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Carl Ransom Rogers and
Person-Centred Theory
Carl Ransom Rogers
Carl Ransom Rogers (1902–1987) is best known for devising person-centred theory
(also known as ‘client-centred theory), which is influenced by humanistic theory. He
paved the way for client-led therapies, and is the source of many well-known quotes.
Early years
Carl Ransom Rogers was born on 8 January 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago
suburb. His parents – Walter A. Rogers and Julia M. Cushing – were both devout
Christians attending a Pentecostal church.
Rogers became the fourth of six children, who were brought up in a strict religious and
ethical environment. He was taught to read at home before he attended kindergarten,
where he was deemed so advanced that he immediately joined the second-year students.
In 1914, the Rogers family bought a farm in the neighbouring suburb of Glen Ellyn.
There, the young Rogers gained his appreciation of the scientific method by observing
moths and other living things.
Study years
In 1921, Rogers attended the University of Wisconsin to study agriculture but soon
changed course to study history instead. A year later, he attended the World Student
Christian conference in Beijing and spent six months in China.
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In 1924, Rogers graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor of Arts
degree in history. He initially enrolled at the Theological Seminary in New York to
become a church minister.
However, in 1926, he married Helen Elliot and decided against a career in religion,
instead signing up to study psychology and teaching at the University of Columbia.
Career years
On graduating, Rogers took a position at the Rochester Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, later serving as Director. In 1931, he was awarded his PhD for
research on the Rorschach ink-blot test.
It was during his tenure at Rochester that Rogers became strongly influenced by a
social-worker colleague who had studied under the psychotherapist Otto Rank.
Rogers also came across the work of Jessie Taft, one of the key female voices in the
development of person-centred therapy. Taft was already an accomplished author and
had also translated Rank’s work from German to English for an American audience. It
was the ideas of Rank and Taft that laid the ground for what Rogers would call ‘nondirective therapy’.
Anecdote has it that there was one particular event at Rochester that altered the
direction of Rogers’ thinking – and thus the world of psychotherapy – forever.
According to this, when Rogers was working with a child who had behavioural issues, he
tried to convince the mother that the reason the child was behaving badly was because
of her early rejection of the child. The mother stormed out, only to return and ask
whether Rogers took adults for counselling. When Rogers replied that he did, she
proceeded to tell her own story. Rogers realised the power of letting the client speak
about their world, without ‘expert’ intervention. This encounter formed that basis of
what he later described as ‘client-centred therapy’.
While Rogers’ ideas attracted criticism from the psychotherapeutic community, they
also gained wide acceptance over time. Rogers was honoured with many awards and
accolades, including being elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 1961.
He was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in Northern Ireland and
Russia, where he tried to bring differing factions together in the hope of finding
common ground.
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Sadly, the nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize arrived a few days after his death on 4
February 1987, caused by a fall at his home in La Jolla, California.
Key books published
Rogers was a prolific writer and published many other books and papers during his life.
The following books are particularly key in setting out his theory and ideas:
•
Client-Centered Therapy: Its current practice, implications and theory
(published in 1951) – Rogers wrote this book while working as a professor of
psychology at the University of Chicago (where he helped establish a counselling
centre and conducted effectiveness studies). The book describes his findings and
theories.
•
On Becoming a Person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy (1961) – this book
was written while Rogers was teaching psychology at the University of Wisconsin.
In it, he describes his experiences helping people with personal development.
•
A Way of Being (1980) – written towards the end of Rogers’ career, this book is
seen as more personal and philosophical than Rogers’ earlier works, and ends
with a call for a more person-centred, humane future.
•
The Carl Rogers Reader (published posthumously in 1989) – the year before
Rogers died, he had started work on this collection of his writing with the help of
Howard Kirschenbaum, author of On Becoming Carl Rogers and Valerie Land
Henderson, his associate of many years.
Humanistic Psychology
It is humanistic psychology that underlies the person-centred approach. The humanistic
approach is sometimes referred to as the ‘third force’ of psychology, a term coined by
American psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1968 – the first force being psychoanalysis
and the second behaviourism.
Carl Rogers adopted humanistic theory into his person-centred therapeutic model.
Tudor and Merry (2006, p.68) note: ‘It was significant for the later development of his
ideas that Rogers’ first graduate training was at the liberal Union Theological Seminary
in New York and that he was attracted to and encouraged in unorthodox thinking.’
