Carl Rogers’ struggle to be “real” and its implications for understanding psychologists’ life–work connections and sociocultural impact

Abstract

This study examines and interprets a significant connection between the life experiences and professional work of Carl Rogers. The focus is on Rogers’ life-long struggle to be “congruent” or “real” in his therapeutic, professional, and personal relationships, a challenge that he never managed to meet fully. In doing so, it illustrates the possible utility of studies of connections between the personal lives of psychologists, the psychological ideas and theories they create, and the sociocultural impact they have.

He was a master of listening and letting you know you were understood. However, in my relationship with him, he often lacked the willingness or ability to say what he was thinking and feeling at the moment. (Nathalie Rogers, writing about her father’s struggles with congruence or authenticity; N. Rogers, 1995, p. 179)

Relatively early in his career, prominent 20th-century American psychotherapist Carl Rogers (1902–1987) focussed on the essential therapeutic importance of unconditional acceptance and empathic understanding of the client. He subsequently added the ideal of congruence, understood as a therapist’s ability to experience and exude an unfeigned, spontaneous genuineness of being while interacting with clients in therapy. With the publication and popularity of his seventh book, On Becoming a Person, in 1961, Rogers claimed not only psychotherapy but “potentially . . . every facet of daily living” (Kirschenbaum, 2007, pp. 309–310) as within his range of expertise. Written in a folksy, semi-autobiographical style, this book demonstrated “his growing desire to be seen and known as an individual, to achieve a more personal encounter in his relationships, even with his readers” (p. 311), whose numbers seemed to be growing daily. Many readers and members of the public at large became open to Rogers’ idea of the congruent, fully functioning person, whose life was a constant process and direction rather than a destination—one that comes with the psychological freedom to live spontaneously and creatively. Indeed, part of Rogers’ sense of congruence was to view himself and others as, at least potentially, such fully functioning individuals. Rogers’ core message was that his therapeutic conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy fostered personal power and growth that carried beneficial social consequences in all human experiences and relationships.

To better understand Rogers’ increasingly strong focus on congruence as the sine qua non of the fully functioning person, capable of being “real” in self and other relationships, it is helpful to know something about some of Rogers’ life experiences that seem directly relevant to his struggles to be congruent in his own life. It is impossible even to summarize a biographical account of Rogers’ life and work here. However, it is possible to interpret some of the more salient episodes in Rogers’ life that support an interpretation of his struggles with congruence and the way in which these struggles influenced his work and its impact. But first, it is useful to examine Rogers’ conception of congruence itself. Following this conceptual clarification is an episodic examination of Rogers’ pursuit of congruence in his own life—a quest, the attainment of which was not always apparent, as noted above by his daughter, Natalie. Finally, some remarks will be addressed to the possible sociocultural legacy of Rogers and to the usefulness and potential of studies of the lives of psychologists. Although what follows draws from biographical accounts of Rogers’ life and from histories of therapeutic culture, it is not a biography or a history, but an interpretation of one psychologist’s life and work and its sociocultural impact, accompanied by a call for similar or related work by others concerning psychology and its sociocultural consequences.

The concept of “congruence”

Rogers assumed that we are born with an innate tendency toward self-actualization that can be greatly helped or hindered by our life experiences. To enhance the former, infants and children must receive healthy levels of unconditional positive regard from caregivers and others. Nonetheless, it is more usual, even inevitable, that reactions of others toward the child will be more mixed, resulting in conditional positive regard, which sets up conditions of worth that the significant people in our lives place on us and that we must meet to ensure their positive regard. If these conditional values and constraints are internalized, as they almost always are, the child is unable to grow into a fully functioning, congruent (real, genuine, authentic) person, since such conditions prevent openness to a full range of life experiences. The resultant incongruent or inauthentic aspects of our developing personhood cause us to restrict or deny aspects of our experiences and selves in ways that distance us from some of our feelings, desires, and inclinations, making it challenging or impossible to live according to the innate organismic valuing processes that act as an internal guidance system toward self-actualization. In this way, conditions of worth impede our being and possibility by restricting our self-expression and life experimentation.

Given this state of affairs, the therapist’s job is to facilitate clients opening themselves to greater awareness of a fuller range of experience that can help them to exercise greater agency in pursuit of their life choices, actions, and possibilities. The therapeutic aim is to help clients make their own decisions, forge their own plans and goals, and realize and embrace possibilities for their own self-actualization—in short, to help clients help themselves to be who they want to be. Because life is inevitably unpredictable, Rogerian therapy aims to help clients embrace the adventure of life as an ongoing process of becoming. To this end, the therapist’s primary job is to help clients overcome unduly restrictive conditions of worth so that they can recognize and experiment with a wider array of life perspectives, possibilities, and ways of being. This is a job that does not require the imposition of the therapist’s preferences, values, plans, or strategies, but is primarily a matter of the attitudes the therapist takes toward the client. It is by extending attitudes such as genuineness or congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding to clients, that therapists can facilitate clients’ self-actualizing tendencies to explore and consider possibilities for living and flourishing that can lessen the distance between their perceived and ideal selves.

For Rogers, congruence was the most important of the three core conditions that constituted his necessary and sufficient therapeutic requirements. Its achievement is essential because it underpins both unconditional positive regard and empathy. But what is congruence?

