Chapter 10 Rogers: Person-Centered Theory 293of 1926, he left the seminary to attend Teachers College on a full-time basis with
a major in clinical and educational psychology. From that point on, he never
returned to formal religion. His life would now take a new direction—toward
psychology and education.
In 1927, Rogers served as a fellow at the new Institute for Child Guidance
in New York City and continued to work there while completing his doctoral
degree. At the institute, he gained an elementary knowledge of Freudian psycho-
analysis, but he was not much influenced by it, even though he tried it out in his
practice. He also attended a lecture by Alfred Adler, who shocked Rogers and the
other staff members with his contention that an elaborate case history was unnec-
essary for psychotherapy.
Rogers received a PhD from Columbia in 1931 after having already moved
to New York to work with the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children. During the early phase of his professional career, Rogers was strongly
influenced by the ideas of Otto Rank, who had been one of Freud’s closest associ-
ates before his dismissal from Freud’s inner circle. In 1936, Rogers invited Rank
to Rochester for a 3-day seminar to present his new post-Freudian practice of
psychotherapy. Rank’s lectures provided Rogers with the notion that therapy is an
emotional growth-producing relationship, nurtured by the therapist’s empathic lis-
tening and unconditional acceptance of the client.
Rogers spent 12 years at Rochester, working at a job that might easily have
isolated him from a successful academic career. He had harbored a desire to teach
in a university after a rewarding teaching experience during the summer of 1935
at Teachers College and after having taught courses in sociology at the University
of Rochester. During this period, he wrote his first book, The Clinical Treatment
of the Problem Child (1939), the publication of which led to a teaching offer from
Ohio State University. Despite his fondness for teaching, he might have turned
down the offer if his wife had not urged him to accept and if Ohio State had not
agreed to start him at the top, with the academic rank of full professor. In 1940,
at the age of 38, Rogers moved to Columbus to begin a new career.
Pressed by his graduate students at Ohio State, Rogers gradually conceptual-
ized his own ideas on psychotherapy, not intending them to be unique and certainly
not controversial. These ideas were put forth in Counseling and Psychotherapy,
published in 1942. In this book, which was a reaction to the older approaches to
therapy, Rogers minimized the causes of disturbances and the identification and
labeling of disorders. Instead, he emphasized the importance of growth within the
patient (called by Rogers the “client”).
In 1944, as part of the war effort, Rogers moved back to New York as direc-
tor of counseling services for the United Services Organization. After 1 year, he
took a position at the University of Chicago, where he established a counseling
center and was allowed more freedom to do research on the process and outcome
of psychotherapy. The years 1945 to 1957 at Chicago were the most productive
and creative of his career. His therapy evolved from one that emphasized method-
ology, or what in the early 1940s was called the “nondirective” technique, to one
in which the sole emphasis was on the client-therapist relationship. Always the
scientist, Rogers, along with his students and colleagues, produced groundbreaking
research on the process and effectiveness of psychotherapy.