CARL ROGERS: BIOGRAPHY, THEORIES, CONTRIBUTIONS AND WORKS - PSYCHOLOGY

Carl Rogers (1902 - 1987) was an American psychologist who went down in history as one of the main exponents of the humanist current. This therapist created a branch known as nondirective psychology, which emphasized the relationship between the therapist and the patient rather than taking a series of predetermined steps to cure different mental illnesses.

Carl Rogers' interest in psychology began to develop during his time as a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York. In 1931 he obtained his doctorate from Columbia University, and in the following years he worked as both a professor and a researcher for different educational centers.

Rogers drawing. The original uploader was Didius at Dutch Wikipedia.

At the same time, Carl Rogers practiced psychotherapy with patients of all kinds, from children with problems to adults with different pathologies. Throughout his career, Rogers published numerous works, including Treatment of Troubled Children (1939) and Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942). In this last work, he laid the foundations of his therapeutic school, non-directivity.

While serving as a professor at the University of Chicago, Rogers participated in numerous studies with which he tried to verify the effectiveness of his therapeutic methods against other popular approaches at the time. Today, he is considered one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century psychology, and his contributions continue to be of great importance in the field of mental health.

Carl Rogers biography

Early years

Carl Rogers was born on January 8, 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, one of the suburbs of the city of Chicago. He was the son of Walter Rogers, who was a civil engineer, and Julia Cushing, who professed the Baptist faith and stayed home all his life to care for their children. Carl was the fourth of six siblings, and his family ties were very intense during his childhood.

Rogers stood out for his intelligence from his first years of life. For example, he learned to read on his own before entering kindergarten. On the other hand, because he received a very strict and religion-based education, he became a very disciplined and independent person, although also somewhat isolated.

The education that Carl Rogers received during his early years made him interested in the scientific method and the practical discoveries it could bring. Initially he began studying agriculture at the University of Wisconsin, although he also took courses in religion and history.

However, soon after, Rogers began to doubt his religious convictions, and ended up abandoning theology and declaring himself an atheist. In 1928 he graduated with a master's degree in education from the teaching faculty of Columbia University; and in 1931 he obtained his doctorate from the same school. While obtaining the latter degree, he began to conduct psychological studies with children.

Professional life

In 1930 Carl Rogers served as director of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, New York. Later, between 1935 and 1940 he worked as a professor at the local university; and during this time he wrote the book The Clinical Treatment of Problematic Children (1939), based on his experience working with children with different types of problems.

At the level of therapy, it was initially based on the post-Freudian approach first proposed by Otto Rank, and which was completed by his student Jessie Taft, who was very famous in his time due to his clinical work and as a teacher. Once he gained more experience, in 1940 Rogers served as a professor of clinical psychology at Ohio University, where he wrote the book Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942).

In this work, the psychologist proposed the idea that the client could benefit much more from the therapies received if they established a cordial and respectful relationship with their therapist. In this way, through the acceptance and understanding of the professional, the patient could obtain the insights they need to change their life for the better.

In 1945, Carl Rogers opened a consultation center at the University of Chicago itself; and in 1947, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA). During this time, his greatest contribution was conducting various investigations that allowed him to demonstrate the effectiveness of his therapeutic methods. He also wrote several works, among which he highlighted Therapy centered on the client (1951).

Second half of the 20th century

During the following years of his life, Carl Rogers continued teaching classes at different universities and conducting therapy processes with numerous patients. Together with Abraham Maslow, he founded what would later become known as "humanistic psychology," which became very popular during the 1960s.

Rogers continued to teach at the University of Wisconsin until 1963. At that time, he joined the staff of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla, California. There she remained for the rest of her life, both giving therapy and giving talks and writing numerous works.

At this time in his life, some of his most important books were Carl Rogers on Personal Power (1977) and Freedom to Learn for the 80s (1983). In this last work, the researcher explored how his theories could be applied to situations in which there was oppression or social conflict, a subject to which he devoted much of the last years.

In this sense, Rogers acted as a diplomat in a large number of international conflicts, traveling around the world to achieve it. For example, it helped bridge the gap between Irish Catholics and Protestants; and in South Africa it played an important role in the conflict between the white population and the colored population.

Death

Carl Rogers died in 1987 after suffering a fall in which he fractured his pelvis. Although he was able to be transferred to a nearby hospital and received a successful operation, the next day he suffered multi-organ failure and lost his life. However, today he is still considered one of the most important figures in the entire field of clinical psychology.

Rogers personality theory

One of the most important contributions of Carl Rogers in the world of psychology was his theory of personality, which was based on the principles of humanism and the ideas of Abraham Maslow. This area of his work was of great importance to Rogers himself, who wrote 16 books trying to explain his theory perfectly.

