Foreword to 'Carl Rogers_ the Quiet Revolutionary, An Oral History'

7/28/2019 Foreword to 'Carl Rogers_ the Quiet Revolutionary, An Oral History'

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Home > Focusing and ... > Psychotherapy > Articles > Foreword to 'Carl Rogers: The

Quiet Revolutionary, An Oral History'

F O R E W O R D

Eugene T. Gendlin

Carl Rogers: The Quiet Revolutionary, An Oral History. Carl R. Rogers and David E. Russell. Foreword by Eugene T. Gendlin.

(Roseville, CA: Penmarin Books, 2002).

Rogers is world renowned for originating and developing the now prevailing

humanistic trend in psychotherapy, having pioneered in research and having

influenced all fields related to psychology. He was already well known when I

started working with him in 1952. Visitors came from everywhere. Some were

inspired to self-empowerment by a single meeting. Some were disappointed.

Rogers seemed ordinary; he was not a sparkling conversationalist. He would

certainly listen to you, and with real interest. He would sit forward and look you

in the eyes, wanting to hear what this person--you--had to say. But, then, on

his side he might just state his position again, rather than replying in detail to

your detail. He also kept his new thinking silently, perhaps wordlessly, inside.

When he was ready, he wrote his ground-breaking ideas.

He rarely exuded feelings, and hardly ever anger. He would strongly state his

feelings and needs, but without pouring them on the other person. If his

secretary was on the phone with a friend, he would stand, patiently, holding his

letters in his hand, waiting until she was ready. But he faced down the hatred of

most of the profession because in the workplace, classroom, therapist's office

and all around him, he turned the social system upside down.

He cared about each person but not about the institutions. He did not care

about appearances, roles, class, credentials or positions, and he doubted everyauthority, including his own.

His immense power came from the fact that once he discovered something, he

followed it through. He saw no reason to limit it by all those irrelevancies that

stop most people. So he was able to launch practices that revolutionized the

field.

In the 1940s, he was accused of "destroying the unity of psychoanalysis." He

founded a frankly different method: nondirective therapy. It meant war against

monolithic authority. He won that war. Today we have many methods and the

opportunity for open inquiry.

He insisted on testing his new therapy to show that it worked. To Rogers, that

meant objective, quantitative research. But there were few usable procedures

and no examples of research in psychotherapy. Such research was considered

impossible because therapists had never let anyone listen in, let alone measure

and compare. Rogers recorded therapy sessions on the clumsy glass disks of

that time. He was accused of "violating the sanctity of the analytic

relationship"--another war.

Rogers wanted comparative research, and he tried hard to get the

psychoanalysts to record and test their therapy. For years their reply was, "You

can record the residents" (in other words, the trainees). It showed whose

sanctity was being protected.

eword to 'Carl Rogers: The Quiet Revolutionary, An Oral History' http:/ /www.focusing.org/gendlin_foreword_to_cr.html

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Rogers' group was the first (by twenty years) to analyze every sentence of

hundreds of transcripts and to measure outcomes on psychometric (and other

newly devised) tests given to clients before and after therapy, and also given to

a control group. Rogers won that war too; such research is now common.

He proclaimed new ethics: Recording required the client's permission.

Confidentiality was emphasized, and the answer to all inquiries was only, "The

person was in therapy here." In spirit, his ethics is now accepted, but at thetime it was new. "Professional ethics" mostly meant a doctor's duty to protect

other doctors.

The way in which Rogers came to his new method was characteristic of him. He

found something, and then, because there was no relevantreason to limit it, he

did not limit it.

Otto Rank interpreted onlywhen the patient "stood in the very experience

being interpreted."1 Jesse Taft and Frederick Allen (with whom Rogers studied)

found this conjunction onlywhen they interpreted interaction. So they were

otherwise silent. Rogers eliminated all interpretation. Instead, he checked hisunderstanding out loud, trying to grasp exactly what the patient wished to

convey. When he did that, he discovered something: The patient would usually

correct the first attempt. The second would be closer, but even so, the patient

might refine it. Rogers would take in each correction until the patient indicated,

"Yes, that's how it is. That's what I feel." Then there would be a characteristic

silence. During such a silence, after something was fully received, the next

thing comes inside. Very often it is something deeper. Rogers discovered that a

self-propelled process arises from inside. When each thing is received utterly as

intended, it makes new space inside. Then the steps go deeper and deeper.