Congruence does not mean that the therapist burdens [their] client with the overt expression of all [their] feelings. Nor does it mean that the therapist discloses [their] total self to the client. It does mean, however, that the therapist denies to [themselves] none of the feelings [they are] experiencing, and that [they are] willing to experience transparently any persistent feelings that exist in the relationship and let these be known to the client. It means avoiding the temptation to present a façade or hide behind a mask of professionalism, or to assume a confessional–professional attitude. (C. R. Rogers, 1966, p. 185)

The key word here is persistent, in the sense of recuring in a way that the congruent therapist recognizes as of vital importance to preserving the overall therapeutic relationship with the client. Without this kind of congruence, there also could be no possibility of achieving appropriately therapeutic levels of empathy and unconditional positive regard. Without congruence, the therapist effectively is saying to the client that everything is OK, when it is clear to (or at least sensed palpably by) both therapist and client that this is not the case. Yet, what also must be avoided is the therapist burdening the client indiscriminately with what the therapist is experiencing in ways that prevent or impede the focus of the therapeutic relationship and work on the client’s experience. Importantly, if the therapist’s self-experiencing during therapy is not congruent, the therapist fails to accept themself as a person in full. Such a failure likely reflects therapists’ inability to surmount and overcome conditions of worth encountered in their own life experiences, resulting in incongruency between their words and their actions while interacting with their clients. Without having worked through their own conditions of worth, therapists are unable to accept and be themselves in their relationships with their clients and others in their lives. It is exactly this kind of incongruence, especially as it relates to an inability to fully accept and like oneself, that Rogers experienced and battled in various relationships in his own life experiences. Although he made significant progress, he, like most of us, sometimes fell short of living realistically and authentically, and suffered accordingly.

Examples of Rogers’ lifetime pursuit of congruence

Thwarted self-expression in childhood

Carl Ransom Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, the fourth of six children born to Julia and Walter Rogers. Rogers’ early childhood was spent in the highly affluent and conservative Oak Park community near Chicago. Ernest Hemingway, who spent much of his childhood there at the same time as Rogers, described it “as a place of ‘wide lawns and narrow minds’” (as cited in Cohen, 1997, p. 21). To maintain appearances and their good name, Rogers described his parents as “masters of subtle emotional control” (p. 21). Walter and Julia Rogers were committed Christians. Both parents were devoted to their family and committed to a strong Protestant work ethic. Later in life, Carl often recalled his parents as loving but very controlling and constantly monitoring his and his siblings’ comportment.

He described family times with lots of humor and fun, but with a powerful undercurrent of what he perceived as hurtful teasing, which he attributed to his being “something of a book worm” and “extremely absent-minded” (Cohen, 1997, p. 24). His parents and older brothers often called him “Professor Moony,” a stereotypically absent-minded comic book character at the time. Only as an adult, did Carl Rogers realize that the frequent teasing and name calling he received as a child from his parents and older siblings was “not a necessary part of human relations” (Cohen, 1997, p. 25). With this realization, Carl retrospectively concluded that “being teased made him shy. He would often complain he was inept in social situations partly because he did not know what to say” (p. 25). In their biographies of Rogers, both Cohen (1997) and Kirschenbaum (2007) are careful to note that Rogers’ older siblings did not share Rogers’ sense that he had been victimized during childhood in ways that made it difficult for him to express himself. His older siblings maintained that he had exaggerated and even manufactured such grievances, when in fact their little brother had received a “loving and excellent preparation for life” (Cohen, 1997, p. 25). Nonetheless, “at his 80th birthday party, Rogers gave a paper in which he again complained about his parents” (p. 25).

Kirschenbaum (2007) concludes that Carl

grew up in a secure, prosperous home, was indulged in many ways, felt entitled, expected he would get what he wanted. Yet . . . he remained socially and emotionally isolated. . . . There was . . . no sharing of his inner thoughts and feelings. In his family such sharing would not have felt safe. (pp 15–17)

Crisis in Chicago

After earning his PhD in clinical psychology from Teachers College at Columbia University, Rogers’ first professional job was working with delinquent and problem children in Rochester, New York at the Child Study Department of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Following the publication of his first book, The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child (C. R. Rogers, 1939), Rogers accepted a full professorship in clinical psychology at Ohio State University, a position he took up in 1940 and held until he moved to the University of Chicago in 1945. At Chicago, Rogers was given the opportunity to develop a new University Counseling Center to serve both students and the entire local community. Carl insisted that the center would be a place for both therapy and research, a union he also preached as president of the American Psychological Association in 1946. He secured university funding for recording and transcribing many therapy sessions at the center and worked hard to help the 12 counselors he hired study these recordings, as he did himself, so as to become aware of and learn from their mistakes. Rogers insisted that the full acceptance of each client as a human being was “an absolute, a moral and personal imperative” (Cohen, 1997, pp. 124–125) for himself and his staff.

During his years at the University of Chicago (1945–1957), Carl was able to extend the framing of his therapeutic approach in a highly significant way, one that he believed equipped it for applications to individuals, groups, and entire communities, even nations. The central key to therapeutic and progressive change was the “ability to move from one’s own frame of reference to the client’s internal frame of reference” (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 161). Far from being a passive, laissez-faire approach, “adopting the client’s frame of reference demands the utmost in active listening, concentration, and communication” (p. 163). To emphasize this critical shift in moving from one’s own to the client’s perspective, Rogers stopped using the term “nondirective” and began to employ the term “client-centered,” and later “person-centered,” to label his therapeutic theory and method. In his 1951 book Client-Centered Therapy, Rogers stated that

The individual who comes to rely upon this hypothesis [that entering into their clients’ perspectives is the key to unlocking clients’ powers to help themselves] . . . finds almost inevitably that [they are] driven to experiment with it in other types of activity. (C. R. Rogers, 1951, p. 384)

To illustrate these other types of activity, the book included chapters written by Rogers’ colleagues on play therapy, group-centered psychotherapy, and group-centered leadership and administration, and by Rogers himself on student-centered teaching and the training of counselors and therapists. In his 1951 book, Rogers also adopted a first-person voice to accompany the “clear, down-to-earth, non-esoteric . . . [and] genuine” (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 165) manner of his writing about his approach. In doing so, he was signaling his deep faith in democratic processes within which people could come together in understanding each other and achieving an openness and freedom in living their lives together. To his earlier emphasis on the client-centered attitudes of the therapist, which included unconditional acceptance and empathic understanding, Rogers increasingly added the ideal of congruence, understood as therapists’ ability to be themselves in an unfeigned, spontaneous genuineness of being with their clients in therapy.