While working as a professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Carl Rogers wrote one of his best known works: On Becoming a Person. In this book, he stated that everyone has within them the resources they need to achieve a healthy state of mind and grow individually. According to him, all individuals can achieve self-acceptance and self-actualization.

Personality development

For Rogers, a fully functional person who has reached these two states is one who has seven fundamental characteristics. Thus, the development of the personality has to do with the creation of these seven traits, which can be acquired in any order or never be achieved.

The seven traits described by Rogers are as follows:

- A great openness to experience, and a lack of need to defend oneself from ideas that are strange or contrary to one's own.

- A lifestyle that emphasizes enjoying the moment rather than trying to manipulate it.

- The ability to trust oneself and one's abilities.

- The ability to make decisions freely, accept responsibility for them, and direct oneself.

- High levels of creativity and adaptation. This trait also usually implies the abandonment of conformity and obedience to traditions.

- The ability to act based on their own decisions constantly.

- A full life in which the entire spectrum of emotions that human beings can feel is involved.

Other ideas about personality

In addition to these seven traits shared by people with a fully developed personality, Carl Rogers also created a theory about how each individual's own identity, self-concept and ways of behaving are formed. This was collected in his famous "19 principles", in which he summarized his ideas about personality and its formation (they are explained in a later section).

Among the most important ideas described by Rogers in this sense were, for example, the proposal that the personality is formed on the basis of the relationship of each individual with their environment. Each person perceives what is happening around him in a subjective way, and in this way internalizes some ideas or others about himself.

In addition, for Carl Rogers the behavior of each individual is governed by a basic objective: the need to constantly improve and have a life rich and full of experiences. All the actions of a person would be directed to this objective, and the emotions accompany them to improve the effectiveness of the behavior of each one.

On the other hand, Rogers explained mental health as the ability to adjust all one's life experiences and ideas about oneself to one's own self-concept. When a person was unable to assimilate an element and fit it into what he thought about himself, he could end up developing a more or less serious psychological illness.

Finally, this therapist developed the concept of the "real me." According to him, we all have a natural tendency to become a specific person, but the pressures of our environment can divert us from that path and cause us to end up being in a completely different way. The more we resemble that real self, the less stress we will have and the better our mental health will be.

Rogers' 19 Propositions

Rogers first spoke about the 19 propositions in his book Client Centered Therapy (1951). According to Rogers, these propositions show a theory of behavior and personality, observed from his experience in therapy:

Individuals and organisms find themselves in a continuously changing world full of experience - a phenomenological field - of which they are a part.
The organism reacts to the phenomenological field, which is experienced and perceived. This field of perception is "reality" for the individual.
The organism reacts as a whole organized for it before its phenomenological field.
The organism has a basic and instinctive tendency or impulse to constantly update itself.
As a result of interaction with the environment, and in particular as a result of interaction with others, there is an effort to satisfy our needs, thus forming behavior.
In this way, the organism has a basic tendency to exertion. To update, maintain, seek and improve, the body must experiment to preserve its development.
The best point of view for understanding behavior is from the individual's internal frame of reference.
A part of this frame of reference is differentiated by constructing the self.
This self appears as a result of the individual's interaction with both the environment and others. The self is defined as the organized, fluid but congruent conceptual pattern of perceptions of the characteristics and relationships of the self or the self together with the values attached to these concepts.
The values related to the experiences and the values that are part of the structure itself, in some cases, are values directly experienced by the organism, and in some cases they are values introjected or received from others, but perceived in a distorted way, as if they had been directly experienced.
As the experiences are produced in the life of the individual, they are: a) Symbolized, perceived and organized in some relation to it. b) Ignored because there is no type of perception with the structure - self relationship. c) Denied symbolization because experience is incompatible with the structure of the self.
Most forms of behavior are compatible with the concept of self.
In some cases, the behavior may be triggered by needs that have not been symbolized. Such behavior may be incompatible with the structure of the self. In such cases the behavior is not "property" of the person.
Psychological maladjustment occurs when the individual rejects meaningful experiences. When this situation occurs, a basic or potential stress situation is created.
On the other hand, psychological adaptation exists when the self-concept assimilates all sensory and significant experiences.
Any experience that is incompatible with the self can be perceived as a threat.
Under certain conditions, mainly involving the complete absence of threat to the structure of the self, experiences that are incompatible with it can be perceived and examined to be assimilated.
When the individual perceives and accepts in a compatible system all his sensory and visceral experiences, he can come to understand and accept others more as differentiated persons.
As the individual perceives and accepts more experiences in his self structure, he replaces his value system with a continuous process of organic evaluation.

