Carl Rogers

He could read before he started school, which in a strict Congregationalist house in Oak Park mostly meant more Bible. He was the fourth of six children of a civil engineer, and when the family moved onto a farm he went to the University of Wisconsin to study agriculture, then switched to history and religion. At 20 he sailed to Beijing for an international Christian conference and came home doubting the faith he had been raised in. He married Helen Elliott in 1924, entered Union Theological Seminary anyway, and there sat through a student-run seminar with the title Why Am I Entering the Ministry. He never finished. He crossed to Teachers College at Columbia and took a doctorate in 1931. He was 29 and had traded one vocation for another.

He ran the child-protection society in Rochester for a decade before Ohio State made him a professor in 1940 and published Counseling and Psychotherapy two years later, which called the person in the chair a client rather than a patient and told the therapist not to interpret. What turned doctrine into research was that he recorded and transcribed sessions, so others could argue with the transcript. In 1951 he set out 19 propositions on how a person assembles a self, and in 1957 he named three conditions he called necessary and sufficient for change: the therapist must be congruent, must hold the client in unconditional positive regard, and must understand accurately from the inside. Counselor training still rests on that list. His students carried it out — Thomas Gordon into parenting, Eugene Gendlin into focusing, Marshall Rosenberg into nonviolent communication.

From the late 1950s into the 1960s Rogers sat on the board of the Human Ecology Fund. It was a Central Intelligence Agency front. Founded in 1954 under an earlier name, it moved Agency money to behavioral scientists whose work bore on interrogation and coercion, part of the program called MKUltra. Most academics it paid did not know the source. Rogers knew at least something. He and others in his field were handed material on Nikita Khrushchev and asked what they made of him and how to deal with him, which Rogers later called an entirely principled and legitimate request. I don't think we contributed very much, he said, but, anyway, we tried. The man who built a method on suspending judgment had been asked to size someone up, for an agency funding research into breaking people down.

In November 1985, at 83, he brought people from 17 nations to Rust in Austria to argue about Central America with no diplomats present. At 85 he went to the Soviet Union to run workshops. Then he fell, fractured his pelvis, came through the operation, lost his pancreas the following night, and died of a heart attack days later in San Diego, in February 1987. His reputation has dispersed rather than risen or fallen. A 2002 eminence study put him sixth among 20th-century psychologists and second only to Freud among clinicians, but the better measure is that his vocabulary — client, congruence, unconditional positive regard, active listening — is now standard counselor training rather than the property of a school.

Carl Rogers's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Counseling and Psychotherapy book
  The book that replaced the patient with the client 1942
• Client-Centered Therapy book
  Contains the 19 propositions on how a self is built 1951
• The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change article
  Congruence, unconditional positive regard, empathic understanding 1957
• On Becoming a Person book
  Written at Wisconsin and his best-known book 1961
• Center for Studies of the Person company
  Co-founded in La Jolla after he left the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute 1968
• A Way of Being book
  The late statement of the person-centered approach 1980

• 1922 aged ~20 Sails to Beijing for a Christian student conference and comes back doubting
• 1924 aged ~22 Marries Helen Elliott and enters Union Theological Seminary He left after two years for Teachers College at Columbia.
• 1930 aged ~28 Takes over the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester
• 1942 aged ~40 Publishes Counseling and Psychotherapy at Ohio State The client replaces the patient and the therapist stops interpreting.
• 1947 aged ~45 Elected president of the American Psychological Association
• 1957 aged ~55 Names the necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic change Three of them, and counselor training still teaches all three.
• 1963 aged ~61 Leaves Wisconsin for La Jolla and the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute He co-founded the Center for Studies of the Person five years later.
• November 1985 aged 83 Convenes the Rust Peace Workshop in Austria at 83 Leaders from 17 nations, talking about Central America without diplomats.
• February 4, 1987 aged 85 Dies in San Diego after a fall, an operation and a heart attack

• B. F. Skinner 1904–1990
  Developed operant conditioning and made behaviorism the dominant mid-century American psychology. intellectual opposite
• Abraham Maslow 1908–1970
  Proposed the hierarchy of needs and helped found humanistic psychology. co-founder of humanistic psychology
• John Dewey 1859–1952
  Philosopher and educational reformer whose progressive ideas shaped modern American pedagogy. shaped his Columbia training
• William James 1842–1910
  Founded American psychology as a discipline and shaped pragmatist philosophy at Harvard. antecedent
• Benjamin Spock 1903–1998
  Pediatrician whose 1946 baby-care manual reshaped postwar American child-rearing advice. parallel authority on non-directive advice