However, in the midst of his clarification of his therapeutic attitude and manner, establishing and operating his innovative Counseling Center, and constant publishing and speaking engagements, Carl Rogers suffered through a deeply personal crisis. Ironically, this crisis was to challenge Rogers’ faith in his personal ability to accept, empathize, and be genuine with his clients. The particular client with whom he struggled to enact his therapeutic ideals was a woman whom he first met and counseled at the Ohio State University, but who later had moved to Chicago. In Rogers’ own words: “I handled her badly, vacillating between being warm and real with her, and then being more ‘professional’ and aloof when the depth of her psychotic disturbance threatened me” (as cited in Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 183). Even though Rogers met with this woman very often, sometimes up to five counseling sessions per week in May of 1949, she still would appear sitting on the doorstep of the Rogers’ home saying

she needed more warmth and more realness from me. I wanted her to like me though I didn’t like her . . . I recognized that many of her insights were sounder than mine and this destroyed my confidence . . . I got to the point where I could not separate my “self” from hers. (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 184)

It was like “[he] became the one being worked on in the relationship” by a “shrewd and highly interpretive therapist . . . who because of her own needs had to try to destroy me” (p. 184). Nonetheless, Rogers continued his self-destructive relationship with this woman because he believed she was on the brink of a psychosis and thought he had no choice but to try to help her. Eventually he felt on the verge of a breakdown himself, and after seeking therapy from his colleague, Nathaniel Raskin at his University of Chicago Counseling Center, arranged for psychiatrist Louis Choden to interrupt a counseling session Rogers was having with the client and essentially take over her case, with no prior indication to the client that this would be happening.

Rogers and his wife Helen then fled their home and Rogers’ university and Counseling Center responsibilities to hide away in their family cabin on Seneca Lake. However, he stated, even “when I returned I was still rather deeply certain of my complete inadequacy as a therapist, my worthlessness as a person, and my lack of any future in the field of psychology or psychotherapy” (as cited in Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 185). Eventually, after nearly a year of therapy with Oliver Bown, one of Rogers’ Counseling Center colleagues, Carl gradually recovered, he stated, “to a point where I could value myself, even like myself, and was much less fearful of receiving or giving love. My own therapy with my clients [had] become consistently and increasingly free and spontaneous ever since that time” (C. R. Rogers, 1967, p. 367).

In an oral history of his life recorded by David Russell, Rogers reflected on what he had learned from his Chicago crisis during 1948 and 1949. He said that his therapy with “Ollie Bown . . . was very, very profitable, very helpful. I realize that probably my deepest problem was not being able to like or love myself,” adding that “I did better therapy after I came back: . . . one functions better externally than it would be possible to believe if you know the inner turmoil going on” (C. R. Rogers & Russell, 2002, pp. 164–165). In these comments, Rogers seems to imply, consistent with his theory of personal growth and self-actualization, that he benefited greatly during his sessions with Bown through exploring and verbalizing his “inner turmoil”—turmoil that derived from a fear of giving and receiving love, which in turn issued from an inability to truly love himself, and which manifested in severe self-doubt about his adequacy as a psychotherapist and person. In his description of Rogers’ Chicago crisis, Kirschenbaum (2007) adds an endnote that reads:

I wonder if another reason Rogers felt he “had to” be of help was that, as he sometimes said, each new client for him offered the possibility of proving or disproving his theory of therapy. If he “failed” with a client, this client, it threatened the validity of his theory in his own eyes. (p. 628)

When recounting the story of his Chicago crisis in his 1967 autobiographical chapter in A History of Psychology in Autobiography: Volume V, Rogers (1967) ends his recollection by saying “I have since become rather keenly aware that the point of view I developed in therapy is the sort of help I myself would like, and this help was available when I most needed it” (pp. 367–368). Given Rogers’ frequently repeated statements concerning the lack of acceptance, strict censure, and restricted self-expression that attended his childhood upbringing, it is tempting to link the underlying lack of self-confidence and self-love evident in Rogers’ reports of his inner life during the Chicago crisis to these “conditions of worth” experienced in his early life. Kirschenbaum (2007) opines that Rogers “had to continually work and produce to be deemed worthy in his parents’ eyes” and “he had to keep his feelings submerged because expressions of feelings, particularly negative ones, were not welcome.” Perhaps this “unfinished business from childhood . . . created a wound” that was opened by this “disturbed woman” (p. 187).

Cohen (1997), in his critical biography of Carl Rogers, offers a more judgmental interpretation. He writes that this female client “made him see that he was breaking one of his sacred rules,” after all as his “client she had a right to unconditional positive regard.” With this realization, “the guilt and shame were more than he could bear, so he fled and had to reject her so brutally to let all his repressed anger out. His client became his victim” (p. 139). Once back on track after his near breakdown, Rogers was able to spend his final 7 years at the University of Chicago to advance his theoretical framework, gather increasing professional acclaim, and adjust to major changes in his personal life.

Rogers claimed that he had learned a great deal from this experience. One expression of this learning was to strive for greater genuineness or congruency in both his therapeutic and everyday life—to be more genuinely open and expressive of his feelings, something with which he had struggled throughout his life. Such increased emotional spontaneity was viewed in a positive way by his close friends and associates, who appreciated knowing where they stood in their interactions with Rogers. As an example, Kirschenbaum (2007) relates the relevant reaction of one of Rogers’ students who was shocked at being told to “be quiet” by the father of nondirective therapy, who later added that “I’m sorry I had to tell you to shut up in there, but if you ever dominate the discussion like that again, I’ll do it again.” The student recalled this incident as helping him to understand that “having warmth and empathy does not mean being weak” (p. 298). Presumably, one of the things Rogers had taken from his failure to be open about his feelings in his interactions with his difficult client in Chicago was that he needed to be more honest and clear about his own feelings, just as he retrospectively wished he had been able to do with his parents and older siblings.

