HISTORY OF CLIENT-CENTERED THERAPY

Carl Rogers is a psychologist who recognized early in his career that children as well as adults could do a lot of independent altering of their lives if given understanding and love. He turned away from the moralisms of religion,from the testing methods of psychology, and from the diagnostic and interpretive methods of psychiatry. He utilized his intuition, experience, and research methods to develop a nondirective or client-centered system of reacting to counselees.

He made his first observations of the effect of counsellor behavior on clients during the 1930s at the Rochester (New York) Guidance Center. During the early 1940s,he researched Client-Centered Therapy at Ohio State University and wrote Counselling and Psychotherapy. This book contained one of the first of a long series of presentations of what actually said by client and therapist in therapy sessions. From 1945 to 1957 he continued his therapy, research, and teaching at the University of Chicago.He published Client-Centered Therapy in 1951, which included some theory as well as applications of his viewpoint to settings other than individual therapy. From 1957 to 1964, he worked with psychotics at the University of Wisconsin and then moved to La Jolla, California,where he developed a training center for therapists and leaders of organizations.Today he is active in applying client-centered principles to leadership education.