Carl Rogers′ Helping System

Journey & Substance

Godfrey T Barrett-Lennard

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780761956778, 9780761956761
• eBook ISBN: 9781446224120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

`This book is a monumental achievement, and person-centred practitioners will be indebted to Goff Barrett-Lennard for many years to come. He has written no only a definitive study of the history of person-centred approach - what he calls a report of the "evolutionary course of a human science" - but also an accompanying commentary which is unfailingly enlightening, sometimes provocative and occasional lyrical? - Brian Thorne, Emeritus Professor of Counselling, University of East Anglia and Co-Founder, Norwich Centre

`I highly recommend this book as a reference source of major import, as bibliography, as history as art, and as a complex discussion of questions that plague the person-centred practitioner and the client-centred therapist? - The Person-Centered Journal

`If you only ever buy one book about the Person-Centred Approach, other than those written by Rogers himself, this is the one. It is a staggering achievement by one of the most knowledgeable writers in the field? - PCP Reviews

`This book is a gem, and should have wide appeal. It is an excellent introduction to person-centred psychology, written in accessible style, and it takes the reader beyond the simplicity often confused with naivety Goff Barrett-Lennard reveals a sophisticated complexity that challenges us to view the "person" with fresh eyes and an open mind? - Tony Merry, University of East London

`I strongly recommend this book as a sophisticated treatment of the client-or person-centred approach to therapy and its applications to areas outside therapy. It is also a useful overview of research on all aspects of person-centred ideas? - Psychotherapy Research

`This book... is not a single "meal" in itself but a positive "larder" containing every imaginable staple food and condiment all exquisitely and thoroughly researched. The book took Godfrey T Barrett-Lennard 20 years to write and it will stand as a reference text for person-centred specialists for longer than that... an essential reference text... and a pantry full of delicious surprises? - Counselling and Psychotherapy, The Journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy

`Probably the most important piece of work on the person-centred approach to have emerged in recent years... an essential source of reference for anyone with a serious interest in the person-centred approach? - Counselling News

Written by an ex-student and long-time colleague of Carl Rogers, this in-depth and challenging book charts the development of person-centred therapy from its origins through to the present day.

Godfrey T Barrett-Lennard traces the central concepts and key figures within the movement, set against the contemporary historical, social and political context. As an integrated overview of the person-centred approach, Carl Rogers? Helping System presents a wealth of fascinating ideas and information which is linked to a fresh, incisive account of the unfolding theory, process and research.

PART I

CARL ROGERS AND HIS MILIEU

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1

The Beginnings of Client-Centred Therapy

The word ‘therapy’ has no verb in English, for which I am grateful; it cannot do anything to anybody, hence can better represent a process going on, observed perhaps, understood perhaps, assisted perhaps, but not applied. The Greek noun from which therapy is derived means ‘a servant’, the verb means ‘to wait’.

Jessie Taft, 1933

In 1939, as World War II began in Europe, a book titled The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child was published by a clearly talented but, until then, largely unknown clinical psychologist in Rochester, upper New York State. Based on over a decade of field experience working with children, parents and families in difficulty, in an era that included the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal, the book was an original and substantial resource to other workers in its field. It is evident from many details of the book that the author’s interest and thought were influenced by innovative sources in social work and other fields as well as psychology. In his opening chapter entitled ‘A point of view’ the writer, Carl R. Rogers, proceeds at once to a firm and revealing expression of his outlook:

In this book we shall deal with the child, not with behavior symptoms. One will look in vain for a chapter on stealing, thumb-sucking, or truancy, for such problems do not exist, nor can they be treated. . . . [In] each instance it is the child with whom we must deal, not the generalization which we make about his behavior. (Rogers, 1939: 3–4)

Thirty-five years later, Rogers was to emphasize that seeing ‘the unique, subjective, inner person as the honored and valued core of human life’ was one of the main enduring features of the client-centred orientation (Rogers, 1974c: 9). While client-centred therapy as a distinct new approach was not yet born in 1939, its precursors are vividly apparent in Rogers’ first book. This work itself was a convergent outcome of several major streams of influence. The most evident of these are the background and person of the founder, his professional experience and influences, and the larger social-ideational climate in which his thought and practice took form. I invite you as reader to join me, to start with, in inquiring into the origins of the client-centred system. My belief is that this can lead to a deeper understanding than would result from simply viewing the end product. This ‘system’, under Rogers’ tillage and in the soil of the times, grew in its founder’s lifetime into an approach to therapy and human relations of global import.

The ‘growing’ of the founder of client-centred therapy

Rogers was a middle child in a large, middle-class, religiously strict and socially conservative, close-knit family. He has described his strongly family-centred parents as ‘masters of the art of subtle and loving control’ (Rogers, 1967a: 344). They both were well-educated for their time, energetic and very practical in bent, with a strong belief in self-reliance and in the virtue and efficacy of hard work. Rogers’ father was a civil engineer and contractor, with his own business, and he later took up scientific farming as a sideline. His mother cared for her large family and household, evidently taking the lead, both through example and her fundamentalist religious beliefs, in her children’s moral education. The boy Carl had learned to read well before he started school at age 7. He remembers himself as a dreamy youngster and omnivorous reader, although somewhat conflicted by this absorption as opposed to being up and about ‘working’. As a child and youth, he had relatively little social life outside his immediate family. The family itself included a variety of relationships and companionship with older and younger brothers. Humour with a cutting edge or in the form of ‘unmerciful teasing’ is mentioned as a feature of the family interaction (ibid.).

