Carl Rogers
Person-Centered Theory
The Humanist Perspective
The humanist perspective in psychology represents a “third force” which
developed as a counterpoint to psychodynamic theory and behaviorism.
Humanist psychologists, led by Abraham Maslow, began meeting in 1957 to
exchange papers, and they ultimately formed the Association of Humanistic
Psychology. This group included Allport, Erich Fromm, Kelly, Maslow,
Rollo May, Henry Murray, and Carl Rogers. Even though Allport is
associated with trait psychology, he actually gave the group the name
“humanist.” Both Rogers and Maslow studied with Adler, and the Adlerian
group were first to publish humanist papers. You can see the affinity, as
Adler stressed holism, choice, and the subjective experience of the
individual. These were concepts the humanists chose to study in depth in
order to understand human motivation. Horney and Kurt Goldstein also
influenced the humanists as they stressed the efforts of brain-injured
patients to strive as a whole person, not a bundle of part-brain processes.
The humanist perspective is committed to the value of personal growth,
healthier aspects of human experience such as spirituality, creativity, and
tolerance. They value the subjective, phenomenological experience of the
person. They focus on the present experience, not the past or future
expectations. They also stress personal choice and responsibility for choice.
The past does not determine the present. No one is a helpless victim of
his/her life. People do have different capacities for self-reflection, however,
which does determine how healthy a choice a person can make. The
humanists are also interested in changing the environment to enhance human
potential for positive choice-making.
Humanists describe a “true self” which holds the potential for optimum
growth. The more we separate from the true self, the more unhealthy we
become. Humanists believe we should be guided by our inner knowing, not
the desire to please or be affirmed by others. This belief has been compared
to a religion, but its beliefs fit the American emphasis on individuality and
optimism of spirit. Humanists have been criticized for underestimating the
evil in mankind, as they believe people are intrinsically good. They cite
environmental causes as the source of evil. Other critics believe the
emphasis on self-actualization fosters selfishness, narcissism rather than
social interest. Humanists stress the goals of behavior, so they are
teleological (future-oriented) rather than deterministic, as both the
alternative views of psychology stress. Science in general is deterministic,
searching for causes of behavior in the past, rarely in future goals. So
humanists are not enamored with scientific method as practiced through
experimental method, but Rogers was very interested in scientifically
validating his therapeutic methods. What Rogers began, the positive
psychologists are honing today. Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi both work
to produce a scientific body of research that supports humanist beliefs and
focuses on what people do in service of being healthy and growing.
Preview of theory
Rogers can claim a place in psychology as his theory regarding
therapy was the first to be tested by empirical research. He specified the
conditions necessary to offer effective therapy, and the nature of the change
process. He defines outcomes of therapy so they can be measured. His
theory holds value for business, child development and even politics and
world conflict, as well as individual change. His basic belief is that people
are motivated by a growth-directed process- the actualizing tendency. This
was a very different philosophical belief from most psychological theories,
or even religious beliefs. (And, curiously enough, people respond very
powerfully to being believed in- for many of us it is a novel experience.)
Biography
Carl Rogers was born near Chicago in 1902 to a businessman who
held rigid beliefs about discipline in the family. It was a fundamentalist
Christian family, valuing hard work and strict rules. It was so repressive that
Rogers and two of his siblings developed ulcers. Rogers was active in
church-based volunteer work, even traveling to China on a YMCA program.
This freedom from family constriction allowed him to value different
customs outside the valuing system of his family. He earned a bachelor’s
degree in history, married Helen, an artist, and went to NYC for graduate
school. He earned his doctorate at Columbia University in psychology,
developing a test to measure children’s personality adjustment. He continued
to work with children, both delinquent and underprivileged youth. Finally he
took an academic appointment to Ohio State University after publishing
Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child. He realized his ideas about therapy
were original and published them in Counseling and Psychotherapy. He
opened up therapy to observation, and taught graduate students through
practicum experiences. This was the first experience of students to be trained
in the university through supervised experience. He established a new
counseling center at University of Chicago, writing Client-Centered
Therapy. He finally took a position at University of Wisconsin, but disliked
the competitive atmosphere in the Psychology Department so much that he
resigned in protest. In 1964 he moved to Western Behavioral Sciences
Institute in La Jolla, CA to develop the Center for the Studies of the Person.
He explored the power of encounter groups and eventually studied means of
facilitating international peace. He did have problems with drinking and had
an extramarital affair which caused much pain to his family. He earned
many professional honors during his career, even being nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1987. He died that year of a heart attack.
The Actualizing Tendency is the general, positive trend toward growth that
he saw motivating human beings- the desire to grow, express, and activate
all one’s capacities. The formative tendency is the general tendency in all
nature to move toward development. In humans it is called the actualizing
tendency. So behavior is seen as rational, in service toward a goal, even if it
is bizarre in nature. This actualizing tendency moves us toward complexity,
independence, and social responsibility. Our basic motivational instinct is
basically good and healthy. This optimism about the human condition was
seen as radical, very much opposed to the selfishness of the Freudian view
of man, or the sinful view of Christian religious people.
