Carl Rogers: Theory, Quotes, & Psychology​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
Carl Rogers is one of the founders of the field of humanistic psychology, and his writings powerfully informed psychotherapy in the 20th century.
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Throughout the history of psychotherapy as a formal field of work and study, scholars and practitioners have debated endlessly what the right approaches and techniques are. Should we be using worksheets, interpreting dreams, or focusing on our feelings above all else? We seem to be highly invested in finding the “right” answer and tend to hold our opinions quite strongly on this topic.
At the same time, some researchers are very interested in figuring out what is helpful across all types of therapy, and one consistent finding is that what we call the therapeutic alliance—the relationship between the therapist and the client(s)—is a major contributing factor in the success of psychotherapy across all its different manifestations (Nienhuis et al., 2018). This is something I see in my own therapy practice, hear from friends and family, and know to be true from having been the client of several therapists: Therapy feels and works better when there is a solid bond between therapist and client.

Well before lots of research had accumulated in support of this finding, the psychologist Carl Rogers was touting the benefits of what he called “unconditional positive regard”—the relentlessly warm, encouraging, and nonjudgmental approach that he believed would help clients most. Carl Rogers was onto something with this idea as well as with lots of other ideas. Let’s take a look at his contributions to the field of psychology.
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Who Is Carl Rogers? (A Definition)​

Carl Rogers was born in 1902 in a suburb of Chicago, the fourth of six children in a devoutly religious family. He grew disillusioned with religion as a teenager and particularly as a college student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which was part of the reason he became so interested in applying scientific methods to real-world problems (Kirschenbaum, 2008). But he still spent two years studying at a seminary before embracing the field of psychology instead.

He was educated in psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. There he began by studying children and even published a book on working with troubled children in 1939. However, by a couple years later, he was focused more on the field of psychotherapy in general, publishing his seminal work, Counseling and Psychotherapy, in 1942. This led to him running a counseling center at the University of Chicago, where he continued to publish important books on the nature of effective psychotherapy. He later returned to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he published what is perhaps his most famous book, On Becoming a Person (Rogers, 1961).​

Later in the 1960s, Rogers moved to southern California, and he remained there the rest of his life, teaching and writing until his death in 1987. In his final years, he was particularly interested in how his ideas for effective psychotherapy might be helpful in resolving larger-scale conflicts, such as the religious conflict in Northern Ireland and the issue of apartheid in South Africa (Kirschenbaum, 2008).

Carl Rogers’s Contribution to Psychology​

Carl Rogers’s biggest contributions to psychology revolve around his novel research methods and important ideas for the field of psychotherapy (Kirschenbaum & Jourdan, 2005). Rogers and his collaborators were the first psychotherapists to publish full transcripts of psychotherapy sessions, a practice that greatly increased interest in the study of psychotherapy and made his own style of psychotherapy more accessible to practitioners.
 
Second, several of Rogers’s primary ideas about how to make psychotherapy more effective have received lots of support in the psychological literature (Kirschenbaum & Jourdan, 2005). Within the idea of a strong therapeutic alliance, Rogers’s concepts of unconditional positive regard and of congruence have been shown to directly affect psychotherapy outcomes. More generally, his belief in therapy that is client-centered and nondirective—taking its cues from what the client wants, not what the therapist thinks needs to change—has been embraced by many practitioners, and there are many training institutions worldwide that focus on his “person-centered” approach to psychotherapy. In promoting this focus on client goals and directing attention away from an explicit focus on psychopathology, he built momentum for the development of the field of counseling as distinct from psychology (Gladding, 1999).​

Carl Rogers & Humanistic Theory

Carl Rogers’s belief that psychology should focus on human flourishing as much as or more than human suffering was a defining aspect of the field of humanistic psychology, which he developed along with other mid-century psychologists such as Abraham Maslow. To Rogers, humanistic psychology represented a third wave of psychology, following psychoanalysis and behaviorism, and it differed from these previous approaches in that it focused on the development of a “fully functioning person” (Rogers, 1963). By this, Rogers meant a person who could embrace all of their own experience, was fully present in the moment, and trusted their own thoughts and feelings but was not overly attached to them. This was humanity at its best, and Rogers focused his humanistic theory on the development of psychotherapeutic tools that would help people reach that full potential.

Carl Rogers & Unconditional Positive Regard

Unconditional positive regard means being warm and nonjudgmental toward other people (Rogers, 1963). It means accepting the client’s goals and their right to choose their own path, even if one might inwardly disagree with their perspective, because people become more fully themselves when they move toward goals they have chosen themselves. This idea, so fundamental to Rogers’s person-centered therapy approach, contradicts previous psychological approaches that saw people as being at the mercy of their unconscious or their environment.