About the time Carl finished elementary school, his parents bought a farm away from their former home in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. His father and mother both liked productive outdoor activity. Most of all, they wished to remove their large family, then aged 6 to 20, away from ‘the temptations and evils of suburban and city life’ (ibid.). The woods and country provided a rich setting for play and fantasy that connected with Carl’s adventure story reading, and for his blossoming serious interest in nature and in natural science. Two examples seem to stand out. One included his fascinated study and diligent rearing, through the caterpillar-larval and cocoon-pupal stages, of various species of great night-flying moth. The second example was Carl’s growing involvement in his father’s interest in scientific agriculture, often via projects and ventures which he made his own. An important instance he remembered was, as a 14-year-old, ploughing determinedly through a large book describing exacting experimental procedures in agricultural science, and gaining his first learnings about control groups, randomization, hypothesis testing and the generally painstaking process of scientific inquiry in an applied field (ibid.: 347, and Rogers, 1961a: 6).

In all, Rogers’ upbringing was rather narrow and it was spacious. The family climate was both judgemental and supportively valuing of its members. On the one hand, Carl was confined pretty much to his family in a kind of preventive ‘house arrest’ situation and, on the other side, he was given fertile opportunity for very important dimensions of exploration and growth. The opportunity included favourable conditions for imaginal and intellectual development, for learnings around the forming of beliefs and values, for keen experience both of connection and apartness from others, and for the growth of a strong sense of self. There was room in his bounded world to dream, and the inner and outer conditions for a rich fantasy life existed side by side with a family emphasis on pursuits of a very practical nature. Especially, there was space and general encouragement, to playfully explore, seriously study and directly investigate phenomena that interested him, in the ‘safe’ areas of natural history and agriculture.

Carl took his formal schoolwork in his stride, excelling in English, where he could be personally expressive, and in science. Experiences of significant failure or defeat seem to have been almost non-existent, and the young Carl grew up in an atmosphere of generally taken-for-granted confidence in his basic ability, potential to succeed, and ‘specialness’ – in himself and as a member of his family. Although there were social/interpersonal ways in which he felt unsure of himself, his family and school experience would have supported the assumption that he could continue to develop and achieve what he wanted to, in directions he felt free to take. To discover and freely move along a growthful and fulfilling path some constraining personal walls would almost certainly need to come down. Vivid new experiences away from home were catalysts in this direction.

After finishing high school, Carl joined his next older brother at the University of Wisconsin, taken for granted as the place members of his family would go to college, and opted for agricultural science as his primary field. Soon his religious inclinations led to association with a band of classmates in a Sunday-morning group nondirectively facilitated by one of his professors. In this voluntary open situation, both self-initiation and interpersonal bonding developed strongly. For the first time, outside his family, Carl experienced ‘real closeness and intimacy’; and he reports that ‘the friendship and companionship which developed in this group of about twenty-five young men was an exceedingly important element in my life. We came to know each other well and to trust each other deeply’ (1967a: 349). Many particular activities and learning experiences ensued. About midway in his second year Carl took part in an evangelistic conference of Student Volunteers (a kind of religion-based ‘Peace Corps’) where he experienced strong inspiration to change his life goal and go into Christian work. One consequence was to shift from agriculture to history as his major undergraduate field.

The following year, another profoundly influential episode occurred, beginning with selection as one of ten students from the United States to take part in a World Student Christian Federation Conference, in Peking. Rogers speaks of the six-months-long experience, including the leisurely voyages by sea and the intellectual and personal stimulus of his student companions and the gifted professional staff, as probably the most formative transition period in his undergraduate years. Even the conference itself centred on intercultural relations and was not evangelical in tone. Carl kept a journal record of the trip and of his developing thought and outlook, and sent a copy of this ahead to his family. By the time he returned home, the effect of his mailed communications and evident ‘radical’ change was an emancipating breaking of ties with his parents, in terms of religious and intellectual perspective (1967a: 350–351).

A concurrent development in Rogers’ life was his movement into a deeply sharing, love relationship with the young woman who was to become his wife, and who was already his sweetheart by his second university year. His later years in college strongly carried forward his maturing intellectual development – the main influences including particular teachers, the work of historical figures to whom he resonated, and the opportunities for searching, creative engagement and independent achievement. Another significant new activity was involvement in the University debating team. This was a demanding but also exciting and confirming experience, yielding new skills and mastery (ibid.: 351). Gone was the outward dreaminess of Carl’s early youth, and in its place was a still-visionary but highly active, energetic pattern of roving exploration and achievement.

