Carl Rogers had been practicing psychotherapy for over a decade before it struck him that he had a novel approach to offer the field. The occasion was an invited address he gave to the counseling program at the University of Minnesota in 1940. Rogers had just been hired as a professor at Ohio State University after having worked for 13 years at child psychology clinics. When he was invited that year to speak to the counseling program at Minnesota
about the process of psychotherapy, he decided to give his talk the title “Newer Concepts in Psychotherapy.” In this talk, Rogers began by first criticizing traditional methods of psychotherapy as outmoded.

But Minnesota was known as one of the leading centers in the country for training in these traditional methods, and his talk aroused a great furor. It was this furor that confirmed for Rogers what his graduate students at Ohio State had been telling him that year: that he had something truly unique to say. Shortly after he returned from Minnesota he began to write a book, Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer Concepts in Practice (1942), to introduce his new approach to psychotherapy. Out of this new view of therapy later grew a new approach to understanding persons, with radically
different assumptions than those we have seen in previous chapters in the psychodynamic and behavioral models. Before we look at the theory of persons that Rogers developed, let us first look briefly at how he came to pursue the unusual methods of psychotherapy out of which this theory grew.

Upon graduating from college in 1924, Rogers originally intended to pursue a career in religious work. After considering various seminaries he chose to begin his graduate studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York, because it was reputed to be the most liberal seminary in the country. Yet still by his second year there Rogers found himself frustrated with having ideas fed to him. Along with a number of other students, he petitioned the
administration to be allowed to set up a seminar with no instructor and no curriculum but the students’ own questions. Somewhat to their surprise, the students were granted their request.

In this seminar, a group of open-minded students took up important religious and philosophical problems, following their questions and doubts freely to see where they led. In Rogers’ case, they led him out of religious work. He felt that the seminar played a profound role in his developing a philosophy of life that was truly his own, rather than one that was fed to him by others, and he decided that he could not choose a profession in which he was required to believe in a specified doctrine. The next fall Rogers left Union and religious studies, moving across the street to begin graduate study in psychology at Columbia University.

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

When at the age of 86 Skinner gave his keynote address to the American Psychological Association he was dying of leukemia, but he still used the podium to fight for the adoption of behaviorism as the science of psychology. He died 8 days later, on August 18, 1990. Behavior analysis was not then and likely never will be the exclusive approach of psychology. But its influence on the field has been profound, and Skinner himself was rated the most important psychologist of all time in a 1991 ranking, beating out Freud, who had held the number one spot a decade earlier.59 In its elegant
simplicity and firm rooting in scientific method, Skinner’s behavioral model has generated voluminous research. And like Freud’s model, Skinner’s has shown the power to capture the imagination of many outside of the field of psychology, both scholars and practitioners. Behavior analysis has been applied to such problems as how best to raise our children, to educate our students, to cure our ill, and to reform our criminals. There have even been multiple attempts to build real Utopian communities modeled after his
fictional Walden Two.

The intensity of the proponents of Skinner’s model has been well matched by the intensity of its critics, however. After an article about the baby-tender appeared in the Ladies Home Journal, Skinner received letters from people asking for instructions on how to build one for their own baby, but he also received letters suggesting that if he wanted to shut his children away in a box he shouldn’t have had them in the first place. After Walden Two was
published in 1948, there were people who were so inspired by the vision it offered that they tried to make it a reality, but there were also people who saw his vision as that of a mad scientist who was a potential menace to Western civilization. Skinner’s extremism probably fostered these strong reactions.

In his final address to his fellow psychologists shortly before his death, he made an analogy between the vigorous opposition to Darwin’s theory by those who want to maintain belief in a Creator and the stubborn resistance to behavioral theory by those who want to maintain belief in a Mind. The analogy drew claps of appreciation from some and gasps of astonishment from others. But it is not simply that Skinner’s theory trampled on cherished values of American society like free will and a volitional mind. Many objected to the theory not because they felt it unappealing but because they believed it invalid.

