American psychologists once rated Carl Rogers above Freud as a therapist
In a 1982 survey of 422 American and Canadian psychologists, Carl Rogers came out as the most influential psychotherapist in history, with Freud in third. Rogers had trained for the ministry, lost his faith after a trip to Beijing, and built a therapy around one idea: an accepting listener helps people fix their own lives.
Rogers was born in 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, the fourth of six children of a civil engineer and a devout Baptist homemaker. He read fluently before kindergarten, and a strict religious upbringing left him solitary, self-disciplined and drawn to the practical scientific method. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison he began in agriculture, moved to history and settled on religion.
A 1922 Christian conference in Beijing, when he was 20, unsettled his beliefs. After a seminar pointedly titled Why Am I Entering the Ministry? he changed direction, though he first married Helen Elliott in 1924 and spent two years at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He moved to Teachers College, Columbia, earning an MA in 1927 and a PhD in 1931. Described as an atheist early on and later as an agnostic, he spoke often in old age about a spiritual dimension beyond scientific psychology.
An internship at New York's Institute for Child Guidance exposed him to two styles. The institute practised a rigid Freudian routine of long case histories and batteries of tests, while Alfred Adler simply engaged the child and parent directly, which startled Rogers and taught him more than he first realised. He went on to direct a child-protection society in Rochester, New York, wrote The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child in 1939, and absorbed the ideas of Otto Rank through Rank's follower Jessie Taft.
At Ohio State from 1940 he published Counseling and Psychotherapy, arguing that a relationship with an understanding, accepting therapist lets clients gain insight and reorganise their lives. This person-centred approach spread into counselling, student-centred teaching and organisations. The American Psychological Association honoured his research in 1956 and his professional work in 1972, and a study by Steven Haggbloom's team ranked him the sixth most eminent psychologist of the century, second only to Freud among clinicians. He died in 1987.
Source: Carl Rogers