Animosities in Rogers’ Wisconsin research team

However, despite his claims of greater personal growth in his own congruence, several events in Rogers’ later life at the University of Wisconsin, the Western Institute for Behavioral Science, and the Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla (as well as in his personal life) challenged, or at least constrained, his claim to have achieved greater authenticity in his psychotherapeutic and other interpersonal relationships.

At Wisconsin, Rogers and his colleagues (some of whom had followed him from Chicago to Wisconsin) embarked upon a major research project to test hypotheses concerning necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutically induced positive change in psychotic and normal individuals. Unfortunately, this project resulted in agonizing interpersonal conflict among members of the four-person research team of Rogers, Charlie Truax, Donald Kiesler, and Eugene Gendlin, which peaked when Rogers took an extended absence from campus to take up a position as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from the summer of 1962 through the spring of 1963. In Rogers’ absence, it became clear to Kiesler and Gendlin that Truax was “attempting to subvert the project toward his own ends” (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 290) by intending “to use the entire project data to publish a work under his own name” (p. 291). Moreover, Truax had removed some of the research data to his home, much of which was never recovered. Lawyers became involved and interpersonal relationships were torn apart. All of this caused inordinate delays in the production and publication of the book reporting the research, which finally was published by the University of Wisconsin in 1967 under the title The Therapeutic Relationship and Its Impact: A Study of Psychotherapy with Schizophrenics (C. R. Rogers et al., 1967) to very little fanfare.

Throughout this unseemly episode, Rogers showed very little willingness to take charge of events and seemed especially reluctant to confront Truax or to act decisively to remove him from the project. Indeed, his mismanagement of the project displayed his tendencies to assume the best in others and not to pay attention to quotidian matters of project management, the consequences of which were exacerbated further by his frequent absences from campus. In consequence, colleagues and administrators who took the time to be thoroughly familiar with daily departmental life and procedures outmaneuvered him quite easily, and were not greatly worried by the eloquent and forceful memos of objection Rogers would send them, typically well after relevant matters had been decided, and often from a distance. Rogers’ claim to have achieved a newfound congruence in his interactions with others, however it may have manifested in his psychotherapeutic interactions, was in little evidence in his relationships with university colleagues and officials during this time.

California highs and lows

One major consequence of his ordeals at Wisconsin was Rogers’ subsequent decision to leave behind the travails of academia and venture forth into the unfolding of new vistas of experience and freedom. What better place to do so than in 1960s California, the home of an American sociopolitical and cultural revolution. In the summer of 1963, Carl Rogers at the age of 61 resigned from the University of Wisconsin to find a new home from which to broadcast his message of human potential and self-actualization at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute located along the Pacific coastline of La Jolla, replete with year-round temperate weather and good vibrations for the fully realized person in constant pursuit of personal freedom and fulfillment.

The Western Behavioral Science Institute (WBSI) was the brainchild of Richard Farson, a former doctoral student of Rogers. Together with wealthy California Institute of Technology physicist Paul Lloyd (who was convinced of the transformational potential of Rogers’ ideas) and social psychologist Wayman Crow, Farson established the WBSI in 1958. After years of courting Rogers as a resident fellow, Farson finally succeeded in convincing him to join in the WBSI’s mission of furthering understandings and practices capable of improving human relations and resolving social problems and conflicts. With Rogers on board, the WBSI received funding from several government agencies and sources. For the first decade of his time there, Rogers was heavily involved with what had become known as the encounter group movement. In addition to contributing to the development of methods and understandings consistent with the institute’s overall mission, “encounter groups provided . . . a vehicle for [Rogers’] own personal growth,” especially “a greater trust in and openness to his feelings and a greater willingness to risk himself in relationships” (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 343). These changes were noted by Rogers’ son David and daughter Nathalie, who exclaimed “I’ve seen a tremendous change in him. I just can’t get over it. . . . [He is] much more self-revealing, much more open about his needs for affection and being affectionate or demonstrative” (as cited in Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 344). Rogers continued his intensive involvement in group work for the next decade. A documentary film, Journey into Self (McGraw, 1969), using footage from a 16-hour group facilitated by Rogers and Farson, won an Academy Award for best feature-length documentary in 1968. In his 1970 book Carl Rogers on Encounter Groups, he acknowledged that some criticisms, including harmful effects of encounter groups that were poorly led and overly intensive, might have some merit, but mostly focused on the positive and transformative experiences he had witnessed and researched. When his active involvement in encounter groups began to wane, Rogers simultaneously began to write about the benefits of the growth of positive feelings and real closeness to others as outcomes that could be extended to combatting difficulties occasioned by intergroup conflict, technological change, and cultural reorganization and renewal. Nonetheless, by the late 1960s, Rogers’ familiar pattern of initial enthusiasm for a new job and working environment followed by increasing disenchantment had begun to apply to his work at the WBSI, just as it had in his earlier university appointments and subsequent resignations.

Applying much the same language as he had used to describe his crisis in Chicago and his debacle with his coresearchers at Wisconsin, Rogers described his split from the WBSI as involving “events which have given me more agony than anything else I can recall in my professional life” (as cited in Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 361). Reminiscent of how Wisconsin administrators had viewed Rogers’ approach to administration, Richard Farson described Rogers’ increasing difficulties at the WBSI as owing to the fact that “Carl could not see that strong membership required strong leadership . . . he was so committed to democratic management, thinking it had to be completely without hierarchy” (as cited in Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 363). When Rogers, hurt and angry, eventually resigned from the WBSI, he and several other former members created a new organization called the Center for Studies of the Person (CSP). Unlike WBSI, members of CSP received no salaries, were responsible for running and funding their own projects, and had sources of income from other employment. Under these circumstances, Rogers once again accepted the title of “Resident Fellow,” and “did the egalitarian thing very, very well” (p. 368), sharing requests to conduct workshops, interacting as one among others, and enjoying complete freedom to move in any directions he wished. In effect, CSP was a support group for like-minded individuals who occasionally worked well together on projects that went well beyond encounter groups and psychotherapy.

