In February of 1922, he and other students and professional workers boarded a ship for China. Although his previous exposure had been to religious belief of a conservative and evangelistic kind, on this trip Rogers found students, leaders, and scholars from all parts of the country and all types of experience with divergent religious beliefs. In them he found a group of open-minded individuals eager to explore their religious understandings in uninterrupted discussions on the 3-week voyage across the ocean. They asked themselves the most basic questions that for Rogers’ parents had been unthinkable to ask, such as whether Christ was really the son of God or simply a man like other men. In the face of evidence that sincere and honest people could have such divergent religious beliefs, Rogers’ thinking was stretched in ways it had never before been stretched. The result was that his views became liberalized, and he realized that he could no longer go along with his parents’ beliefs. Only 5 days into the journey he wrote in his diary:

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

At this point in his life he was assuming an attitude of dependence on an external authority, and seeing the swelling force that came from within himself as “terrible” and needing to be reined into the right path.

Although Rogers had come to Wisconsin expecting to study agriculture in preparation for a career in farming, he soon abandoned this plan in favor of a career in the ministry. He became increasingly absorbed in religious activities, helping to organize religious conferences on his own campus and traveling to conferences in other states. This involvement brought him an opportunity in his junior year that was to profoundly alter his life course. A conference of the World Student Christian Federation was being planned in Peking, China. From across the United States, 10 youths were chosen to represent their country as delegates to the conference. Beyond going to the week-long conference in Peking, they would also take part in various meetings and speaking engagements throughout China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Hawaii over a period of months. When Rogers was selected as a student delegate to this conference, he wept with surprise and joy. He felt sure that his selection meant that God had a great plan for him.

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

When Rogers left home for college in 1919, he initially continued to follow the directions laid down by his family. He went to the University of Wisconsin, not because of any evaluation of the school itself, but because both of his parents and all three of his older siblings had gone there and it was expected that he would do so as well. In his first year he roomed with his brother Ross, who was then a senior, in the YMCA dormitory. His religious upbringing made the YMCA a congenial home, and he joined a group that met every Sunday for worship, study, and social activities. His deep involvement in religion, as well as his willingness to be led by an external power, are revealed in a diary he kept at the time. In November of his freshman year, for example, he wrote about a Fellowship meeting:

“Dad” Wolfe spoke on “Selecting a Life Work.” Oh, it’s wonderful to feel that God will really lead me to my life work, and I know He will, for never has he deserted me. Just the same, tho, it is an awesome thing to think that a wrong decision will wreck my life, but oh, how I’ll try and keep my life in tune with God, so that He can guide me. I have plenty of ambition, in fact I sometimes think I’m too ambitious, but if I can only keep that terrible swelling force within me in the right path, I know all willbe well.26

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

After that year, however, Rogers’ father said that he wanted to take the fence down and include the plot with the main field. Rogers suspected that the farm foreman had a hand in this decision, embarrassed by what onlookers would think of the odd things going on in this plot next to a respectable field. Rogers recalled his response later:

That really got me. I felt it was unfair and unjust. I fought and fought for that, and lost, and was really angry and upset. I remember crying about it. They’d taken away something that was
very precious to me and my brothers for no sound reason. I felt very unjustly treated.25

Here we see him ready to stand up for what is personally meaningful, finding it precious, despite the fact that others see it as odd and embarrassing.

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

But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow 2 or 31 feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window. The sprouts were, in their bizarre, futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency… In dealing with clients whose lives have been terribly warped, in working with men and women on the back wards of state hospitals, I often think of those potato sprouts. So unfavorable have been the conditions in which these people have developed that their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, scarcely human. Yet, the directional tendency in them can be trusted.24

As a child at home, Rogers dutifully followed the directions laid down by his parents. But one incident gave a foreshadowing of his future rebellion against authority. A small, 1-acre plot of land had been fenced off by the previous owners of the farm, and after reading some books on feeding and growing techniques, Rogers persuaded his father to let him and his younger brothers use this field as an experimental plot. For a year they worked the field, conducting experiments comparing different kinds of grains and having great fun doing it.