Call it a way of circumventing defenses or making maximal closeness without

imposing. Whatever you call it, observe the result. For Rogers, theory came

after experience. He wrote his theory of this in Client-Centered Therapy, and

then a fuller theory in On Becoming a Person, his best-known book, but he did

not try to convince by theory. He wrote, "Try it as an operational hypothesis;

see what happens."

In the therapist's chair, this way of listening is entirely different. Instead of

being set to deal with what a person says, to move it in some way, to agree

with one part and differ with another, one listens to grasp what the person

intends to convey--the sense that makes when felt as that person feels it.

Rogers' discovery led further! He found that everyperson makes internal

sense. That sense evolves and corrects itself as it deepens. This discovery put

Rogers ahead of the country in another way. In 1945, blacks, women, gay

people and others found help at the Counseling Center because these

therapists knew that everyclient had to teach them a new world. A black client

might spend months teaching a therapist about black experience. However,

another black client might say with relief after one hour, "With you I can forget

about race." These therapists never forced a policy on a client. They would not

coerce a woman to stay in a marriage, as psychoanalysts generally then did.Nor would they decide what another person's sexuality should be. To therapists

trained by Rogers, it was obvious that everyperson is at the directing center of

a life and that one can help people only by means of their own intricacy and


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their own steps.

Rogers published the transcripts of a case of his that was a failure. In the intern

group he would play tapes of model interviews, but sometimes he would bring a

bad one, saying, "I don't know what's going wrong here." The students could

hear a great deal going wrong, and it made them feel free to present their own

bad interviews.

He found diagnostics to be inadequate, prejudicial and often misused; so he

eliminated it. It was another affront to the profession, but it made the space of

psychotherapy open and receptive.

Rogers renamed his nondirective therapy client-centered therapy(and later,

person-centeredtherapy). As in law, the client, not the lawyer, decides each

move. But that was only the outward sign of breaking the medical model of

"illness," "diagnosis" and "the doctor knows best." Today most therapists see

"clients," and they don't think of therapy as analogous to medicine.

Rogers' discovery had implications for other fields, and he followed them up inhis usual way: Is it just as true in education that a deeper process develops

from inside? In his own courses, Rogers taught by handing out lists of

"available resources" at the beginning of a course and then pursuing the good

sense of each student's proposal for how the class should proceed. The result

each time was an enormously excited class directing its own exploration.

Without assignments, students read and did more than ever under the old

system. Rogers soon contributed to a new literature that influenced a

generation of educators.

To learn this method of therapy requires some years of practice, supervision,

and consultation, but academic education does not help. That led (and Rogers

followed where it led) to the conclusion that one does not need degrees to be a

therapist. Another war. Why not train church workers, nurses, mothers,

teachers--anyone--to be a therapist? There was no inherent reason not to, and

irrelevancies did not stop him.

Although millions were trained, Rogers did not win this war. Rather than really

sensing each point, the method was simplified. It became verbal repetition.

Recent research shows that such responses lead to failure because they deflect

people from entering into their as yet unverbalized experiencing.2 The method

ended up discredited. This listening is hard to learn. We are renewing Rogers'vision by teaching "focusing and listening" to the public.

Rogers was constantly invited everywhere. He would try to decide which

invitations to accept, saying, "Where could I have the most impact?" As often

as not, he would choose a group in nursing or in education.

Would the approach apply in work settings? In 1947, Rogers gave up control of

the Chicago Counseling Center. Student interns, secretaries and faculty ran it

equally. Of course, involvement and productivity rose to new levels. Later, when

the center lost its grant, this model showed its resilience: Everyone pooled their

pay and worked for very little, until new funding was found. This was the

Counseling Center to which I came as a graduate student in philosophy.

Philosophy is a highly developed discipline, not about a topic but about how


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concepts work (on any topic). Since concepts can work in different ways, and

since one needs concepts to examine concepts, there have always been vital

disagreements in philosophy. From the beginning, I put the various conceptual

strategies in relation to direct experiencing. Then each philosophy enables you

to see and do more, and all can be employed. As mere concepts they contradict

each other, but each can bring forth something valuable from what I call "direct

experiencing."