Rogers’ education projects

The CSP projects most dear to Rogers were in education, conflict resolution, and peacemaking. By the 1960s, many teachers who had read Rogers’ articles and books were writing to him about how they were trying to apply his ideas in their interactions with their students. When a niece told him “Your articles have so much significance for education, but there’s no book of yours” (as cited in Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 390), he decided to write a book for teachers. Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become was published in 1969. Soon thereafter, Rogers was inundated by requests to give talks and workshops to educators. These most often took the form of encounter groups in which teachers could share their experiences. Sometimes he worked with groups composed of school administrators, teachers, students, and parents. Perhaps his most intensive intervention of this kind was his work with the Immaculate Heart school system in Los Angeles—a 2-year experiment that produced very mixed and complex results and consequences. A similar mixture of results was obtained a few years later in Louisville. Years later, in a new edition entitled Freedom to Learn for the 80s (C. R. Rogers, 1983), Rogers offered his assessment of both the Immaculate Heart and Louisville experiments in self-directed change in school systems. Although recognizing “patterns of failure” in both experiments, he did not find fault with his basic hypothesis that “when individuals, or in this case individuals in systems, are given a supportive, facilitative climate that encourages them to set their own directions, then great positive energy and creativity is released and significant learning and growth take place” (as cited in Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 405). Nonetheless, Rogers was sobered by the failures evident in both cases, attributing them to broader, countervailing sociocultural factors, such as the opposition of powerful institutional practices of the Catholic church, the politics of desegregation, the threats posed by innovation to various key individuals and groups, bureaucratic rigidity and convenience, and power plays peripheral to the central task of education for freedom. As Kirschenbaum (2007) reflects:

All these reasons, while often valid, beg the question of whether or not self-directed change and innovation of the kind Rogers advocated in educational systems are, in fact, possible. As Rogers turned his attention to still wider applications of his work, this was a question left unanswered. (p. 405)

The “wider applications” to which Kirschenbaum referred included aging, political awakening, physical and mental health, spirituality, conflict resolution, and peacemaking.

Rogers’ peace projects

In the last decade of his life, Rogers was not only

evangelizing for the person-centered approach [but] was genuinely concerned with the future of the planet. The older he was . . . the more committed he became to reducing inter-group and international tensions and achieving world peace. . . . The most crucial problem in the world today is the solution of tensions between nations, racial groups, industrial groups as well as those between family members and individuals. (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 540)

The resultant Peace Project saw Rogers and his CSP colleagues collaborate with international agencies, governments, and other private institutions to launch and conduct workshops to enhance communication and advance joint action to relieve tensions in several world hotspots. These included meetings and discussions of ongoing tensions in Ireland and South Africa, and the famous Rust workshop held in Austria that brought together dignitaries from several Central American and European nations and the United Nations to discuss political conflicts in Central America, especially the guerilla war in Nicaragua between the Sandinista liberation movement and the Contras that was threatening to engulf other countries in the region.

After returning to La Jolla following the Rust workshop of November 1985, Rogers summed up his experience of the event:

Certainly we had no obvious influence on the total situation in any of these countries. But . . . on a small scale, we were able to demonstrate . . . that meaningful dialogue could be established, that . . . a more realistic understanding could emerge. (as cited in Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 555)

In 1986, supporters of Rogers began the process of drafting a nomination for him to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. However, Rogers’ death in 1987 meant that the nomination could not be considered. Members of the CSP continued the Carl Rogers Peace Project for nearly 10 years following his death but, without Carl himself and the inspiration and enthusiasm he was capable of generating, funding gradually fell off and continuation of the project became impossible.

Rogers’ personal relationships in later life

In addition to his peace project, Rogers’ last years were filled with accomplishments that included the publication of his final book, A Way of Being (C. R. Rogers, 1980), and the satisfaction of seeing increasing evidence of his influence on psychology and the ever-growing popularity of his person-centered approach to life in general and to personal growth and fulfillment in particular. However, there also was a darker side to Rogers’ final years that went beyond the inevitable ravages of old age. In this last stage of his life, he still had not succeeded in vanquishing all vestiges of his life-long pattern of difficulties in expressing himself clearly and effectively in intimate relationships, or his tendency to escape from the tensions these struggles produced by fleeing from them in ways that were sometimes ineffectual, clumsy, and hurtful to others. Nonetheless, he believed that he finally was making significant progress in these areas, which he continued to imbue with great personal significance. In a chapter entitled “Growing Old: Or Older and Growing?” in A Way of Being, Rogers discusses what he regarded as progress in “taking care of myself” and “intimacy.”