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Rogers first explained his developing theory in a Minnesota lecture entitled ‘Newer
concepts in psychotherapy’. Thorne and Sanders (2012, p. 12) report that ‘he
subsequently came to consider the date of this event as the birthday of client-centred
therapy’.
There – to an outraged audience – Rogers criticised the traditional approach to therapy,
particularly the practice of directive advice-giving (which was part of both Freudian
psychoanalytic and Skinnerian behaviourist approaches), and advocated ‘helping
individuals to grow and develop’ (believing that everyone has the ability to trust in
themselves enough to make their own decisions), an ‘emphasis on feelings and emotions
rather than on cognitive aspects of a situation’, ‘a focus on the present rather than the
past’ and ‘the crucial experience of the therapeutic relationship itself as a major element
in the growth of the client’ (Thorne and Sanders, 2012, p. 13) – all key features of the
humanistic approach.
Rogers’ Key Theories
Rogers produced many valuable theories, including the following three core ideas:
•
•
•
the six necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change
the seven stages of process
the 19 propositions (his theory of personality).
Rogers also developed a rich vocabulary for understanding how human beings perceive
the world. The term ‘locus of evaluation’ is used to refer to the way we make sense of the
world around us. An internal locus of evaluation sees us trusting our organismic self.
Conversely, if we receive conditions of worth (conditional love) from others when we are
young, we develop introjected values. As a result, we live our lives from an external locus
of evaluation – in other words, being able to be happy only when we have the approval
of others.
The six necessary and sufficient conditions
Alfred Adler’s work on change was a particular inspiration for Rogers’ 1957 article, ‘The
Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change’, which
describes the conditions needed for humans to grow/thrive.
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In addition to Rogers’ belief that all humans are born intrinsically good, he held that
they are self-determining (i.e. the best placed to make decisions for themselves and to
sort out their difficulties), so long as they experience the right conditions from others.
The three core conditions for this are empathy (i.e., understanding), congruence
(genuineness) and unconditional positive regard (UPR: non-judgement).
The term ‘core conditions’ was not in fact used by Rogers, but was coined later – in 1969
– by one of his students, Robert Carkhuff. He ‘used it in the context of identifying from
divergent orientations to therapy “core, facilitative and action-oriented conditions” by
which the helper facilitated change in the client (or “helpee”)’ (Tudor, 2000, p. 34).
Adding several additional ‘core conditions’ of his own, Carkhuff used the word ‘core’ to
refer to their applicability to all helping professions, including – for example – social
work, teaching and healthcare. Other terms used to refer to the core conditions are the
‘facilitative conditions’ or ‘therapist’s conditions’.
Describing how the term entered the world of counselling specifically, Tudor (2000, p.
34) continues: ‘The term “the core conditions” was taken up by people much closer to
Rogers than Carkhuff … and applied to three of the necessary and sufficient conditions
and, although Rogers himself did not use the term, it has become part of the personcentred therapy lexicon.’
Although the three core conditions are the best known, Rogers also proposed three
further conditions required for effective therapy: therapist–client psychological contact
(i.e., a sound relationship between the two parties); client incongruence (a mismatch
between the client's experience and awareness, meaning that the client feels vulnerable
or anxious); and client perception of the therapist’s empathy and UPR. These three
further conditions are sometimes referred to as the ‘hidden conditions’, ‘client’s
conditions’ or ‘lost conditions’.
Rogers (1957, pp. 95–96) asserted: ‘No other conditions are necessary. If these six
conditions exist and continue over a period of time, this is sufficient. The process of
constructive personality change will follow.’
The seven stages of process
Rogers’ model of the seven stages of process within the client describes how a person
experiences a developing sense of sense and how open they are to self-change.
Feltham and Dryden (1993, p. 181) refer to the seven stages of process as one model of
stages of change: ‘the marked phases which clients (or people attempting self-change)
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pass through … Rogers’ (1961) 'stages of process' runs from 1 ('remoteness from
experiencing') to 7 ('experiencing effective choices of new ways of being).’ The theory
provides a valuable common language with which counsellors can track client progress
and discuss this in both clinical supervision and case studies.
In his book On Becoming a Person, Rogers (1961, p. 131) writes:
Individuals move, I began to see, not from a fixity or homeostasis through
change to a new fixity, though such a process is indeed possible. But much the
more significant continuum is from fixity to changingness, from rigid structure
to flow, from stasis to process.
