carl Rogers
A person’s real need, a most terrible need, is for someone to listen…not as a ‘patient’ but as a human soul. To listen well is to respond to a great human yearning.
—Carl Rogers
Man’s inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.
—Carl Rogers
Topics: Listening
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