Some ElecTronic

Skinner then told the following story: Rogerswas sitting through a cold dawn trying to hunt ducks when none were about. Finally after hours of waiting, a lone duck flew by and Rogers took aim and shot, but at the same time another hunter from his own hiding place aimed and shot at the same duck. When the two men arrived simultaneously at the place where the duck had fallen, Rogers turned to the other hunter and said “You feel that this is your duck.” But, as Skinner finished the story, in the end it was Rogers who brought the duck home. Skinner continued that he would do his best to prevent a similar outcome in the present instance. His remarks brought a laugh from all involved. But with this amusing introduction Skinner was also making a serious point, that even with his approach of empathic understanding Rogers is controlling others and leaving them far from free. Skinner then continued:

The controllability of behavior is an old story, of course. Historians have always been delighted when they could prove the influence of some kind of biographical event on a hero. Biographers take the same line. The social sciences have certainly brought further evidence of a statistical nature, and an experimental analysis of the behavior of an individual organism has now essentially clinched the point…

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

In his opening remarks, Rogers outlined the important points to underlie their dialog with the following statement:

Man has long felt himself to be a puppet in life, molded by world forces, by economic forces. He has been enslaved by persons, by institutions, and, more recently, by aspects of modern science. But he is firmly setting forth a new declaration of independence. He is discarding the alibis of “unfreedom.” He is choosing himself, endeavoring to become himself: not a puppet, not a slave, not a copy of some model, but his own unique individual self… To the extent that a behaviorist point of view in psychology is leading us toward a disregard of the person, toward treating persons primarily as manipulable objects, toward control of the person by shaping his behavior without his participant choice, or toward minimizing the significance of the subjective—to that extent I question it very deeply.39

When Rogers ended these opening remarks Skinner began his: “I always make the same mistake. In debating with Carl Rogers I assume that he will make no effort to influence the audience. Then I have to follow him and speak, as I do now, to a group of people who are very far from free to accept my views. In fact, I was just reminded of a story that I once heard about Carl Rogers and I will tell it now.”40

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

We have now gone as far as we can to identify personal sources for Rogers’ professional ideas. But before we leave Rogers’ life story, let us see what we can learn from one more thing: the marvelous fate of the overlapping of his life and career with that of Skinner. The two men were born 2 years apart, Rogers in 1902 and Skinner in 1904, and they died 3 years apart, Rogers in 1987 and Skinner in 1990. Both fashioned a body of work that had a major impact on merican psychology in the mid-1900s. And yet, although each was a passionate proponent of his own world view, their two views could hardly have been more different. They rarely had the opportunity to battle out their differences directly. Although both started their academic careers in the Midwest, Skinner shortly returned to the east coast to remain ensconced at Harvard for the rest of his career while Rogers traveled through a series of institutions in the Midwest and West as if not wanting to collect any moss. There were three occasions, however, when a special conference was organized so that the two men could meet eye to eye and spar. The most extensive of these meetings was the third, a 2-day event organized by the University of Minnesota in the summer of 1962 A transcript of the meeting shows that the two had no trouble identifying their differences.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Whereas previously the individual had defended against the threat of incongruent organismic experiences by keeping them out of awareness and thus denied to the self, this significant event forces the incongruity into awareness. The result is intense anxiety and a state of disorganization as the self-structure is broken. The individual now acts out those previously denied aspects of his experience, and as a consequence loses all confidence in himself or herself, feeling crazy and worthless. This is in fact the process that Rogers went through during this crisis. His self-image was that of a warm therapist, but this psychotic client evoked organismic responses of fear and a wish to withdraw that he could not accept into awareness. When her hostility broke his defenses and suddenly forced his fear and wish to withdraw into awareness, he urgently acted on those previously denied experiences and ran away. As a result of having thus acted out organismic experiences that he had previously felt the need to deny to his self, he lost all confidence in himself, feeling crazy and worthless. He was able to recover his self-worth only after undergoing a therapeutic relationship in which he received unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Meanwhile Rogers, convinced that he himself was going insane, went home and told his wife that he had to get away at once. They were on the road within an hour and stayed away for 2 or 3 months on what they later referred to as their “runaway trip.” The early moments were rough going—Rogers felt himself incapable even of walking into a store to buy some beer—but Helen’s quiet assurance gradually relieved his terror. When they finally returned to Chicago he was past his crisis, but he was left with a feeling of utter worthlessness as a therapist and as a person. It was only after one of his colleagues offered to serve as his therapist that he was able to work through these feelings to a point where his fears diminished and his capacity to value himself increased. It is this traumatic experience, then, which made clear to him the importance of the therapist’s congruence in a therapeutic relationship.