In philosophy it is now possible to communicate Rogers' understanding of what

human beings are, which is very different from the usual assumptions. For

Rogers, each human being is a different intricacy beyond what culture makes.

The new advances that come from listening and focusing have never happened

before in the history of the world.

I knew that experiencing is always already symbolized by situations and implicit

language, but we also have access to it directly. If one speaks from it, it

develops further. It can move far beyond the usual meanings and phrases.

I came to Rogers because I figured out that in therapy people must be speakingfrom that interface. I had to see it. When he interviewed me for the practicum,

he said it would be good to train a philosopher, but then he leaned forward,

looked at me intently, and asked, "But are you obtuse about people?" (This

seemed to be his observation of philosophers.) I said no, I didn't think so;

people talked to me about their problems, sometimes all night. I just didn't

know how to help them. He accepted me for the year-long practicum.

After two weeks I lost my fear of being a client. I learned that everyone is a

potential client, and I gladly became one. I experienced the therapy from both

sides, and I soon found what I came to study: the crucial role of directexperiencing beyond mere concepts. But its role was not recognized. Client-

centered therapists said that they reflected "feelings" like sadness or anger, but

I found that they mostly reflected intricate clusters expressed in phrases such

as "when he does this, I feel helpless because anything I would do makes me

feel a way I can't stand." When heard exactly, something deeper would emerge

from the implicit intricacy.

The next year I became an intern. A phase of research had just been

completed. To everyone's dismay, two of Rogers' hypotheses were disconfirmed.

Success in therapy did not correlate with the client's emphasis on "the

relationship" and on "the present."3 These were measured by classifying what

the clients talked about. From my ongoing experience as a client, I knew that

verbal content did not get at what Rogers meant. With my approach in

philosophy, I could reformulate the research scales.

In his open way, Rogers welcomed anyone in the group to contribute research

instruments to the next phase. My new scales measured whether there was

much "present" experiencing during the therapeutic hour, regardless of whether

it was aboutpast or present events. We measured the "relationship" by

whether clients said that they felt different here, in therapy, and whether that

new experiencing happened "only here." In collaboration with Jenney andShlien, my new scales correlated with success in therapy, whereas the old

measures again did not. This launched a new experiential approach. Fred

Zimring and I later developed a seven-stage scale to define observable indices


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of speech (and patterns of silence) characteristic of direct reference to

experiencing.4 Rogers adopted our new scale and redefined his theoretical

principle of the "self-concept." He spoke of the person as "an experiencing

process."5 Since that time, the development of the Experiencing Scale6 has led

to a long series of replicated studies.7

In 1961, an article that Rogers wrote, called "The Place of the Person in the

New World of the Behavioral Sciences," was very important to me. He warnedabout misuses of psychology by governments or powerful people. I remember

spending quite a lot of time after I read it thinking through how anything I

would ever work on would be of a nature that could not be misused.

I followed Rogers to Wisconsin as his research director. Soon I was standing in

the hallway with a "schizophrenic" patient who refused to enter an office with

me. He would not talk deeply about anything. This was true of all our hospital

patients.

We had also recruited a control group of "normals" from the surrounding farm

country. From them I learned about contouring a piece of land to keep the

rainwater on it, and why you can grow only as much tobacco as your relatives

can help you pick in a few days. These normal clients wouldn't talk about

anything therapeutically relevant either.

This lack of depth also occurred with some portion of our regular clients in

Chicago. Kirtner had shown that failure in long-term cases could be predicted

from the first two interviews if clients did not describe their inner experience.8 I

went to work on the problem when I returned to the University of Chicago in

1963. A group of students helped me to sustain the nerve to write and test

"instructions" for finding one's direct experiencing. We used these only outsidethe therapy hour. It led to a lot of research. We succeeded in articulating one

crucial therapeutic variable and making it teachable. We can now reverse the

failure prediction.

I often cited Kirtner, but one memory of that era came back to me many years

later. In 1956, when Kirtner distributed his study, the center staff was

outraged. We could not believe that we worked with some clients in a way that

was failure-predicted from the first few interviews. Surely there must be an

error in the study, we declared. Only Rogers was calm. He told us, "Facts are

always friendly." When I came to his office to argue about it, he said, "Thisstudy will help us with the next study." As I was leaving and we stood in the

doorway, he put his hand on my shoulder for emphasis and said, "Look, maybe

you will be the one to discover how to go on from this." He meant me only as

an example, but I may have heard him on a deeper level.

