History Transpersonal Pioneers: Carl Rogers

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History Transpersonal Pioneers: Carl Rogers 4/25/2016 Sofia University » Transpersonal Pioneers: Carl Rogers SOCIAL Contact • Canvas • Portal • Email • Library • 中文简体 • Español • India ABOUT ADMISSIONS ACADEMICS SCHEDULE STUDENT LIFE FOUNDATION NEWS/EVENTS RESOURCES search now... SoȄa University > SoȄa for 2015 and Beyond > History Of SoȄa University > Transpersonal Pioneers: Carl Rogers History Apply RSVP for an Open House Schedule a Tour Financing Your Education History History Of SoȄa University Transpersonal Pioneers: Mary Calkins Transpersonal Pioneers: Aldous Huxley Transpersonal Pioneers: Abraham Maslow Transpersonal Pioneers: William James Transpersonal Pioneers: Carl Jung Transpersonal Pioneers: Carl Rogers > Transpersonal Pioneers: Carl Rogers Carl Rogers Carl Rogers was a founder of humanistic psychology whose contributions to psychology and psychotherapy continue to resonate throughout the Ȅeld. His theory and practice shifted the authoritarian paradigm of therapist-led psychotherapy toward a client-centered practice, which gave primacy to the client’s self-knowledge and impulses toward healing one’s own problems. In addition to radically changing therapeutic practices, Rogers applied his person-centered psychological theory to other Ȅelds including education, couples counseling, and group work within industry and governments. The Life of Carl Rogers It is impossible to grasp the profundity of Rogers’s contributions to the Ȅeld without an overview of his formative years and his academic and professional pursuits, as his journey through life greatly in̄uenced the scope and direction of both his theory and practice. Born January 8, 1902 into a strict Protestant family living in Oak Park, Illinois, Rogers was an isolated loner who sought solace in academia. His family was prosperous and moved to a farm away from the “‘temptations’ of suburban life” when Rogers was twelve (Rogers, 1989, p. 8). There he developed a keen interest in science through the observation of the natural world around him and the cultivation of his family’s farmland. http://www.sofia.edu/about/history/transpersonal­pioneers­carl­rogers/ 1/7 4/25/2016 Sofia University » Transpersonal Pioneers: Carl Rogers These experiences led him to the University of Wisconsin to study agriculture. During his junior year of college, Rogers traveled to China as part of a youth ministry conference. While abroad, some of the rigid fundamentalism impressed upon him during his formative years diminished. Reminiscing about what he learned on his journey, in hindsight Rogers viewed this period as a time of personal growth. It was 1922, four years after the close of World War I. I saw how bitterly the French and Germans still hated each other, even though as individuals they seemed very likable. I was forced to stretch my thinking, to realize that sincere and honest people could believe in very divergent religious doctrines. In major ways I for the Ȅrst time emancipated myself from the religious thinking of my parents, and realized that I could no longer go along with them” (Rogers, 1989, p. 9). Upon his return and the completion of his undergraduate degree, Rogers married and moved to New York City to study for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary. Ultimately, however, Rogers decided against the life of a preacher and completed a degree in clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. It was during this phase of his education that he was exposed to “the dynamic Freudian views” of the clinicians supervising his internship which starkly contrasted the “rigorous, scientiȄc, coldly objective, statistical point of view” presented at school (Rogers, 1989, p. 10). Rogers’s evolution toward a humanistic approach to psychotherapy was clearly in̄uenced by this clinical training and inspired him to pursue an independent, unorthodox professional career. He moved to Rochester, New York directly after graduation from Teachers College to work in a children’s counseling center. While there, he discovered that the directive therapeutic approach in vogue at this time was not effective in the counseling room. His Ȅrst book, The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child (1939) was developed out of this early clinical work and led to an appointment to full professorship at Ohio State University. There he wrote Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942). Subsequently, in 1945, he moved to the University of Chicago, where he opened a clinic based upon his primary theoretical paradigms, which evolved into a psychotherapeutic approach called client-centered therapy, and later renamed person-centered therapy. The 1951 book, Client-Centered Therapy outlined Rogers’s distinctive therapeutic philosophy and style: the client should be free to determine