The Organismic Valuing Process is an inner, subconscious knowing that
guides us in evaluating new experiences for their growth potential. It draws
people toward growth-inducing experiences. This could be thought of as
intuition. This inner experience directs our choices- in positive ways if we
have been taught to attend to it. This is an inner valuing process that is
accurate if the person has been raised to trust himself and respect his or her
emotional needs. Some people have even applied this process to the health
of the body- a person in touch with his needs will be physically healthier.
Unfortunately, not all people have been raised to respect their personal
needs. So this inner valuing process has been silenced and replaced with
efforts to please others. (You can see how Rogers’ early childhood
development repressed his individual functioning, as his family was very
repressive and strict. This may have contributed to his acting out later in
life.) When Rogers was questioned about criminals and violent people who
do not seem to be functioning in a positive way, Rogers would say the
environment, early abuse, etc. caused the person to lose touch with his/her
inner feelings. Their feelings are either ignored or punished, and so they
invalidate any emotional reactions, especially empathy. These people have
little reaction to the victims they afflict. So Rogers would say that they are
acting out of fear and defensiveness, not innate evil forces.
The Fully Functioning Person is described as a person who is selfactualizing and pays attention to his/her inner valuing process. This person is
not overwhelmed by early socialization and s/he displays many of the
following characteristics:
 Openness to Experience, meaning this person is present within his
experience, open to what happens around him. S/he feels feelings in
response to others’ acts and does not censor or deny the impact of
these events. S/he also trusts his feelings about such experiences. This
also includes tolerance for ambiguity in experiences.
 Existential Living means this person tries to live fully within each
moment. This means fully experiencing the moment, but also
observing each moment. The person is willing to be changed by his
interactions in the world. So s/he is flexible in response to life
experience.
 Organismic Trusting means trusting one’s intuitive experience. The
person values his/her inner needs and feelings, without letting others
dictate what s/he should feel. This person does not need affirmation
from others for validation.
 Experiential Freedom this is an inner freedom- choice about how to
think and develop a perspective on any circumstance. Actually, most
adults have behavioral freedom, as well, but they don’t always see
that since they are often in bondage to a picture of life or others’
expectations of them.
 Creativity regards more than artistic production, it includes
adaptation to new experiences, not being locked into past history or
future expectations. It means being the artist of one’s own life.
Subjective Experience, Values, and Science
Rogers validated the subjective experience of each person over the
dispassionate evaluation of science. This subjective experience often has the
character is spiritual experience- altered states of consciousness or
mysticism. Rogers believed that paranormal phenomena should be explored
in research. Values are important in Rogers’ theory- but they are unique to
each person. Values develop through our personal experience.
The Self- Rogers was the first to really explore the role of self in personality
development. He described two selves- a self that has been built and shaped
by social/ cultural successes, but may not be authentic, and the self that
arises from the death of that acculturated self.
 Ideal self leads to mental disturbance, as the person feels s/he should
be this idealized self, and often rejects the reality of the self. The more
incongruence a person experiences between this ideal self and the
authentic self, the more the person experiences the real self as
threatening. So the person distorts his/her experiences and feelings in
order to promote a more likable, socially acceptable self.
 Real self is the self that holds the actualizing tendency, the intuition
about what is right for the person, without apology. So the more
authentic the person allows himself to become, the healthier he
becomes.
Development affects the child’s perception of self. Adults tell children to
“be good.” So the child substitutes adult praise for his/her own desires and
feelings. Many parents, in the interest of motivating their children to be
good, and work hard, only offer love and acceptance when the child is
behaving.
 Conditions of worth are the standards or expectations that a person is
expected to live up to in order to gain praise or acceptance or love.
This developmental pattern produces human doings, instead of human
beings. As a result children try to only show the “good” qualities and
disown the “bad” qualities. Many “bad” qualities are spontaneous,
excitement, creativity and self-direction. These are qualities that could
protect and help the child to know his greatest potentials.
 Parenting styles affect a child’s personality development.
o Authoritarian parents stress obedience & respect for adults.
This comes at a price for the child, as his/her natural
inclinations are rejected as inadequate. It can produce
dependent personalities who do not trust their own intuitions
about what is right for themselves, even as adults. These
children are taught not to rebel or question authority, so that
when they feel rebellion or individuation, it feels dangerous.
The child learns to become rigid in following the rules so s/he
will not have to deal with ambiguous or confusing feelings.