There are two primary objections to Skinner’s theory on the basis of its validity in providing an account of human phenomena. One is that the theory is derived from research on lower organisms, and that Skinner’s generalization to humans is largely speculative. In order to have full control over his experimental conditions, Skinner worked with lower organisms such as rats and pigeons that were readily subject to his manipulations. But it is presumptive of him to claim that the principles he discovered for behavior in
these organisms will apply equally to humans. Others have tested Skinner’s principles in research with humans, however. In the last chapter we will look at this work.

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

But Skinner’s design reflected not only his wish to help Yvonne deal with the stresses of child-rearing; he was also concerned to relieve the stresses of the child. In describing the baby-tender at the time he wrote: “I am quite sure that many beneficial effects will follow, not only in easing the lot of the young mother but in building happy and healthy babies … The problem is two-fold: to discover the optimal conditions for the child and to induce the
mother to arrange those conditions. The latter is frequently the more difficult.”51

Having children and seeing Yvonne’s discomfort with mothering may have revived Skinner’s concerns about his own treatment as a child, and he was eager to provide a better experience for his children than he himself had had. Many of the benefits he saw of the baby-tender were in its ability to eliminate negative influences on the child, such as the clothing that he
viewed as confining or the airborne germs that could bring infection. Skinner wanted to use his behavioral science to control his children through their environment, but he wanted this control to be to their benefit in eliminating harmful forces.

He soon learned that others would not react so favorably to his vision of control. Enthusiastic about the potential of the babytender to have a positive effect on many mothers and children, Skinner approached General Mills about developing it commercially. Two of their engineers came to see it and one wrote a memorandum about it to the management. He raised concern about the possible psychological reaction against the device by the average mother who may not care to raise her baby in this way or may not trust the gadget. The thing, as I saw it, was a surprise and somewhat of a shock at first sight. It didn’t seem to comport with my idea of the warm-hearted mother whom I envision as wanting to tote her youngster everywhere; also listen to his howls at night, but maybe there are enough long-haired people and cold-hearted scientists such as the professor who invented this gadget, to make a market for it.52

We are now in a better position to understand the struggle that was going on in Skinner and that found expression when he wrote Walden Two in the summer of 1945. Part of him had identified with his parents, in choosing to control as a scientist and parent and in denying the possibility of freedom. But part of him remained identified with his rats and children, who felt the negative consequences of aversive control and wished for freedom. The accusation that he was cold-hearted toward his own child required Skinner to face again the problems of control and freedom and their emotional consequences, and he would play out his struggle through the characters of Burris and Frazier in Walden Two.

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

Although Skinner had hoped that his parents would sanction his freedom, instead they “prevent” him from “struggling” to write and thus “force” him into his present course. The first research designs he would pursue in graduate school would reflect the concern Skinner now had for how to progress and escape in thecontext of a restraining and threatening environment.

He was in a bad spot. Although Hamilton had been an environment that reinforced his writing, his parents created a punishing environment for it. Along with their disparagement of feeling that we saw in his short story, “Beautiful Homes,” we now see also a disparagement of thinking, dismissing his ideas as “highfalutin” and belittling his discussion of Dostoevski. Value is given to men who get things done and writing is viewed as doing nothing. That Skinner could not progress in his writing only lent support to this view. Skinner had come home to write because he could not forcefully break free, and on finding that his parents were not going to sanction his freedom as he had hoped, he began a process of resignation to their world view. He would give up the pursuit of literature to pursue science instead, and in his scientific theory he would adopt control as the primary goal and would reject free will as an impossibility. He would even embrace his parents’ valuing
of action in his focus on behavior as the phenomenon of interest, and their devaluing of feelings and thoughts in his claim that inner states should be treated as irrelevant. His preference for the study of operant behaviors that affect their environment over respondent behaviors that react to their environment can also be seen to rest in his parents’ respect for effective action.

But as well as finding a way to move forward, Skinner also needed a way to justify his lack of movement during the Dark Year. He had agreed to admit his failure outwardly, as he wrote in his note, but he did not want to admit it to himself. The efforts that he took over the course of the year to account for his failure show a pattern of externalizing blame, and here we may find a
basis for his later claim that behavior is determined from without rather than from within. At first he blamed his parents as seen in the previous note, saying that they prevented him from pursuing writing independently and thus forced him on his present course. His claim that he was too sensitive to his surroundings shows that he was deeply aware of the difference in the effect of his Hamilton versus home environments. Blaming his parents could not be the final solution for Skinner, however, for he was unwilling to revolt
against them to pursue writing. He thus turned toward the end of the year to blaming literature itself as a method. This allowed him to divert blame from within himself but also to avoid blaming his parents. When at the end of the year he discovered Watson’s work on behaviorism he found a systematic rationale for blaming his failure outward, for Watson’s theory claimed that behavior was solely a function of environmental factors. He also found a system by which he could adopt those values his parents had transmitted,
using science to effectively control behavior. Vulnerable to shame and guilt and eager to relieve himself of the failure of the Dark Year, Skinner embraced behaviorism with a tenacity that was not to weaken over the next 60 years of his life.

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

But the first page had been removed with a sharp knife.44 It is unclear what elements of this story are literally true, but by Skinner’s own account the story is about his behavior freshman year and there is very likely an authenticity to the emotional patterns displayed. What is revealed is a son who is ambivalent about showing his love to his parents: His parents have come to doubt that he really loves them and his homesickness only seeps
through when he is not guarding against it.

When we see the parents’ response to his expressions of love we find a reason for his guardedness: They ridicule his tender feelings with laughter and gain pride from the idea of hurting their son by their distance. In the end the son deals with his dilemma by disavowing his expression of feeling. If this story speaks to Skinner’s own relationship with his parents, it provides another personal basis for his discounting of emotion in his theory: He had been demeaned for the expression of feeling and so had responded by repudiating it entirely.

By the end of his time at college there were many things pointing Skinner to a career in writing. He was one of four seniors who had attracted attention on campus as writers and were involved with a number of faculty members in weekly meetings modeled after the Round Table at the Algonquin. He had had the opportunity to visit socially with such writers as Aleck Woollcott, Edna Ferber, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost at Hamilton or at Bread Loaf Summer School. It is not surprising, then, when in his autobiography he
reports his decision senior year to spend the following year writing a novel.

What is surprising is his decision to do this at home. True, we can imagine reasons for doing so, such as the economic savings in living with his parents. But we can also imagine reasons against it, such as the fact that whereas college had provided a supportive environment for free expression, his home had not. In any case, the curious fact is that although his autobiography gives ample justification for his choice to pursue writing, the rationale for his choice to go home is omitted.

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

There is one more part of the story yet to be told that should aid our understanding, although this piece too is told in a way that makes it not immediately easy to decipher. Surprisingly, however, although Skinner’s two autobiographical accounts differ in their report of whether he was moved, they are virtually identical in their report of this aspect of his reaction. In both accounts, right after reporting that he was/was not moved and in the same paragraph,he continues with this observation:

I once made an arrowhead by bending the top of a tin can into a flattened cone. I fastened it to the end of an arrow, and when I shot it straight up into the air, it fell back and struck my brother in the shoulder, drawing blood. Many years later I remembered the event with a shock when I heard Laurence Olivier speaking Hamlet’s lines:

… Let me disclaiming from a purpos ‘d evil Free me so far in your most generous thoughts, That I have shot mine arrow o ‘er the house, And hurt my brother.42

What can he be thinking here to put this observation after his report of Ebbe’s death? Is he telling us that he felt guilty and in some way responsible for his brother’s death?