"Focusing instructions" can be given outside of the therapy hour, or in brief bits.

The client's ownership of the hour is not obstructed. The therapist can respond

to "this" or the client's "sense of something there . . ." so as not to miss or

round off the unclear edges of what the client reports. This helps the client to

attend there. It is what successful clients do naturally after each listening

response. They check with what they sense directly in order to see whether

what was said is quite right. As they do this, more and more arises from there.9

Focusing and listening are now being taught to the public on the worldwide


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network www.focusing.org and in businesses, churches, schools, sports,

medicine and many other contexts, 10 this time with the kind of training that

ensures the quality of the listening. In quality listening, you feel your sense of

the person's meaning before you respond. Training in focusing involves very

precise little instructions for inward bodily attention. We show how to find the

directly sensed "murky zone," how to keep one's attention there long enough

to do something, and then what can be done there. We are renewing Rogers'

vision of a society-wide application that can radically change how we view andtreat each other and ourselves.

Having learned only from his group, I did not know until years later how

authoritarian, negative, artificial and frozen the rest of the field of

psychotherapy was. Our group did not fully recognize how deeply Rogers had

changed the basic assumptions of psychotherapy and of the whole society. He

had written about this, but words were not effective. It is the practice that

changes one's assumptions. When you listen in his way, each person expands

from inside and becomes intricate, elaborate and beautiful before your eyes. If

you interpret or edit even for a moment, there is a jarring interruption. It stopsthe inwardly arising process.

Listening shows you that the nature of human beings is nothing like socialized

content. It has a depth of richness that needs only interactive receptivity to

open out, step by step, into a creative self-correcting development with freshly

discovered wanting, personal ethics and unique work in the world. How does

one talk about this as part of human nature? Rogers said all this, but it was not

understood. With the usual assumptions, none of it is believable. What Rogers'

practice brings home has not yet been discovered by society. To communicate it

requires new terms. Society requires the process of generating terms from

experiencing.

I went on to create new terms. There is no universal content across cultures or

individuals. In interacting we "cross" and create new meanings in each other.

When we speak we don't represent experiencing; rather, experiencing is

"carried forward." The words are "implicitly rearranged" in the body so that new

sentences "come." The crude, socially shared meanings do not create human

nature, although they do give us essential dimensions such as language and

cultural patterns. Real interactions are more intricate. Their intricacy is implicitly

lived with our bodies. There is no need to inculcate the concern for others. The

others and the world are already implicit in our bodily sensed experiencing, aswe discover when we enter into it and think with it.

Meanwhile, a long period of "postmodernism" has dispelled the assumption that

reality exists only at space-time points. Oddly enough, this assumption was

always known to be false, since it leaves out the scientist, the person who

operates the equipment, the observer, the very one in front of whom the

scientific things in space and time are presented. But it was held that we must

assume a consistent set of logical units to have any theory at all. The

postmodernists still see no better way, but they hold that therefore everything

we say is arbitrary. Only recently do philosophers discuss "emergent" thinking.

My philosophy is coming into its own.

To think with direct experiencing was never really considered before. My

philosophy began there, and I have had many years to develop systematic


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ways in which concepts and fresh language can arise from this kind of thinking.

There are systematic ways in which logic relates to experiencing. Some odd

"characteristics" of this relation are now formulated. For example, the least

detail can restructure the more general conceptions, rather than being

subsumed under them. The meanings that actually function experientially are

"nonnumerical" and "multischematic."11 I was able to develop an operational

empiricism without assuming representation and without fixed units with

identity conditions.12 There is a theory of language and word use at the

interface between language and directly sensed experiencing.13 It also became

possible to fashion basic concepts to redefine the "body," concepts that can

account for how speaking carries the bodily sensed intricacy forward (as in

focusing). These concepts can generate a new first-person science, as well as

relate logically to the usual science.14

If we don't assume that experiencing comes in already cut packages, must we

lose the powers of logical inferences? Not at all. We can think with experiencing

to find where to reposition the logic, and then freshly generate the units for it.