These people have a hard time learning to think for themselves,
even as adults.
o Authoritative parents, on the other hand, teach children to
think about possible outcomes when choosing behaviors and
trying to get their needs met. These children learn a rational
valuing process when choosing responses to other people. This
process values their own needs at least as much as the needs
and demands of others. These parents offer much affection and
unconditional acceptance to their children, teaching them the
value of caring for others and being thoughtful in their
interactions with others.
 Unconditional positive regard means accepting and valuing a person
without requiring them to meet some behavior standards. Parents can
offer unconditional positive regard even while instilling values and
teaching children the unfortunate consequences of some of their
choices. If a person did not have that sort of parenting, however, it is
possible to have remediation and healing through later safe
relationships with healthy adults, or with a therapist. This is a
powerful therapeutic intervention but observing it in a session does
not reveal how influential it is. It looks very benign in practice.
Development of creativity
Creativity emerges as people move into healthy development.
Creativity can be fostered by parents in offering children tasks and
suggestions of various means of solution. Creativity requires 3 psychological
qualities:
Openness to experience
An internal locus of evaluation
The ability to toy with elements and concepts
Therapy- Rogers developed a new therapeutic approach which he called
client-centered therapy. He also pioneered the practicum approach to
teaching student counselors by having them observe therapy sessions. He
was first to find ways to test therapy techniques’ effectiveness in controlled
studies.
 Client-centered therapy is based on the idea that the person seeking
help is the best judge of the direction that will lead to his/her growth.
The therapist should listen carefully to the client to hear what that
person needs and clarify and validate it as much as possible. Therapy
should help the person to reconnect with his/her organismic valuing
process. This is considered nondirective therapy, since the therapist
has no preconceived agenda for the client (and that is darned hard to
do, when you see people acting so self-destructively.) The therapist
tries to mirror the client’s experience, often giving words for feelings
the client displays. The idea is that if the person can truly understand
his/her emotional experience, s/he can better conceptualize how to
behave in order to get his needs met. This is a non-coercive approach
to therapy, but it is not always useful if the client is in imminent
danger or crisis. In these cases the doctor often must take charge in
order to keep the client safe until s/he is stabilized. But Rogers’
approach is very far from the medical model which idealizes the
authority of the doctor and objectifies the client. Rogers believed there
were 3 crucial conditions necessary to promoting therapeutic progress:
o Unconditional positive regard is a feeling of warmth and
acceptance, acceptance of the person of the client, even if you
cannot accept his behavior. Positive regard is not contingent on
the client doing anything.
 Prizing is another term for unconditional positive regardfinding something about the client to value. In this
process the client comes to value him/herself more
highly. When people feel respectful of themselves they
tend to act more respectful of others, also. This allows
the person to open up and reveal parts of the self which
had been repressed or disowned because of early
rejection. The therapist can often shine a positive light on
these previously rejected parts of the self. Now the client
begins to trust the organismic valuing process.
o Congruence is authenticity of the therapist. His behavior
should match his inner feeling experience. If the therapist
cannot offer acceptance of the client, or feels revulsion due to
something the client has said, the therapist should express his
feelings, always owning them in an honest way. This is a risk
on the part of the therapist, but it models authenticity and
owning ones’ emotional experience. It is a fine line for
therapists to know how much to reveal, however. The therapy
session is for the benefit of the client, so the therapist must be
cautious in spending time on his/her own feelings.
o Empathic understanding means the therapist has the ability to
get into the subjective experience of the client. (Sometimes a
therapist will hear a tragic story and feel it so genuinely that
s/he cries- this may be the first time the client has ever
experienced empathy with his or her pain. It can be very
powerful and freeing of repressed hurt and pain.) Obviously the
therapist must be clearly in turn with his/her own feelings in
order to make use of them in therapy. It also means trying to
give words to an emotional reaction that the person who is
relating it may not have. It also may be possible for the
therapist to hear a client’s story and reframe the client within
the story in a more positive way- understanding and validating
the person’s desperation or helplessness which might have led
him to act in ways he finds repulsive or feels guilty about. This
all requires great emotional intelligence on the part of the
therapist. And the good therapist offers these insights in a
tentative way, so the client can reject them if they are incorrect.
The therapist is not invested in being “right” about the client’s
experience, merely in getting the client to assess and feel
his/her experience more authentically. When a client feels fully
known and accepted, s/he may no longer need all the defenses
that have protected him/her. Now the person can open up the
real self and find ways to integrate it into daily experience.
Adequate counseling training means learning how to deal with
clients from different cultural backgrounds in order to
effectively understand people who are very different in past
experience. This can be developed by using cognitive empathy
techniques- asking clients about their culture as well as
respecting the varieties of healthy functioning that are different
in nature from what we in middle-class culture would describe.
Research on therapy- because Rogers wanted to validate his therapeutic
approach with empirical evidence, he described his constructs as specifically
as possible.