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

He found and raised their caterpillars, collecting the particular kinds of leaves they needed for food. He attentively nursed them for days and weeks through their 12-month cycle, until at last their cocoons opened to reveal the glorious creatures. It was a process of emergence that he remembered “very vividly” into adulthood, and it may have played an important role in leading to his theoretical emphasis on growth and development via an innate actualizing tendency.

Indeed the whole farm life probably made this salient to Rogers. In one of his papers, in which he was seeking to emphasize that the actualizing tendency operates even in the most maladjusted individuals for whom it is not so apparent, he wrote:

I remember that in my boyhood, the bin in which we stored our winter’s supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small window. The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout—pale white sprouts, so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring.

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

It is in this childhood immersion in subjectivity that we might find the origin for his later theoretical emphasis on the subjectivity of organismic experience and the phenomenal field.

In moving their family to a farm when Rogers was 12, his parents were probably hoping that this too would spur their son to take more notice of the real world. They assigned him various chores around the farm, including milking the cows and riding the cultivator. The experiences that seemed to have had the most powerful effect, however, were those in which he had primary responsibility for rearing from infancy lambs, pigs, and other animals. The project he pursued with most passion was the rearing of luna moths. One day while walking in the woods surrounding the farm, Rogers came upon two luna moths just emerging from their cocoons. He looked in wonder at the marvelous creatures, as large as a small bird with long swallowtail wings, pale green in color with spots of purple. From that moment on he was fascinated. He got books on moths to read about them.

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

My life was a very, very private thing… I simply knew somehow that what most interested me would not be of interest to other people and might be sort of scorned or thought of as very strange by other people. So the thought of sharing it never occurred to me.20

He was a dreamy youngster, so often lost in fantasies of his own creation that this too became a source of teasing from siblings and concern from parents. His brothers and sister needled him about this by calling him “Professor Moony” after an absent-minded comic strip character of the time. Around his 12th birthday, his father took him along on a 2-week business trip to visit various construction sites on the east coast, and Rogers later surmised that “it was an attempt to help me become more interested in real life than fantasy.”21 In one of his writings, he went so far as to say that his childhood fantasies “probably would be classed as schizoid,”22 by which he meant perhaps to emphasize their lack of contact with reality. At another time he mused that he could easily have become schizophrenic.23

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

He was the butt of teasing from his siblings, although teasing was apparently a prominent way all the children related to each other. In the autobiographical chapter he wrote as an adult, Rogers recounted that the children in his family all teased each other unmercifully and that this teasing had a biting edge to it. But his siblings took issue with this account when they read it, insisting that the teasing was all in good fun and part of a playful comradery. They saw Rogers as especially sensitive to the teasing, however, and easily hurt.19 Thus, he was as a child particularly vulnerable to feeling a lack of positive regard from others, and so in outlining his theory was aware of the problematic role this need for regard could play in the developing person.

In the face of this teasing from siblings and the negative judgments from parents, Rogers kept to his inner world a great deal, and kept this inner world to himself. Looking back from adulthood he reported:

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

Although he felt sure that his parents loved him, he felt equally sure that they would judge negatively his private thoughts and feelings if they only knew them. Many of Rogers’ later theoretical ideas can be seen as a rejection of this world view held by his parents. His parents had believed that people are sinful in their most basic nature, and so had taken the responsibility of judging and directing their children. In contrast, Rogers would assert the essential trustworthiness of an individual’s inner being, and so argue that he or she needs to be left free of conditions of worth and external direction.

As a child, however, Rogers showed himself eager for the positive regard of others and sensitive to any lack of it. He was frail in stature and shy in personality, and easily prone to tears. He felt that his parents loved his next older brother Ross more than they loved him, and the feeling was strong enough that he developed the idea that he had been adopted.

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