Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIII. Humanistic/Existential
Theories- Rogers:
Person−Centered Theory
© The McGraw−Hill^317
Companies, 2009seminary 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 psychoanalysis, 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 mem-
bers with his contention that an elaborate case history was unnecessary for psycho-
therapy.
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 Chil-
dren. During the early phase of his professional career, Rogers was strongly influ-
enced by the ideas of Otto Rank, who had been one of Freud’s closest associates be-
fore 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 psy-
chotherapy. Rank’s lectures provided Rogers with the notion that therapy is an emo-
tional growth-producing relationship, nurtured by the therapist’s empathic listening
and unconditional acceptance of the client.
Rogers spent 12 years at Rochester, working at a job that might easily have iso-
lated 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,pub-
lished 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 director
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 psy-
chotherapy. The years 1945 to 1957 at Chicago were the most productive and cre-
ative of his career. His therapy evolved from one that emphasized methodology, 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.
Chapter 11 Rogers: Person-Centered Theory 311