I have always been a very responsible person. . . . But I have changed. I let go of all responsibility except the responsibility—and the satisfaction—of being myself. For me it was a most unusual feeling: to be comfortably irresponsible with no feelings of guilt. And, to my surprise, I found I was more effective that way. . . . I found I thoroughly enjoyed being with me. I like me. I have been more able to ask for help. . . . When Helen, my wife, was very ill, and I was close to the breaking point . . . I asked for help—and got it—from a therapist friend. I explored and tried to meet my own needs. I explored the strain that this period was putting on our marriage. I realized that it was necessary for my survival to live my life, and that this must come first, even though Helen was so ill. (C. R. Rogers, 1980, pp. 80–81)

Rogers then goes on to say that:

In the past few years, I have found myself opening up to much greater intimacy in relationships. . . . I am more ready to touch and be touched physically. I do more hugging and kissing of both men and women. . . . I recognize how much I need to care deeply for another and to receive that kind of caring in return. I can say openly what I have always recognized dimly: that my deep involvement in psychotherapy was a cautious way of meeting this need for intimacy without risking too much of my person. . . . I have developed deeper and more intimate relationships with men . . . I also have much more intimate communication with women. There are now a number of women with whom I have platonic but psychologically intimate relationships which have tremendous meaning for me. (C. R. Rogers, 1980, pp. 83–84)

To which Kirschenbaum (2007), whose comprehensively extensive, balanced, and meticulously researched biography of Carl Rogers must rank as one of the best biographies of any psychologist, adds “All this was true—except for the word ‘platonic’” (p. 458). ¹

Helen, who was in failing health and homebound, had to endure Rogers “sharing his feelings” and justifying his actions. She was “continuously re-hurt and angry and often critical and blaming of him” (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 462), while he oscillated “between understanding and accepting her feelings and being angry and resentful about her attempts to control him” (p. 462). Reflecting upon the difficulties the couple experienced during Helen’s last years of life, Kirschenbaum opines that Rogers’ late-life predicament involved at least two matters that were prominent in 1970s America and in the human condition more generally: “the challenge of balancing freedom and responsibility” (p. 462) and the question of “how far should open and honest communication be taken” (p. 464).

Helen Rogers’ death in 1979 freed both partners—she from her physical suffering and loneliness, he from the tension between meeting his independent professional and personal needs while remaining committed to Helen and their relationship and tending to her physical care. (p. 465)

The satisfaction and pain Rogers experienced through his self-proclaimed growth in intimate emotional expression, confession, and truth-telling was only part of his struggles while approaching the end of his life. Kirschenbaum reveals much about Rogers’ later years that very few others were aware of prior to the publication of his biography of Rogers in 2007. ² Although Rogers wrote in A Way of Being (C. R. Rogers, 1980) that he had made what he regarded as considerable and desirable advances in intimacy, self-expression, and looking after himself, he also claimed that he had become much more volatile.

When I am excited, I get very high. When I am concerned, I am more deeply disturbed. Hurts seem sharper, pain is more intense, tears come more easily, joy reaches higher peaks, even anger—with which I have always had trouble—is felt more keenly. (C. R. Rogers, 1980, p. 82)

Rogers wondered if “this volatility is due to my risk-taking style of living. Perhaps it comes from the greater sensitivity acquired in encounter groups. Perhaps it is a characteristic of the older years. I do not know” (1980, p. 82). But what, thanks to Kirschenbaum, we now do know, and that apparently very few outside of his immediate family knew during his lifetime, is that Rogers had a serious problem with alcohol. For much of their lives, Carl and Helen had enjoyed consuming alcohol together and to relax in social settings, a habit that increased gradually over time. Long before Helen became housebound, she and Carl drank a lot, mostly in private. By the 1970s, Carl was drinking “close to a bottle of vodka a day” (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 471). Direct expression of concerns about his drinking from his adult children did little to change things. “What emerges then, is a picture of a high-functioning, closet drinker, self-medicating with liquor to reduce anxiety, stress and intermittent depression” (p. 474).

Kirschenbaum’s analysis is that Rogers never was able to forget or overcome what he felt as a lack of love and respect from his parents. His therapy with Ollie Bown helped him get back to coping with his life but “while it certainly confronted these issues and seemed to provide a measure of new self-acceptance, . . . [it] did not touch or resolve some core self-concept issues or deep hurt or grief” (2007, p. 476). Without the drinking, his psychological scars from his childhood might have remained just scars.

But Rogers’ ongoing drinking tore at the scars and reopened old wounds. . . . In a sense, there were two Carl Rogers . . . a man . . . who modeled his teachings at least as congruently as any prominent psychologist in history . . . [and] . . . a man who was not at peace with himself, who suffered from a drinking problem, who was surrounded by love but deeply lonely. (pp. 476–477)

Rogers’ sociocultural impact

Since at least the mid-1980s, a growing number of social scientists and scholars in the humanities have become fascinated by the impact of psychological and psychotherapeutic ideas and practices on contemporary cultures and societies. These commentators use terms such as “the triumph of the therapeutic” (Rieff, 1987), “the therapeutic state” (Polsky, 1991), “therapy culture” (Imber, 2004), and “the therapeutic turn” (Madsen, 2014) to describe what cultural sociologist Illouz (2008) refers to as a therapeutic ethos that now crosses national borders and blurs regional differences to create a global “social imaginary” (Taylor, 2004) concerning what it means to be human and the nature of human life in this world. This new therapeutic ethos eclipses previous religious, historical, and philosophical ideas and sociocultural practices concerning salvation through ascetic self-denial and citizenship through self-discipline and self-restraint. In their place, it offers self-actualization as the achievement of maximal psychological health and well-being in this life. Increasingly, problems of society (such as unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and crime) are understood as problems that originate in individual choices, poor planning, and insufficient self-development and effort. According to German sociologist Beck (1992), such individualization of sociocultural concerns promotes and legitimizes self-concern and fragments and dissipates potential collective action. Consequently, it erodes possibilities for effective co-operation amongst citizens and impedes support for necessary political participation and governance. The collective political becomes fragmented against the forces of individual self-actualization—“the moral side of authority has moved away from external sovereignties to internal convictions.” Contemporary culture has become “permeated by [a] seductive message about individual self-actualization and self-creation” (Madsen, 2014, p. 13).