Rogers identified that the journey between stages is not linear, and that people move
both ways. Tolan (2003, p. 112) describes this as follows: ‘It is rare to find someone who
shows signs of being in only one “stage” at a time. At some points, a client might even
seem to the counsellor to have “gone backwards”.’ By stage 6, however, progress tends
to be more secure, and self-growth is then able to continue without the counsellor.
The seven stages of process describe an organic process and are not intended to be used
as a framework to ‘push’ clients. Merry (2014, p. 59) notes: ‘There are no direct
interventions that can be made or should be made in an attempt to move the client from
one stage to the next to speed up the process.’
The 19 propositions
It was in 1951 that Rogers wrote Client-Centered Therapy, the first full version of his
theory, which includes a chapter devoted to his theory of personality and behaviour (in
the form of 19 propositions).
In developing this part of his theory, Rogers (1951, p. 482) drew on the work of other
psychologists and on his own experience of counselling clients: ‘Taken as a whole, the
series of propositions presents a theory of behavior which attempts to account for the
phenomena previously known, and also for the facts regarding personality and behavior
which have more recently been observed in therapy.’
The 19 propositions represent the following key ideas:
•
•
•
Consciousness is experienced from the first-person point of view.
Behaviour is a product of self-belief.
A safe emotional environment is necessary for psychological change to take place.
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The 19 propositions thus emphasise the key role in the person-centred approach of the
phenomenological field – i.e., all that the organism experiences, consciously and
otherwise; this is inevitably subjective and therefore not a precise reflection of any
objective reality. Rogers writes (1951, p. 532):
This theory is basically phenomenological in character, and relies heavily upon
the concept of the self as an explanatory construct. It pictures the end-point of
personality development as being a basic congruence between the phenomenal
field of experience and the conceptual structure of the self.
Merry (2014, p. 34) observes: ‘The nineteen propositions repay careful reading because
together they provide us with an elegant theory of how and under what circumstances
people change, and why certain qualities of relationship promote that change.’
Thus, the 19 propositions are of value to counsellors both in working with clients and in
developing ourselves, since – in Kelly’s words (2017, p. 51) – ‘part of the counselling
journey, specifically in PD [personal development] groups, is about encouraging those
elements of our personality that are invisible to us – perhaps not-for-growth elements of
ourselves – to come into our awareness, challenging us to look at them.’
Modern Developments and Research
Present-day key influencers of person-centred theory include Dave Mearns and Brian
Thorne, who have developed Rogers’ unitary view of the self into the idea that people
have many selves (known as ‘configurations of self’). This new concept drew on the work
of Mick Cooper, and all three men are also known for their work on relational depth,
which they assert can occur only when the core conditions are present to a high degree,
and is described by Mearns and Thorne (2000, p. 87) as ‘something really special … a
relationship of incredible safety and vitality in which even the most feared dimensions
of existence can be faced’.
Colin Lago has worked extensively on diversity and transcultural concerns in
counselling, a topic to which Cecil Patterson also contributed, despite his stance as ‘a
follower of Carl Rogers with no need to usurp his position’, who ‘continued to follow by
interpreting and elaborating on it [Rogers’ theory] without trying to extend it’
(Goodyear and Watkins, 1983, p. 593).
Last but not least, Tony Merry founded the British Association for the Person-Centred
Approach in 1989; and Keith Tudor and Mike Worrall (2003) published the first book
that focuses exclusively on a model of supervision consistent with person-centred
principles.
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Cooper (2021, paras. 1–2) observes that while Rogers and his team ‘were amongst the
first counselling and psychotherapy clinicians to use research data as a way of informing
their practice’, ‘since then, many elements of the person-centred field have stalled’. He
continues: ‘We don’t know the latest research findings, we don’t evaluate our approach,
we don’t consider research as a useful source of information in developing our practice.’
Some recent studies of person-centred theory include:
•
•
the large-scale ETHOS trial of school-based person-centred counselling (Cooper
et al., 2020)
the PRaCTICED trial, comparing person-centred counselling for depression with
CBT in the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service (Saxon et
al., 2017).
Cooper (2021, para. 5) notes that ‘there’s so much more research out there that has been
done, and can be done, to really help us nuance, refine, and update our person-centred
ways of working to maximise the benefits that we can give to clients’.
Elliott (2016) summarises over 60 years of studies in person-centred and experiential
psychotherapy and counselling, starting with Carl Rogers’ own work. He looks at three
main areas of research:
•
•
•
the quantitative effects of person-centred and experiential therapies
client in-session processes
the contribution of therapists and therapy methods to client change.
