ABSTRACT
Carl Rogers developed person-centered counseling and psychotherapy in the United States roughly between 1940 and 1990. He fostered this approach in an era when science pervaded Western thinking, when psychoanalysis dominated clinical psychology, and when progressivism challenged traditional education. His ideas matured concurrently with the emergence of behaviorism as a systematic approach to psychotherapy, with which his ideas differed fundamentally. “Arguably the leading voice in the humanistic psychotherapy movement” (Kirschenbaum, 2007, p. 257), Rogers expressed his humanistic views in his own summary statement of history:
Rogers lived through World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam war, and most of the Cold War. He continued to rene his ideas throughout the turbulent social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, including the civil rights and women’s rights movements. In these fertile times of social experimentation, Rogers and others who shared his views applied his principles to a variety of domains of human existence.