At a sociopolitical and cultural level, the seductive message of self-creation and self-actualization also has been said to sanction an alignment of “political, social, and institutional goals with individual pleasures and desires, and with the happiness and fulfillment of the self” (Rose, 1990, p. 257). In this way, therapization of culture has the “capacity to offer means by which the regulation of selves—by others and by ourselves—can be made consonant with contemporary political principles, moral ideas and constitution exigencies” (p. 257). Although, on balance, Rose views the therapeutic ethos itself in a relatively neutral manner and cautions against adopting an overly “jaundiced view of the therapeutic culture of the self” (p. 257), others have issued much stronger warnings concerning the alignment it enables between personal self-development and neoliberal governance. For example, Madsen (2014) considers psychology’s promotion of a therapeutic ethos “an ideological bias,” and argues that

even as psychologists and other therapeutic experts will experience ever greater legitimacy in society and even greater demand, so the state of the sociological imagination will worsen and the incidence of psychological ailments in the population will increase and vice versa. (p. 171)

Sugarman (2015) adds that “it is plain that psychologists are contributing to an ideological climate in which persons are not obliged to consider, let alone take responsibility for the welfare of others” (p. 103).

Obviously, Carl Roger’s intention was never to contribute to a therapeutic culture that fostered social and cultural conditions hostile to human altruism, generosity of spirit, and love of others. Yet, the taking up of psychologists’ ideas and rhetoric by lay populations and their consequential absorption into sociocultural, including political and economic, contexts can be highly complex and unpredictable. Thus, it is entirely possible that Rogers’ humanistic, person-centered ideas and practices may have been folded into American and some other world cultures in ways very different from those he had contemplated and anticipated. Several popular commentators have drawn a direct link between the life and work of Carl Rogers and contemporary therapeutic culture. For example, Sommers and Satel (2005) accuse Rogers of introducing into American life the ideal of self-actualization, with the corollary “that the vast majority of Americans led ‘unactualized lives’ in spiritual wastelands from which they needed to be rescued.” These authors “reject the idea that psychology, however humanistic and liberationist, can be a general provider of salvation” and claim that “the popular assumption that emotional disclosure is always valuable, and that without professional help, most people are incapable of dealing with adversity . . . [has] drifted into all corners of American life” (p. 9) in ways that have eroded our resilience and confidence in our individual and collective ability to address our concerns and improve our prospects. Sommers and Satel also point to inconsistencies in Rogers own life—“On the one hand, he advocated a non-judgmentalism that countenances odd and conventionally outrageous behavior. On the other hand, he was censorious of anyone who challenged his eccentric principles and practices” (p. 71). For them, Rogers’ lasting contribution to American society has been to convince Americans that “self-expression is more important than self-control, that non-judgementalism is the essence of kindness, that psychic pain is a pathology in need of a cure” (p. 217). Nor are the problems that these popular authors see with Rogers’ legacy unique to America. Norwegian critical psychologist Madsen (2014, p. 171) maintains that contemporary therapeutic culture has grown and will continue to grow and spread well beyond America. Madsen, like Parker (2007) before him, suggests that it is time for psychologists to turn away from psychology as a universally valid study of the psyche, to critical studies of the effects of psychology.

In his attempts to understand and overcome what he believed to be an inability to express his life experiences and feelings to others and to feel good about himself, Carl Rogers invented a form of psychotherapy that he fervently believed could free him and others from such struggles. Unfortunately, having done so, he continued to experience the effects of what he referred to as “conditions of worth” that he had experienced in his childhood and which prevented him from attaining a sufficiently full acceptance of himself capable of anchoring a congruency in his self-experiencing and interactions with others (clients, colleagues, friends, and family). Although Rogers continuously grappled with and attempted to resolve these matters throughout his professional and personal life, he never succeeded in doing so. He seldom, if ever, faced the full force of his failure to integrate his many successes with an underlying sense of himself as inadequate, flawed, unable to love himself, and in one way or another “running away” from himself and others, even as he tried desperately to “be present.” There is ample evidence in his own life experience of his inability to provide himself with therapeutic levels of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding he attempted to supply to others. He routinely fled from aspects of his life and self that he could not accept fully, and which limited his ability to “get real.”

This said, is it reasonable or fair of contemporary critics of psychology to impugn Carl Rogers as an architect of therapeutic culture? There is no agreed upon resolution to a conundrum of this kind. People and their lives are complex and varied. Yet, certain factual claims concerning the persistence of Rogers’ therapeutic work seem possible and credible—such as that Rogers and his colleagues pioneered the recording and publication of entire psychotherapeutic treatments, that Rogers’ person-centered approach and “self theory” have won a place in standard histories of psychotherapy, and that his books and articles continue to receive considerable, although more currently somewhat less, attention than during his lifetime. Many of today’s most popular psychotherapeutic approaches, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), have become more targeted and skill-based than Rogers likely would approve, although DBT maintains a focus on self-exploration and emotional experience in relationships. However, contemporary existential, humanistic, and experiential psychotherapies retain much of Rogers’ concern for core therapeutic conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy, often reconceptualizing such conditions in terms of the working alliance between therapists and clients, general or common factors across various approaches to psychotherapeutic practice, and a greater emphasis on existential considerations.

As time passes it may be increasingly difficult for contemporary therapists, clients, and others to interpret Rogers’ theoretical and practical therapeutic legacy as he had intended it, in the context and consideration of significant changes and shifts in sociocultural practices, perspectives, and sensibilities that have occurred from Rogers’ death in 1987 to the mid-2020s. Currently there are many and more varied suppliers of psychotherapeutic interventions than in Rogers’ day—life coaches, support groups and people, personal consultants, online facilitators, advisors, guides, and helpers in almost any imaginable life context. Many contemporary societies have become saturated with concern for mental health and disability that would have been almost impossible to imagine in most of the previous century. Consequently, it would be a reach too far to view Carl Rogers as the sole or perhaps even the primary architect of contemporary therapeutic culture. An actual history of therapeutic culture, like that of any significant sociocultural change, is inevitably a highly complex undertaking. However, there also is no denying that Rogers wrote about and communicated his ideas and documented his therapeutic practices in ways that were uniquely accessible to a wide variety of readers, students, and others. For Kirschenbaum, Rogers’ legacy seems implicated in some of the most unsettling questions about contemporary life.