her/his own therapeutic path rather than being led by a clinician toward self-awareness. This paradigm was expanded further, based upon Rogers’s many years of clinical experience in his 1961 book On Becoming a Person, published during his tenure at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Simultaneous with his work in psychotherapy, Rogers was also an educator and applied the person-centered approach to theories about education. Rogers believed strongly that graduate students learn best when engaged in learning what they are truly interested in and that institutions that are too proscriptive are doing disservice to the creative aspects of the Ȅelds of education and science—views he expressed and expanded upon in the book Freedom to Learn (1969) and later updated in Freedom to Learn for the 80s (1983). However, Rogers chose to leave the elite world of academia in 1963, moving to California and working at the Western Behavioral Science Institute. In 1968 he helped found the Center for Studies of the Person, an organization of person-centered professionals conducting workshops, research, and activist initiatives. The mandate of the center is to: . explore the richness of the Person: to help individuals discover and experience more fully in their own lives and relationships even in their organizations – the wealth of what it means to be personal. Of what it means, for example, to be private as well as to be open, of what it means to yield to others and what it means to be self-controlling. This Center intends to experience anew and in its own life the meaning of democracy and of community. In its scientiȄc aims, it intends to go beyond the narrow limits of existing social science methodologies. It intends to invent and submit to the public methods of study suited to the dignity and depth of its subject, being human. It will use means of knowing designed to expand a person’s hope for him- or herself. This is a center for persons. (Center for Studies of the Person, 2005). Rogers remained active with the Center for the rest of his life, traveling internationally and facilitating groups on person-centered approaches. Through the Center, Rogers was instrumental in the development of the use of encounter groups and applied his person-centered approach to improving group dynamics in corporate, government, and international diplomatic arenas. The political implications of the person-centered approach are outlined in Rogers’s 1978 book, Carl Rogers on Personal Power. While working with the center, Rogers continued to write, both personal rēections and professional observations, until his death at age 85 in 1987. Major Concepts of Carl Rogers The main crux of Rogerian theory is that the human experience is unique to each individual and, if given appropriate conditions for self- exploration and inquiry, people will shed defenses (“masks” or “false selves” as Rogers called them) and gravitate toward psychological health. This core belief developed into a theory—coined Becoming a Person—which grew out of experience gained through thousands of hours in clinical practice. Thus, Rogers was an applied psychologist, following in the footsteps of Freud and Jung in his own work, using what he learned while practicing psychotherapy to develop theories about the human condition and human relationships, including the relationship of client and therapist. Rogers wrote extensively on Becoming a Person. Primary to this theoretical construct is the belief that human beings are not static http://www.sofia.edu/about/history/transpersonal­pioneers­carl­rogers/ 2/7 4/25/2016 Sofia University » Transpersonal Pioneers: Carl Rogers constructions or unchanging personalities, but are dynamic, ever-changing entities: the person (or self) is a process. In addition, Rogers believed in the inherent positive potentialities of all living things. Such capacity is “evident in all organic and human life—to expand, extend, become autonomous, develop, mature—the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, to the extent that such activation enhances the organism or the self” (1961, p. 35). These central ideas were supported by several suppositions about the nature of the human being. First, human beings are motivated toward self-actualization, as stated above. Human beings also have personal power, or “vast resources for self-understanding, for altering self-concept, his attitudes, and his self-directed behavior” (Rogers, 1978, p. 7). Problems arise for people for whom this personal power is diminished or restricted due to domination from others, either overt (such as martial law) or covert (such as Ȅnding one’s self in a manipulative relationship). The implication for placing so much power squarely upon the individual is great; including the potential for personal, social, and political change if all persons
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