The process of psychotherapy was coded into specific events that would
occur during therapy. This includes behaviors of therapist and client. He
generated scales to assess therapist effectiveness, so counselors in training
could be more thoroughly briefed about effective techniques.
Outcomes of psychotherapy would be assessed according to the healthy
characteristics of self-actualizing people: openness to experience, selfacceptance, and trust of organismic experience. He used the Q-sort
technique to allow clients to describe themselves and could actually see
movement of the real self and ideal self into greater congruence. Today, with
the emphasis on brief therapy (HMOs don’t want to pay for any more
therapy than absolutely necessary.) there is heightened expectation that the
therapist state specific goals for the client. In general there are some
generally desired outcomes for clients: the person should be able to function
more satisfactorily in his/her work or family, and troubling symptoms should
be reduced. Humanist therapists stress, however, that progress should be
determined by the client’s experience, not so much by others. (Many clients
leave therapy when they are happy with their changes, regardless of what the
therapist would hope for the person. Necessary change cannot be judged by
an objective scale.)
Stages of process- people often change in very incremental degrees and
Rogers developed a scale to measure this painstaking process:
 The Process Scale is a seven-stage description of the process of
change. Rogers described therapy as most effectively occurring
between stages 3 and 6. Before stage 3 most clients aren’t willing to
engage in therapy, since they are busy attributing their problems to
other people or situations. Also early in the process clients tend to
immerse themselves in their past and external issues or people. It
takes awhile for people to understand their own part in their problems.
Most things can’t change until the client takes some ownership of the
problem, but as I said earlier, many comfortable clients don’t wish to
solve the problem, there is a secondary payoff in simply complaining
about the problem. There’s money in it if you can stand it. Hopefully
by the time the client moves from stage 6 to 7, the change process
takes on a life of its own and the person will continue growing even
after leaving therapy.
Encounter groups were developed as a growth-enhancing technique in
which a group of people honestly express themselves to a group and accept
the group’s wisdom, support, and gentle confrontation. These are powerful
engines of change, but not every client can participate. People must have
developed some inner strength to handle the group’s presence and to open
themselves up in an honest fashion. There are experiences designed to
improve interpersonal functioning as well as motivate personal growth.
 Facilitator is the leader of the group, but generally the leader does not
direct the group in a structured way. Mostly the facilitator serves to
keep the atmosphere safe and help members to express themselves in
ways that do not harm others. In a truly unstructured group, a leader
will emerge and other members will accept the leader or challenge
him/her. People will project their issues onto one another and if the
group is truly sensitive, these transferences can be used to explore
inner dynamics.
Other applications
 Humanistic education - these ideas are similar to Rogers’ ideas about
therapy.
o Person-centered – this form of education is focused on what
the student wishes to get from the educational experience, not
what the educator expected him to get. There is no experience
of fear of failure or guilt in this form of education. Fear
undermines creative exploration of learning. So the learner
must determine for himself what is essential to be learned for
the experience to have been successful. The teacher wants to
foster the student’s interest and means of learning. Each person
is responsible for his learning experience. So the teacher
becomes a facilitator of learning, using interactive experiences,
not simply book learning for the emotional engagement of the
learner.
 Marriage and relationships- Rogers seemed to have anticipated the
changes in the marriage relationships of today- with expectations of
partners to be equal, rejecting social roles, mutual trust, and tolerance
of individual differences in forming relationships.
o Satellite relationships are outside relationships that offer
support to one of the married partners. Obviously these
relationships can become sexual, threatening the original bond.
But humanists would say the individual must determine the
value of these relationships and what is important to the person
in maintaining them. Even friendships should be characterized
by congruence, unconditional acceptance, & empathy. People
who have friendships like this generally score higher on
measures of adjustment and self-esteem.
 Social welfare programs should be changed in concert with Rogers’
ideas- where support is not simply handed out, but clients are
encouraged to become self- sustaining and empowered. Then their
dependence on welfare will decline.
 Business can benefit from Rogers’ ideas in forming more effective
management teams and encouraging creative problem-solving from
many members of the firm.
 Political conflict, war, and peace- Ultimately Rogers’ desired to see
psychological principles used in finding solutions to world conflicts,
aid for the poor, & diminishment of threat of nuclear holocaust.
Criticism of Rogers’s theory has been primarily around Rogers’ belief in
the positive nature of man. His therapeutic technique is not more effective
than other techniques, so he doesn’t have a lock on the human condition. He
has been accused of not recognizing the extent of the human capacity for
evil, as well as not recognizing the social forces that influence an
individual’s development. Others say that human growth is not always
toward the good. Also what is good for an individual is not necessarily good
for the group. His theory elicits much controversy, yet it is one of the most
useful means of working with troubled people. It is particularly useful in the
beginning stages of therapy as the therapist builds an emotional rapport with
the client and encourages the client to become invested in his/her own
change process.