This experience also probably illustrated for Rogers the process of an acute psychotic breakdown that he would describe in his 1959 paper. According to this account, a breakdown occurs when a significant event suddenly or obviously demonstrates the substantial
incongruence between an individual’s self and organismic experience.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

There were two years while I was at Chicago which were years of intense personal distress, which I can now look back upon coolly but which were very difficult to live through. There was a deeply disturbed client (she would be regarded as schizophrenic) with whom I had worked at Ohio State, who later moved to the Chicago area and renewed her therapeutic contacts with me. I see now that I handled her badly, vacillating between being warm and real with her, and then being more “professional” and aloof when the depth of her psychotic disturbance threatened me. This brought about the most intense hostility on her part (along with a dependence and love) which completely pierced my defenses.38

Rogers felt that he should be able to help this client and feel warm toward her, yet at times he genuinely felt threatened by her sychosis and his fear led to an aloofness that was not therapeutic. For a time he stubbornly persisted with the relationship although it was past the point of being helpful to the client. When she recognized his aloofness and responded with hostility, the relationship became destructive to him as well, and he suddenly felt
that he himself was on the verge of a mental breakdown. Feeling an urgent need to escape, he contacted one of his colleagues and asked if the colleague could take over as her therapist that very day. When the client came in for her appointment that day, Rogers introduced the two of them and then bolted without further explanation. Within moments the client burst into a full blown psychosis with florid delusions and hallucinations.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

The “growing edge” of this portion of the theory has to do with point 3, the congruence or genuineness of the therapist in the relationship. This means that the therapist’s symbolization of his own experience in the relationship must be accurate, if therapy is to be most effective. Thus if he is experiencing threat and discomfort in the relationship, and is aware only of an acceptance and understanding, then he is not congruent in the relationship and therapy will suffer.37

Although this was the growing edge of his theory of therapy, Rogers would claim later in this paper that it is this congruence of the counselor in the relationship that is primary, while unconditional positive regard and empathy are secondary to it. We might guess, then, that Rogers had been powerfully affected by an experience in which he himself had been defending against awareness of feelings of threat and discomfort in a therapeutic relationship, with negative consequences. And in fact he had.

In his autobiographical chapter, Rogers recounts such an experience
occurring between 1949 and 1951 after he had moved from Ohio Sate to the University of Chicago:

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

We have now found personal origins for most of the important concepts Rogers was to offer in his theories of therapy and of persons. There is one aspect of his theory that emerged later in his thinking, however, and whose source therefore is probably found in experiences that occurred after his professional life was launched. In
his 1942 book Counseling and Psychotherapy, Rogers identified the three essential characteristics of a therapeutic relationship to be unconditional positive regard, empathy, and nondirection. By his 1959 paper offering his elaborated theory, he had dropped the third characteristic of nondirection and had offered in its stead the characteristic of congruence. We have seen that Rogers came to recognize the subtle directiveness he had shown in the case of Herbert Bryan, and his realization of this may have led him to deemphasize the quality of nondirection. But what led him now to emphasize the importance of the counselor being genuine about his or her true feelings toward the client? In introducing this element in his 1959 paper, Rogers wrote:

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

He would now, over and over again, make choices that reflected his need for freedom from external direction. When later he wrote about a student-run seminar he had helped to organize at Union, the issue of freedom recurred in his account: “I am truly astonished at the freedom which was granted to us… The whole seminar was very freewheeling… I wanted to find a field in which I could be sure my freedom of thought would not be limited.”35 When years later he was tempted away from his position at Ohio State by an offer from the University of Chicago to establish a counseling center, again the issue of freedom seemed paramount in his experience of the opportunity. In his autobiographical chapter he wrote about this experience: “I learned to set the staff free… It was a time of innovation in our educational methods and in our freewheeling administrative process… We were also experimenting with much freedom of expression of interpersonal feelings … There was enormous freedom for creativity.”36 This needfor freedom had its source in the restrictive family environment he now left, and it would be expressed in his theoretical proposition that healthy development consists of increasing autonomy from the control of external forces.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

But they had kept up their courtship by mail, and when they were together again in person during his recuperation Rogers found Helen’s support to be a balm. It was she who taught him to dance, and to whom he wrote and spoke about his conflicts with his parents. By the following fall they were engaged, and upon his graduation they were married and moved together to New York City where Rogers would start graduate school.

Rogers’ parents disapproved both of the marriage and of the graduate school. As to the marriage, they liked Helen but thought it absurd for their son to marry while he was still a student. As to the graduate school, in distinction, they were in favor of his going to seminary but were deeply disturbed by his particular choice. Rogers had chosen Union Theological Seminary because it was the most liberal in the country. For his fundamentalist parents, this meant that it was the devil in disguise. In a material expression of their conditions of worth, Rogers’ father offered to pay all expenses for both him and Helen if he would go to Princeton instead, which was at that time a center of fundamentalist thinking. Rogers rejected the offer indignantly, now fully embarked on a path of his own choosing.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest