Rogers was the fourth of six children of Walter and Julia Rogers, preceded by two brothers and one sister and followed by two more brothers. His parents had both been raised on farms, and when he was 12 they bought a farm and moved the family farther away from Chicago. One reason for this move was that they were practical individuals who believed strongly in the virtue of hard work. But the main reason, according to Rogers, was that “they were concerned about the temptations and evils of suburban and city life and wished to get the family away from these threats.”17 Among these threats were such things as dancing, playing cards, watching movies, and drinking soda.

Rogers’ parents were both deeply religious, and his mother in particular became increasingly fundamentalist over time. Every day after breakfast, whether there were guests in the house or not, the family would gather in a circle for Bible reading and prayers. One of his mother’s favorite Biblical phrases that stuck in Rogers’ mind was “All our righteousness is as filthy rags in thy sight, oh Lord.” That is, people are at their core utterly sinful. Anxious to protect their children from the temptations to sin, the parents kept a close watch on Rogers and his siblings. As Rogers described it, they were “in many subtle and affectionate ways, very controlling of our behavior.”18

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

For Rogers we find the idea of progress in his focus on the actualizing tendency, an innate and singular human motive that directs the individual to grow and develop toward selfenhancement. Rogers further postulated that the actualizing tendency leads the individual toward increasing autonomy and away from control by external forces. This stress on independence from external control may also be seen to echo another basic aspect of American culture: the founding of the nation through rejection of British control. Although this link may intuitively seem like too much to claim, we will find later that it appeared in Rogers’ own imagery: He made an explicit analogy to the Declaration of Independence when talking about an individual’s drive toward autonomy and freedom. Finally the concept of democracy, where power is held by the people in the absence of class distinctions, is also found expressed in his theory. The ideal therapeutic relationship, he asserted, is one in which the client is seen to have the knowledge and power to determine his or her own path rather than the therapist having authority over the client.

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

One thing we might be struck by at the outset is some similarities between Rogers’ upbringing and Skinner’s. Most importantly, both had parents whose religious beliefs led them to employ strict parenting styles. But although Skinner eventually identified with his parents, and his theory shows the effects of this identification, Rogers eventually rejected his parents’ judgments, and his theory shows the effects of this rejection. In an interview conducted late in life, Rogers himself remarked: “Some of the most fundamental aspects of my point of view and my approach are sort of the reciprocal of what my parents believed.” Although he did not elaborate on this statement at the time, we find support for the idea in his life story.
Childhood
Carl Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, in the town of Oak Park, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. Like Skinner, he grew up in America in the 20th century and was influenced by its prevailing cultural values. The value of progress that we saw in Skinner’s work appears in Rogers’ work as well, but with the coloring of his own particular palette.

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

But as we have also seen, Rogers’ own personal experiences may have made him more sensitive to some phenomena than to others among his therapeutic observations, and may have even in part led to the formation of the phenomena themselves, because he was the therapist for Mr. Bryan. Let us turn to Rogers’ personal life tosee if we can find sources for his theoretical concepts in it.

LIFE
When Rogers was in his 60s he was approached by the editors of a series called A History of Psychology in Autobiography and asked to contribute a chapter on his life. The chapter he wrote appears in the same volume of the series as one by Skinner. But whereas Skinner went on after this to write a complete autobiography of three volumes, Rogers had no interest in such a task, saying at one point that he preferred to look forward rather than backward.

He did, however, provide interviews and written material, including diaries, for a full-length biography by Howard Kirschenbaum, and later provided another set of interviews for an oral history by David Russell. It is from these various sources that we can extract a picture of Rogers’ life.

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

This combination of unconditional positive regard and congruence was also conveyed in the penultimate session, when the counselor indicated that he found Mr. Bryan’s statement about his budding healthy desire to be beautiful and true. As a result of these therapeutic conditions Mr. Bryan came to regain an internal locus of evaluation, trusting in his own budding healthy desire to make the right choices for himself and no longer feeling the need for therapy.

It should be clear by now how Rogers’ theory offers a vital alternative to the two theories we have studied previously. It is a theory that puts at its center the individual’s own organismic experience as a valuable directive force. Unlike Skinner’s theory in which the role of the external environment is decisive, Rogers’ theory asserts that it is the individual’s own subjective experience of the world that is paramount and that determines his or her course in life.

And unlike Freud’s theory in which the individual’s basic impulses are seen as dangerous, Rogers’ theory trusts the goodness and growth potential of the individual’s internal tendencies. It is a theory pervaded with humanity and optimism. Rogers’ work as a psychotherapist was one important source of this theory for understanding persons, and we have seen that the case of Herbert Bryan in particular provided evidence for his theoretical concepts.

The therapy proceeded by the counselor’s conveying to Mr. Bryan his empathic understanding, unconditional positive regard, and congruence. From the first statement by the counselor that asked in an open-ended way for Mr. Bryan to convey what is on his mind, the counselor made clear that his wish was to understand Mr. Bryan’s internal frame of reference.

The counselor attempted to come to know Mr. Bryan’s own experience and to show empathy for his feelings, reflecting back to Mr. Bryan those feelings he expressed. In this way Mr. Bryan was encouraged to explore the range of feelings he himself had, including those he had previously denied. As Mr. Bryan undertook this exploration, the counselor made clear that he had unconditional positive regard for the full range of experiences Mr. Bryan had.