By no means was it all plain sailing in these liberating but also personally stretching years. About the time that his most critical steps toward independence from his family were being taken, after his return from China, Carl was diagnosed as having a duodenal ulcer. Indications are that this condition had been incubating since his mid-teens, and it seems likely that inner stresses around breaking away from the confining security of his family for a changing, risky, separate identity were contributing causes. His rehabilitation, away from University, included the family cure-all of hard physical work. Between the six-month trip to China, and this further time out, coupled with his earlier shift from agriculture to history, Carl’s pathway through college did not synchronize with that of a class or year group and contributed to a lack of continuous friendships. The most notable exception was with Helen, his bride-to-be, whom he married soon after graduating and just before he headed for New York to begin the next phase in his educational life, a phase which became the transition to another major shift in career direction.

The immediate destination was Union Theological Seminary, a leading intellectual centre in religious work, with a reputation for liberalism. While a new world opened in terms of the quality of philosophical inquiry and teaching, and his first exposure to ‘pastoral’ studies with a clinical-human relations emphasis, the climate was a heady freedom of rising expectations. Carl and others sought and gained permission to organize an official, credit seminar where there would be no instructor and the curriculum would consist of the participants’ own questions and searching.

Most members of this special seminar ‘in thinking through the questions they had raised, thought their way right out of religious work’ (1967a: 354). For Carl, the key issues seemed to be those of sustaining a hard-won freedom of belief and a growing attraction to the personality and person-helping field. He was already taking courses at Teachers College, Columbia University; and made the decision to transfer, after his second year at Union Seminary, into doctoral studies in clinical and educational psychology. In keeping with an earlier mentioned area of confidence, he was sure that he could take the formal requirements in his stride. ‘Preparation for examinations [he wrote] was a well-organized affair for me. It never gave me any trouble because it never entered my head that I would not be successful’ (ibid.: 355).

Next year, Carl obtained a fellowship at the new Institute for Child Guidance where the emphasis on personality and emotional dynamics in the context of an ‘eclectic Freudianism’ was sharply at variance with the objective measurement-oriented ethos dominant in the Teachers College program. His subsequent doctoral research, focusing on the development of a test for measuring personality adjustment in children, reflected an emergent synthesis of learnings and attitudes from these two influential contexts.

Rogers was 26 when his eventful year at the Institute for Child Guidance ended, the requirements for his doctorate evidently complete except for the dissertation. With his wife, Helen, and their 2-year old child to support, he secured his first regular job, as a psychologist in the Child Study Department established by the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Looked at by usual criteria, the position was not impressive: professionally isolated; without academic connection; modest in salary even by the standards of the day (1967a: 358). These limiting features seem not to have weighed in Rogers’ thinking at the time. The most important thing was that there appeared to be an opportunity, realized increasingly over the twelve professionally formative years that followed, to do work that interested him, with people.

Two years later, as Rogers was winding up his doctoral thesis part-time, just getting a job would have been a major achievement. By this time, the New York stock market had crashed and the Great Depression was beginning in earnest. The fallout in human terms of these crises would have accentuated the need for agencies such as the one Rogers was helping to staff, although conditions were scarcely conducive to the availability of resources during the agonizing pre-Roosevelt period. Remarkably, the Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal and associated transformations in American life, pass unmentioned in Rogers’ autobiographies and receive virtually no attention in his professional writing. (I intend, in the next chapters, to establish the vital importance for his work of the wider context and climate of the times.)

Appraising problem children and families in difficulty, and arranging or providing remedial assistance; working in a relatively independent multi-discipline setting; trying out alternative methods in practice, and learning from errors and success; building programs and teams and growing in leadership resources; moving into new spheres of activity, such as writing his first book, and a summer session of teaching at Columbia University – all of these were part of the mix of Rogers’ experience. All helped to prepare him for what lay ahead: leading counselling practice and thought into a new era, blazing fresh trails in the human service and educational fields, and opening his work to touch the lives and thought of people from many other callings.

The context of Rogers’ Rochester years was one of immersion in working and learning with people from all walks of life, wanting always to know more, to become more effective, to expand his repertoire. His daughter grew from infancy and his son to adolescence, and in all his family provided a wellspring of learning, challenge, support and growth opportunity. Rogers’ whole life, not just the phases viewed here, is a striking example of continuity within change, the unfolding process itself still sustained and visible in the last years of his life. One of his papers ‘Growing older: or older and growing’ (Rogers, 1980c, written in 1977) provides vivid testimony to the eventful and creative decade of his life from his mid-sixties to mid-seventies. His own becoming, in the period before and after the emergence of client-centred therapy, has a great deal to do with its fertility and bears on its emphases. Particular, main steps and qualities in Rogers’ work, in the Rochester period and time immediately following it, which clearly included the gestation and ‘birth’ of non-directive client-centred therapy, call for closer description.

Early professional challenges: steps, direction, style

Rogers’ river of publications has as its starting source...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I CARL ROGERS AND HIS MILIEU
• PART II THE NEW VISION UNFOLDING
• PART III PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE
• PART IV RESEARCH
• PART V LEVELS OF BECOMING
• References
• Subject Index
• Name Index