Will men and women increasingly rely on “a trust in their inner experiencing” and “the authority within,” or will political, economic, social, and environmental upheavals and insecurity cause [individuals, communities, and] nations to gravitate toward increasingly authoritarian and fundamentalist forms of leadership? Will individuals inexorably strive for self-determination and individuality—or willingly “escape from freedom”? Whatever the outcomes, Rogers clearly outlined the issues and choices and, through his life and work, presented one vivid model for becoming a person. (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 607)

However, what Rogers did not do, and perhaps what his life circumstances and relatively privileged life positioning did not enable him to do, was to entertain the possibility of more communally and politically grounded movements that might work in tandem with forms and practices of liberal democratic governments and institutions to support a more balanced and equitable sociopolitical life context in which self-actualization and personal growth are joined with community involvement and concern. What Rogers may not have understood is the extent to which persons emerge within sociocultural and political contexts that create very real possibilities and constraints on what is possible in personal and communal development, in ways that inevitably sustain and limit his cherished ideals of “self-actualization” and “facilitative life conditions.” By understanding such ideals as naturally built into the human organism rather than emergent within our historically and socioculturally situated, interpersonal interactivity, Rogers failed to fully appreciate that there is no guarantee that our life contexts and our lives necessarily will move us toward what is good. Indeed, any serious, critical consideration and debate about the nature and sociopolitical grounds for the good in human life is almost completely absent from Rogers’ oeuvre, and perhaps from his life experience—even to the extent that such an absence led him to repeatedly flee from or escape from aspects of his own experiences and actions that did not fit comfortably within his personal and professional self-understanding and life positioning. Even the “political awakening” that Kirschenbaum (2007, p. 435) says accompanied Rogers’ later life involvement in conflict resolution and peacemaking displays little evidence of considering how his deep commitments to individual autonomy and freedom might fare in different historical, sociocultural, and political contexts, let alone in relation to seemingly obvious requirements for human collective flourishing such as social participation, moral concern, and communal agency (cf. Fowers, 2015).

Rogers’ friend and colleague Maureen O’Hara (1995), who worked closely with him, helping to organize and run several national and international CSP encounter groups and workshops on conflict resolution, expressed deep regret about the fact that

He was never able, at least at a conscious level, to acknowledge the ways in which the self-constructs of self-actualizing individuals were part of the cultures that produced them. Nor did he seem to grasp that his own response to people was filtered through and constructed from the cultural biases of white, male, middle-class America. . . . Carl was the quintessential liberal Romantic . . . I had very little enthusiasm for his view of self, that seemed to place the individual’s needs irrevocably at odds with those of others. I wanted to discover if it were humanly possible to be free within society and not just free from it. (pp. 133–134)

Studying the lives, works, and legacies of psychologists

Given that psychology concerns human action and experience, the life experiences, beliefs, and values of psychologists cannot easily be detached from their psychological thinking and practices. “Perceptive observers have long noticed that there is an intimate connection between the personal life of psychologists—their experiences, troubles, preoccupations, and conflicts—and the psychological ideas and theories they create” (Anderson, 2005, p. 203). “The subjective world of the theorist is inevitably translated into [their] metapsychological conceptions and hypotheses regarding human nature” (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993). There is “a dynamic interaction between theorists and their ideas. Their ideas help them understand themselves and often enable them to work out vexing problems” (Anderson, 2005, p. 204). Carl Rogers’ struggles with congruence in his therapeutic relationships and professional and personal life are directly related to his theories of personal development and core psychotherapeutic conditions. Psychological ideas and theories often have biographical origins anchored in the historical, sociocultural life contexts of their authors. Studying the lives, works, and legacies of influential psychologists can help us understand and critically examine the intersections of psychologists’ developmental and life experiences with the development and impact of psychology itself.

Rogers very clearly recognized some of the ways in which his life interacted with his work. Such relations do not invalidate his theories and psychotherapeutic practices. However, they do highlight the value of studying the historical, biographical, and sociocultural contexts of his life and work, especially in relation to claims concerning the universality of his theories and practices. No persons, psychologists or others, can predict and control how their work and ideas will shift and change when situated by events and others after the time of their creation. In the last pages of A Way of Being (1980), Rogers asks the question “Can the person of tomorrow survive[?]” (p. 352). He then discusses what human tendencies could contribute to uncertainty in this regard by opposing and impeding what he regards as positive change. These he expresses using slogans like “tradition above all,” “the intellect above all,” “the status quo forever,” and “our truth is the truth” (pp. 353–355). He then describes “a more optimistic view” of what the future might hold, which includes the development of “the richness and capacities of the human mind and spirit” in “a world that prizes the individual person—the greatest of our resources,” aided by a “technology . . . aimed at the enhancing, rather than the exploitation, of persons and nature” that “will release creativity as individuals sense their power, their capacities, and their freedom,” changes that “will be in the direction of more humanness” (p. 356). Whether or not Rogerian psychology as developed by Rogers and as currently manifested in contemporary therapeutic culture will be associated with such outcomes is impossible to say. However, this does not mean that it is impossible to inquire critically into such a possibility. Inquiry into the lives and works of psychologists in ways that connect to their sociocultural impact can offer potentially informative perspectives on how psychologists and psychology change and affect, for better and for worse, the unfolding of human societies and cultures. ³

It may be true, as Carl Jung (1929/1961) avowed, that “every psychology—my own included—has the character of a subjective confession” (p. 336), but it also is true that every subjective confession reflects the sociocultural contexts within which psychologists work and live, and to which their ideas and practices contribute.