He did not judge Mr. Bryan nor did he direct him toward certain choices; rather he conveyed that he valued Mr. Bryan’s right and ability to choose what he prefers. When in the middle of the therapy Mr. Bryan wondered
whether he could look to the cosmos to ask “which of the two roads do you approve of?,” the counselor recognized that to seek external approval is a possibility, but he also expressed genuineness when he conveyed that he found it doubtful that such an approach settles the question. Instead he indicated that he trusts that Mr. Bryan may have the answer within himself.

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

Let us now return to the case of Herbert Bryan to see how we can find in it the basis for this elaborated theory of personality. The “budding healthy desire” that Mr. Bryan discovered at the end of the therapy is the actualizing tendency that he was endowed with at birth. It is this tendency that led him initially to be drawn to experiences of sexuality and initiative because they were subjectively felt to be organismically satisfying.

But in early childhood his parents set up conditions of worth that were at odds with these organismic values, conveying that their positive regard for him was conditional on his avoiding such behaviors. When as a child he enjoyed exploring sexuality by watching and talking about animals, his mother responded with horror and whipped him; when as a child he pursued fantasies of exploring initiative in a dream about climbing Pike’s Peak, he perceived his father as looking intensely stern and forbidding.

In order to retain the love of his parents he introjected their values, coming to feel that his own sensory and visceral equipment negatively valued sexuality and initiative through his experience of a blocking sensation. Although intellectually he believed that sexuality and initiative are good behaviors, his valuing was divorced from his own organismic functioning and determined instead by his parents’ attitudes. This incongruence between his experience and his self-concept led to the feeling of internal division or incongruence that he identified as his reason for seeking therapy.

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

Rogers had identified these qualities of unconditional positive regard and empathy as two of the therapeutic conditions in his 1942 book. But in that work he had also identified a third therapeutic quality, a refusal to influence or coerce the client, the quality of being nondirective. By his 1959 paper Rogers had changed the name of his therapy from nondirective to client-centered, and he had dropped this third therapeutic condition from his list of defining qualities. But a new third quality had now been introduced, that of congruence.

By congruence Rogers refers to the counselor’s genuineness in the therapeutic relationship, the accurate awareness of his or her own experience in the relationship. Thus, if the counselor is experiencing threat and discomfort in the relationship but is only aware of feeling acceptance and understanding, then this incongruence will have negative consequences for the therapy. The counselor cannot help the client overcome incongruence if he or she is not congruent in the relationship himself or herself.

In the ideal therapeutic relationship, then, the counselor is congruent, empathic, and experiences unconditional positive regard toward the client. Through the combination of these qualities the counselor establishes the conditions for the client’s growth toward acceptance of the full range of experiences. This leads the client toward psychological adjustment, which is characterized by an openness to experience without defensiveness, congruence between self and experience, and living by an internal locus of evaluationrather than by externally determined conditions of worth.

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

What, then, are the conditions by which a common neurosis or acute psychosis can be reversed? According to Rogers the individual’s own actualizing tendency can be trusted to move him or her forward toward growth, health, and adjustment, but the obstacles that have impeded this normal process in the first place must be removed. In place of the conditions of worth, the individual must experience from a counselor or other significant person that their positive regard is unconditional.

Regardless of how the individual feels or acts, he or she is seen as worthy and lovable, prized and valued as a whole person. When a counselor feels and shows such unconditional positive regard toward experiences of which the client is frightened or ashamed, as well as those with which the client is pleased or satisfied, then the client can learn to accept all organismic experiences as part of the self.

Along with unconditional positive regard, however, the counselor must also show empathic understanding. If unconditional positive regard is conveyed when the counselor knows little of the client it is of no great value, because further knowledge could disclose aspects of the client that the counselor would not regard positively. If the counselor displays empathy, however, he or she perceives the internal frame of reference of the client with accuracy,
sensing the other’s hurts and pleasures. When the counselor thoroughly knows and empathically understands the wide variety of the client’s feelings and behaviors and still experiences unconditional positive regard, then this is a very profound thing indeed.

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

But this resolution has tragic consequences. The values that we have introjected from parents or other intimate figures are experienced as if based on our own sensory and visceral equipment. As a result, our valuing has become divorced from our own organismic functioning and determined instead by the attitudes of others.

This establishes a state of incongruence between self and experience that is the basis for psychological maladjustment. Experiences that are congruent with the conditions of worth are conceptualized accurately in awareness. But those experiences that run contrary to these conditions of worth are felt as threatening and must be distorted or denied to awareness. This leads to the common neurosis of humanity: We live not as whole persons open to all experiences but rather in estrangement from basic aspects of our experience.

According to Rogers, defensiveness against the threat of perceiving incongruent information applies to all individuals to some degree. Under certain conditions, however, when a significant experience suddenly or obviously demonstrates a substantial incongruence between an individual’s self and his or her experience, this process of defense is unable to operate successfully. The result is that the individual will experience anxiety at the coming awareness of the incongruity, the organismic experience will be accurately symbolized in awareness, and the self-structure will be broken and a state of disorganization will result. This is the phenomenology of an acute psychotic breakdown.

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