Carl Rogers & Person-Centered Therapy

Person-centered therapy is the name Rogers gave to his approach to psychotherapy (Raskin & Rogers, 2005). Its central thesis was that when a therapist approaches a client with genuine care, empathy, and nonjudgment, the client can become self-directed in pursuing their own growth and betterment. This is called person-centered therapy because the client, not the therapist, sets the terms of what is a good goal and what constitutes success. Whereas many psychotherapeutic modalities impose expectations and goals on clients, Rogers believed it would be far more meaningful and effective for clients themselves to be in charge of these aspects of therapy.

If you would like to hear more directly from the man himself on this topic, I recommend watching this interview, conducted late in Rogers’s life, in which he reviews and outlines his person-centered approach:​

Video: Carl Rogers: The Conversation​

Carl Rogers & Self Concept

According to Rogers (1963), effective and humanistic psychotherapy would change people’s self-concept for the better. Most psychological struggle and lack of thriving, in his eyes, came from a lack of a positive self-concept. It was the therapist’s responsibility, using the techniques we have been discussing in this article, to promote in each client a sense that they are already accepted, they already matter, they already make sense, and they are already able to help themselves. Rogers believed that a more empowering self-concept was a primary, if not the main, goal of psychotherapy.  

Carl Rogers & Self-Actualization

As clients grew in their positive self-concept, Rogers (1963) reasoned, they would grow in their ability to self-actualize. Like Abraham Maslow, Rogers saw self-actualization as the ultimate goal of therapy: that the client could see themselves exactly as they are and have experiences that affirm their unique role in the world. In self-actualizing, he believed, people would come to recognize their “real selves” and then want to express those real selves as much as possible.
 
Rogers believed that the drive to self-actualize was innate to each person and took a unique form in each person. He called this the actualizing tendency and said that people who receive positive support naturally act on this tendency. For many people, this support is not forthcoming from their environments, so it must start in the therapeutic relationship.​

Carl Rogers & Congruence

Rogers (1957) believed that psychological struggles and lack of flourishing took place because there was an incongruence between the real self that people intuitively knew was inside them and the way their environments saw them. It was powerfully healing, as he saw it, for a therapist to give the client an experience of congruence between this internal sense of self and their outside environment. Even if it was just one therapist affirming their real self for one hour a week, Rogers believed that this was a powerful and necessary therapeutic intervention.
 
Thus the experience of congruence for the client relies heavily on the therapist being present, being attentive, and genuinely believing in the client’s real self (Rogers, 1957). How the therapist communicates this perspective to the client is a delicate matter that Rogers gave a lot of thought to; therapists could not give clients that sense of congruence unless they truly felt and believed in the client’s sense of self and their goals.

Carl Rogers & Incongruence

The concept of incongruence is worth saying a bit more about. Rogers saw incongruence as occurring on two levels (Purton, 2013). First, clients might be aware of their real selves but not have their real selves reflected back to them by their environments. Second, clients may know who they believe they truly are but struggle to communicate this sense of self effectively to others.

Carl Rogers’s Perspective on Active Listening

Communicating unconditional positive regard and giving a client the experience of congruence requires very deliberate efforts at active listening (Rogers & Farson, 1957). Active listening, to Rogers, meant the opposite of trying to change the person, which is a very common tendency among therapists. True active listening would not involve efforts to convince, scold, or reason with the client, and it would entail avoiding passing judgment even when one’s opinion is solicited directly. Active listening also means being able to understand the complete message the client is trying to communicate and being able to summarize it for them.

Carl Rogers & Conditions of Worth

In contrast to unconditional positive regard, our environments often communicate conditions of worth to us (Rogers, 1957). By conditions of worth, Rogers meant that only in certain circumstances or when we behave in certain ways could we be considered worthy; in other words, our worthiness is conditional on being a certain version of ourselves. Again, this is why the experience of unconditional positive regard can be so therapeutic: Many people find it very healing to be able to simply be themselves and be accepted that way.

Carl Rogers & the Curious Paradox

Rogers saw self-acceptance and self-love as a precondition for effective growth, saying, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” In saying this, he articulated a primary dissonance within the work of therapy in general: People need to feel good enough about themselves as they are to seriously consider any real change.

Famous Carl Rogers Quotes

  • “What I am is good enough if I would only be it openly.”
  • “I realize that, if I were stable, prudent, and static, I would live in death. Therefore, I accept confusion, uncertainty, fear, and emotional ups and downs. Because that is the price I am willing to pay for a fluid, perplexing, and exciting life.”
  • “It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.”
  • “In my early professional years, I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
  • “When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. I have deeply appreciated the times that I have experienced this sensitive, empathic, concentrated listening.”
  • “People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be . . . When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner’ . . . I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
  • “Change threatens, and its possibility creates frightened, angry people. They are found in their purest essence on the extreme right, but in all of us, there is some fear of process, of change.”

Articles Related to Carl Rogers

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Carl Rogers

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Carl Rogers​

Many therapists today continue to provide therapy in the style of Carl Rogers, aiming to be as positive and accepting with their clients as possible. If this kind of therapeutic approach is appealing to you, I suggest you look for therapists who say they practice in a humanistic style.

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