In this video Rogers talks about some of his most important ideas:

Learning theory

In the field of learning, Carl Rogers distinguished between two different ways of acquiring new knowledge: a cognitive one (which he considered useless and ineffective) and an experiential one, which was much more significant and produced long-term results. The first would refer to academic knowledge, while the second would have to do with the true desires and needs of the individual.

For Rogers, the only type of learning that really made sense was experiential. Among its most important characteristics are the emotional involvement of the person, the fact that it occurs on their own initiative, self-evaluation, and the presence of lasting effects on the learner.

For Rogers, experiential learning is a process that occurs naturally if there is no outside interference; And in most cases it translates into personal growth. Therefore, the role of the education system and teachers is simply to facilitate the emergence of this type of learning.

To achieve this, the education system has to fulfill several vital functions: create a positive environment for learning, make explicit the objectives of knowledge acquisition, organize the resources available to achieve them, achieve a balance between reason and emotions at the teaching level., and share ideas and feelings with students without imposing them on them.

Application of the theory

According to Rogers himself, his theory of learning had its origin in psychotherapy and in the humanistic current of psychology. Its main application is in the case of adults who want to acquire new knowledge, although it can also be used to work with young students.

On the other hand, to achieve the best results in his teaching processes, Carl Rogers developed a series of principles that must be taken into account when working with individuals of any age. The most important were the following:

- Experiential and meaningful learning can only occur when the subject is of real relevance to the person and is related to their own interests.

- Any learning that poses a threat to one's own self-concept (as in the case of new points of view on a subject important to the person) can only be carried out correctly when there are no real or perceived dangers in the environment.

- Learning occurs more effectively in relaxed environments and in which there are no threats to the person.

- Although it is possible to impose learning, those that are produced by the individual's own will are the most durable and those that most change the person in all senses.

Other contributions from Rogers

In addition to his ideas about personality and learning, Carl Rogers is well known within the world of psychology due to his particular therapeutic approach. His clinical sessions were based on the idea of "non-directivity," a technique by which the psychologist helps the person discover his own resources rather than providing the answers he seeks.

Rogers 'non-directivity was based both on modern psychological discoveries (especially those derived from humanist theory) and on other much older currents of thought, such as Socrates' philosophy and his maieutic method. This consisted of asking open questions until the person discovered their own answers.

Rogers' non-directive therapy sessions focused primarily on establishing a trusting relationship between the psychologist and the patient. Once the client was comfortable enough to open up and talk freely about their personal problems, the therapist just had to help her probe her thoughts, beliefs, and ideas through questions of all kinds.

During the second half of the 20th century, Carl Rogers participated in numerous studies in which he tried to demonstrate the effectiveness of his therapeutic approach. One of the most famous was one in which both he and Abraham Maslow and Rollo May (two of the most important psychologists of their time) recorded various therapy sessions and compared the results of their processes.

Rogers therapy today

With the rise of cognitive-behavioral psychology, Rogerian therapy was relegated to the background for many years. The rise in the application of the scientific method to psychology meant that less emphasis was placed on elements such as the relationship between the patient and the therapist, and more on the specific techniques that were used in the sessions.

However, today Rogers' ideas are gaining importance again from sectors such as nondirective coaching and new generation therapies. At present, humanistic psychology is regaining the importance it deserves and being applied together with techniques drawn from other more recent branches of psychology.

Plays

In addition to his career as a clinical psychologist, Carl Rogers devoted a large part of his life to writing numerous books in which he shared his discoveries and theories. Here we will see a list of some of his most important publications.

- The clinical treatment of the problematic child (1939).

- Counseling and psychotherapy: new concepts in practice (1942).

- Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory (1951).

- On becoming a person: a therapist's vision of psychotherapy (1961).

- From person to person: the problem of being human (1967).

- Freedom to learn: a vision of what education can become (1969).

- On meeting groups (1970).

- On personal power: inner strength and its revolutionary impact (1977).

- A way of being (1980).

References

"Carl Rogers" in: Britannica. Retrieved on: January 09, 2020 from Britannica: britannica.com.
"Carl Rogers Psychologist Biography" in: VeryWell Mind. Retrieved on: January 09, 2020 from VeryWell Mind: verywellmind.com.
"Carl Rogers (1902-1987)" in: Good Therapy. Retrieved on: January 09, 2020 from Good Therapy: goodtherapy.com.
"Carl Rogers" in: Famous Psychologists. Retrieved on: January 09, 2020 from Famous Psychologists: famouspsychologists.org.
"Carl Rogers" in: Wikipedia. Retrieved: January 09, 2020 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.

CARL ROGERS: BIOGRAPHY, THEORIES, CONTRIBUTIONS AND WORKS - PSYCHOLOGY - 2024