Criticisms of Person-Centred Theory
Arguments against Carl Rogers’ theory are:
•
that person-centred therapy is culture-specific
•
that Rogers may be wrong in his belief that all humans are essentially good,
especially if you look at the various atrocities carried out around the world
•
that the notion of the core conditions as not only necessary but also sufficient
may not be true for some clients (who may need a more structured approach),
e.g. those who have suffered abuse and abandonment, substance misuse or
psychopathy
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•
that therapists may simply be putting on a professional act rather than truly
embodying the core conditions.
The last argument listed above is known as the ‘Masson critique’. Indeed, Masson
(1989) notes several weaknesses of person-centred theory, including that therapists
‘appear to be genuine only because the circumstances of the therapy are artificial’. He
asserts that if therapists were present more widely in their clients’ lives, they would not
be able to offer empathy and UPR.
There is also a critique – a theological perspective – that claims person-centred therapy
puts the self at the centre of a person’s existence, and so goes against the Christian view
of the centrality of God and Jesus. Rose writes:
The humanistic concept of the self, embraced by Carl Rogers and others,
declares that man has the capacity to solve his own problems, and if he is in
possession of all the psychological facts, he is capable of solving all the problems
that face him … This is contrary to biblical teachings; for if man could solve all
his problems by himself, there would be no need for God.
Rose (1996, p. 1) goes on to advise: ‘While humanistic theories focus on human
experiences, problems, potentials and ideals, and encourage insecure and disturbed
people to find solutions within themselves, the Christian psychologists and educators
should point these people to the great Problem Solver – Christ.’
Differences between Person-Centred and Other Theories
In 1936, psychologist Saul Rosenzweig introduced the concept of the ‘dodo bird verdict’,
referring to his claim that all modalities produce similarly effective outcomes. This led to
an interest among researchers in identifying the common factors among different forms
of therapy, in an attempt to explain this effect.
The first two forces to emerge in psychology – psychodynamic and cognitive approaches
respectively – had not initially placed particular value on the quality of the relationship
between client (or ‘analysand’/‘patient’, as they termed the person receiving therapy)
and therapist. It was only with the emergence of the third wave in psychology – the
humanistic approach – that relationship factors began to be seen as a possible
explanation for the dodo bird effect.
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Rogers’ theory followed his reading of the book I and Thou by Austrian philosopher
Martin Buber (translated by Ronald Gregor Smith in 1937, from the original German
version written in 1923), which focuses on the importance of human relationships in
which the parties see each other as fully human and equal (‘I–Thou’ as opposed to ‘I-It’
relationships).
Today, it is widely agreed that the three relationship factors of empathy, congruence and
UPR (i.e. the core conditions) are necessary in all modalities, though they are sometimes
referred to using different terms (for example, empathy being known as ‘empathic
attunement’ in TA). This general realisation of the importance of relationship can be
called ‘the relational turn’.
However, in contrast with person-centred therapy, which sees the core conditions –
with the addition of the remaining three ‘hidden’ conditions – as not only necessary but
also sufficient to bring about therapeutic personality change, other approaches stress
the importance of adding additional elements, e.g. goal-setting and psycho-education
(teaching clients models to apply in their lives). Thus, such models – for example,
cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) – take a directive (rather than non-directive)
approach.
Gestalt (German for ‘whole’) therapy – originated by Fritz and Laura Perls in the
1940/50s – is another humanistic therapy that uses the awareness cycle (also known as
the ‘cycle of experience’) to help clients to become more aware: ‘The active methods and
active personal engagement of gestalt therapy are used to increase the awareness,
freedom, and self-direction of the patient’ (Yontef and Jacobs, 2005, p. 300).
Both CBT and gestalt therapy have features in common with – and differences from –
person-centred therapy. For example, both person-centred therapy and gestalt
emphasise the phenomenological field. All three focus on the present/here and now (as
opposed to the past, as in psychodynamic approaches). While therapists may selfdisclose (if helpful to the client) in gestalt or person-centred therapy, CBT therapists
would not. CBT is more directive than gestalt, which is in turn (a little) more directive
than person-centred therapy (e.g. when using the empty-chair technique). Indeed,
Yontef and Jacobs (2005, p. 300) write: ‘The gestalt therapist uses active methods that
not only develop patients’ awareness, but also develop patient’s repertoires of awareness
and behavioral tools.’ In CBT, the therapist is the expert, while both the person-centred
approach and gestalt therapy allow the client to be more autonomous.
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