No further hint is given in the autobiographical chapter, where he immediately moves thereafter to a new paragraph on a new topic. This incompletion may represent Skinner’s avoidance of something unpleasant. In the volume written a decade later, however, there is one more paragraph before he shifts to a new subject. This paragraph begins “My brother and I had never competed for the same things.”43

That he negates competition with Ebbe on the heels of the Hamlet quote suggests that he may indeed have felt guilt and thus a need to deny any competition with his brother. The guilt that he recounts in his first report would now be understood not as guilt for feeling no emotion but rather as guilt for his competitive feelings. And the lack of felt emotion would have resulted from a repression of those feelings, that is, an avoidance of the inner experience of inclinations toward hostile behavior against Ebbe. Now, too, we would understand why in the second report Skinner calls attention to the fact that it was Ebbe’s friend rather than he himself who had called the doctor, for this failure to help Ebbe would also be likely to invoke guilt over inclinations to harm him. If Skinner had competitive feelings toward Ebbe that he had repressed, this would be consistent with the fact that in his autobiography he gave a number of examples of competition between them but explicitly and repeatedly denied any competition.

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

By high school Skinner was exploring sexual relations with girls, and one theme appears over and over in his descriptions of these relations: progress. In particular, his main concern was to see how far he could advance up a girl’s leg. With Marion Knise he had a well-established limit of 3 inches above the knee; with Margaret Persons they had an argument on his first approach up her leg and he “never made any further advances”;35 with Leslie Gilbert he wondered whether he might have married her if instead of being so concerned with how far he could go up her leg he had shown her some affection; with a fourth girl he “had never been able to make any progress with her.”36 We have seen that this themeof progress was part of the general ethos of the Progressive Era;

here it may have been amplified by a biological source. In any case, this theme of progress would recur in Skinner’s later work, being used to justify his choice of science over art and being applied in his first experiments on the behavior of the laboratory rat. When Skinner’s senior year arrived, his class had to choose a motto for the graduation exercises. Skinner suggested “Contact!,” the title of a story by Frances Noyes Hart that was based on the word aviators use at takeoff. Skinner reproduces a part of the story in his autobiography:

It’s waiting—waiting for a word—and so am I and I lean far forward, watching the figure toiling out beyond till the call comes back to me, clear and confident, “Contact, sir?” and I shout back, as restless and exultant as the first time that I answeredit—”Contact!” And I am off—and I’m alive—And I’m free! 37

Skinner welcomed his departure for college as a chance for escape from his oppressive home environment.

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

Skinner’s father picked for a wife a woman who was in some ways quite different from his mother. Grace Burrhus was intelligent and beautiful, and she had enough talent to be employed as a secretary before her marriage and as a pianist and singer at weddings and funerals after her marriage. But she shared with grandmother Skinner those qualities that Skinner thought had left a bad mark on his father and on him: an aspiration toward self-improvement and progress, a concern with looking and doing “right,” even a tendency to laugh at mistakes, although this was specific to the mistakes of people she was not close to; shortcomings in herself or in her husband and son were judged violently as if they were a sin.

Grace pushed her husband to succeed and her son to grow tall, protesting when her father put a spoonful of coffee in the young Skinner’s milk that it would stunt his growth. Along with her husband and mother-in-law, she held firmly to the prevalent ethos of progress and would play a part in passing this value to her son. She had rigid standards of what was right and was deeply concerned with what other people thought. Skinner recalls that when his report card in second grade recorded under “Deportment” that
he tended to annoy others she showed great consternation. She was quick to take alarm when she saw any hint of deviation from the right path in Skinner’s behavior, and her common phrases were “Tut tut” and “What will people think?”

Skinner’s mother liked to laugh at people who showed such errors as wearing a shirt and tie that failed to go together or mispronouncing a word, and she even collected examples of such mispronunciations to share with friends. When Skinner mispronounced a word or used incorrect grammar, however, she harshly corrected him with no hint of amusement in her stern response. That Skinner took her judgments on these occasions to heart is shown in his memory of mispeaking once as a child when his father brought their Congressman home to supper. When asked if he had ever been to Washington, Skinner replied, “No, I never were,” and he reports that he suffered for a long while afterward from the thought of his error. Once when his mother heard him use a bad word she took him to the bathroom, put soap on a wet washcloth, and washed his mouth out. It was the only time he recalls being physically punished by either parent.