Rogers didn't change the whole society, but he did have a great impact. Half the

therapists of Europe and Japan are client-centered. In the United States, a

formal organization of client-centered therapists is only now beginning. Rogers

encouraged but would not lead such an organization. He helped found, but

would not lead, other groups: the encounter group movement, the field of

counseling psychology, the Humanistic Association, and the joint psychiatry-

psychology American Academy, among others.

There was little to criticize in Rogers. Some said that in not expressing anger,

he forced those around him to express it by fighting each other. But the fights

were due rather to his refusal to fill his own role. In giving up control, he gave

up all of it; he refused to decide even what was so defined that only he could

decide it. That didforce those around him to fight. But it is little to criticize amid

so many contributions and so much novelty, honesty and courage.

In his last fifteen years, he applied his method to politics, and to training

policymakers, leaders and groups in conflict. Better decisions are made with

empathy for what things mean to the other side. Others are never only what

we oppose. Rogers said the world is "fragile," and he worked for peace. When

he was well over eighty, he led huge workshops in countries such as Hungary,

Brazil and the Soviet Union and conducted communication groups in SouthAfrica.

I am glad that Carl heard me say these good things. The last time was on a

video-recorded panel. Later there was an argument between those who uphold

the pure client-centered method and those who expand it. I said we needed

both groups. But Carl said, "I didn't want to find a client-centeredway. I wanted

to find a way to help people."

References

1. Rank, Otto. Will Therapy and Truth and Reality. (New York: Knopf, 1929/1945). [Back to text]

2. Sachse, R. "The Influence of Therapist Processing Proposals on the Ex-


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plication Process of the Client," Person-Centered Review 5, no. 3 (1990):

321-347. [Back to text]

3. Gendlin, E. T., R. H. Jenney, and J. M. Shlien. "Counselor Ratings of Process

and Outcome in Client-Centered Therapy,"Journal of Clinical Psychology 16 (2):

210-213. [Back to text]

4. Gendlin, E. T., and F. Zimring. "The Qualities or Dimensions of Experiencing

and Their Change," The Person-Centered journal 1 (2): 55-67. [Back to text]

5. Rogers, Carl. "A Tentative Scale for the Measurement of Process in Psy-

chotherapy." In E. Rubinstein and M. Parloff, eds., Research in Psychotherapy.

(Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1958). [Back to text]

6. Klein, M. H., P. L. Mathieu, E. T. Gendlin, and D. J. Kiesler. The Experiencing

Scale: A Research and Training Manual, (Madison, WI: Wisconsin Psychiatric

Institute, 1969). Klein, M. H., P. Mathieu-Coughlan, and D. J. Kiesler. The

Experiencing Scales: The Psychotherapeutic Process, A Research Handbook.

(New York: Guilford Press, 1986), pp. 21-71. [Back to text]

7. Hendricks, M. "Focusing-Oriented/Experiential Psychotherapy." In D. Cain

and J. Seeman, eds., Handbook of Research and Practice in Humanistic Psy-

chotherapies. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001).

[Back to text]

8. Kirtner, W. L., and D. S. Cartwright. "Success and Failure in ClientCentered

Therapy as a Function of Client Personality Variables,"Journal of Consulting

Psychology22 (1958): 259-264. [Back to text]

9. Gendlin, E. T. Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the ExperientialMethod. (New York: Guilford Press, 1996). [Back to text]

10. Gendlin, E. T. Focusing, 2d ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1981). [Back to

text]

11. Gendlin, E. T. Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning. (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1962/1997). [Back to text]

12. Gendlin, E. T. "The Responsive Order: A New Empiricism," Man and World

30 (1997): 383-411. [Back to text]

13. Gendlin, E. T. "Crossing and Dipping: Some Terms for Approaching the

Interface between Natural Understanding and Logical Formation," Minds and

Machines 5, no. 4 (1995): 547-560. Gendlin, E. T. "The Primacy of the Body,

not the Primacy of Perception," Man and World25, nos. 3, 4 (1992): 341-353.

[Back to text]

14. Gendlin, E. T.A Process Model. 1997. Available at

www.focusing.org/process.html. [Back to text]

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Foreword to 'Carl Rogers_ the Quiet Revolutionary, An Oral History'

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