ABSTRACT
Carl Rogers had a glittering career. His early work was on children but, in 1940, he left his post in Rochester, New York where he worked for the Society for the Protection of Children and went to the University of Ohio. He developed what has come to be known as humanist therapy and wrote a number of successful books on counselling. Rogers was critical of the way he fathered his two children when they were small. ‘I would rate myself only fair as a father then . . . in those days I was concerned with whether they were disturbing me rather than whether what I was doing was in the direction of promoting their own growth.’ Rogers coined the phrase ‘unconditional personal regard’, by which he meant that the therapist had to suspend judgment of the inevitably flawed human being he or she was trying to help. Rogers’ motto also influenced his ideas about furniture. You could not have unconditional personal regard if you were staring down at the patient lying in a submissive position on the analytic couch. So sometime around 1942, he decided clients – he disliked the word patients – had to sit opposite him as equals. In abandoning the couch, Rogers resembled a man whose politics he would have detested, Matthias Goring, the cousin of Hitler’s second in charge, Herman Goring. Matthias was a psychoanalyst who also did not want patients to lie supinely on the couch while the all-knowing therapist looked down on them. Matthias Goring was both a fervent Christian and a fervent Nazi. As a Christian he believed that the healer and the sufferer had to face each other as equals. Rogers never claimed religion was the reason he changed the seating arrangements but Rogers, I argued in a critical biography, had many blind spots about himself. (My late son Reuben did much of the research, spent months in the Library of Congress reading Rogers’ papers and would often get exasperated by them. Rogers left the library 117 boxes of papers including the bank books which he opened as a teenager. Reuben turned his experience into a fine novel, Theo’s Ruins.)
The man who thought his every note was worth gifting to the nation was bitterly disappointed not to win a Nobel Prize in the 1980s. He thought he deserved it for some well-meaning attempts he made to offer encounter groups to the Catholics and Protestants in Ulster during the Troubles. If only they could give each other unconditional personal regard, they might stop murdering each other, he believed – not an unworthy ideal. Rogers had considerable understanding of the loyalties that religion inspires. He was born in Chicago in 1902 into a devoutly Christian home. His daughter Natalie wrote that it was
a strict, puritanical environment where the family gathered each morning for prayers and bible reading. The six children sat in the parlour taking turns reading paragraphs from the Bible. After the reading each person knelt on the floor, hands folded on the chair in front of him, to get a final blessing from his parents.