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

Fifteen years had passed since my father had escaped from the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Erie Railroad and had gone to New York for that one-year course in law, and he had come a long way. The newspapers were correct in referring to him repeatedly as a rising young lawyer, but he was not to rise much further. He was then about as effective, personally and professionally, as he was ever to be … Life was to abrade him, to wear him down. He struggled to satisfy that craving for a sense of worth with which his mother had damned him, but forty years later he would throw himself on his bed, weeping, and cry, “I am no good, I am no good.”24

By Skinner’s account his grandmother Skinner’s demanding treatment had a negative effect on him as well. It was she who gave him his first religious teaching at the age of 5 or 6 in an effort to keep him from the temptation of lying. Opening the heating stove to expose the coal fire burning within, she told him that children who told lies were thrown in a place just like that after they diedas punishment.

Skinner’s young mind was so impressed by the image that he suffered overwhelming torment when, soon after being shown the burning coals, he said that someone was his uncle and later learned that the man was actually a great-half-uncle. He had mistakenly told a lie, and the promise of punishment in Hell struck him with terror. Not long afterwards he knowingly
told a lie to avoid punishment, only to be tortured for years with anguish over his future punishment in Hell. In a note he wrote a year after college he recalled: “I remember lying awake at night sobbing, refusing to tell my mother the trouble, refusing to kiss her goodnight. I can still feel the remorse, the terror, the despair of my young heart at that time.”25

This is hardly the language we would expect from the behaviorist who denied the importance of emotions. Does he see emotions as a foolish curse that he suffered in childhood but outgrew with maturity? Alternatively, could it be that Skinner continued to be pained by such emotions into adulthood and so took efforts to deny them their power in his theory? He ended his account of his grandmother’s training methods with the observation that he had never recovered from the spiritual torture of that threat of punishment.
Thus, his theoretical belittling of emotions, as well as of punishment, may in part represent an attempt to defend against such painful experiences. And his long-term reaction to the threat argues against his apparent reason for deprecating punishment in his theory: that it is not effective in the long run.

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

The first person Skinner mentions in both his autobiographical chapter and the three-volume autobiography is his grandmother Skinner. The portrait he paints of her is not a flattering one. He depicts her as a foolish woman who put on airs and whose greatest intellectual achievement was to read a bit of the Bible every day, although he thought this was just a pretense. She moved hesitantly as if unsure whether she was properly dressed or doing the right thing, and she laughed nervously after every remark as if afraid she had made a mistake. Skinner expresses surprise, then, that this unadmirable character moved beyond her “poor white” family of origin, and indeed his account calls attention to his concern for the problem of how she managed this “escape.”

After introducing her family he writes: “A sister of my grandmother’s moved out of that culture … Two or three brothers escaped, too, and so did my
grandmother, though it is hard to say why.”22 He only apparently moves on from this theme in the next seven paragraphs, depicting his grandmother’s appearance, sayings, cooking, humor, storytelling, frugality, and relationship with her pet canary. After all of this, the eighth paragraph begins: “Only one thing makes any sense of the fact that she escaped from her family background,”23 and it is then clear that the problem of escape he had raised two pages before had remained incomplete in his thinking.

Skinner attributes his grandmother’s ability to escape her family background to her having “aspirations.” We may be surprised to find Skinner attributing causality to an inner quality such as aspiration, and indeed although his narrative contains a number of references to internal states he is usually careful not to give them a causal status. In this case it becomes clear as his narrative continues that Skinner takes a decidedly negative view of the effect
of his grandmother’s aspirations on his father and himself. As an only child Skinner’s father received the full force of his mother’s ambitions. She had once told Skinner that when his father was a baby she pinched his nose to make it look sharp and distinguished looking. But Skinner was sure that there were many other ways she had pinched his father as well and that these pinchings had had a painful effect. He attributes to his grandmother’s
ambitions for his father both his father’s apparent conceit, which made him unpopular with other people, and his chronic drive for self-improvement and progress. The latter characteristic allowed him to escape beyond his meager beginnings as his mother had, but it also caused him to suffer profound feelings of failure and shame. Skinner describes his father at the time of his birth in the following way:

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