Carl Rogers: One of the Founding Fathers of Humanism

As one of the founding fathers of humanism, Carl Rogers was very interested in an approach to psychology that had to do with the thoughts and feelings of clients (notice that the word patient is sparsely used). His feelings on resourceful therapy were always centered around the client and how they wanted the therapy to affect their life. In humanistic psychology, the main focus is allowing the client to decide how the therapy would direct them on their own life. Carl Rogers, as with many other humanistic psychologists, believe in keeping the values and morals of the clients in tact. They do not judge their clients, and they try to stay as positive as possible in their therapy sessions with the clientele.

Carl Rogers was born the fourth of six children in 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois. His mother was a Christian homemaker and his father a civil engineer. Rogers was a very smart child growing up, he could read before he was 6 and started school as a second grader instead of a kindergartner. He went on to receive his Bachelor's from the University of Wisconsin in 1924. While he was going to school in Wisconsin, he was chosen to be one of the students to go on a mission trip to China, where he stayed for six months and learned about religion and social philosophy (Kirchenbaum, 2005). His Master's and Doctorate came from Columbia University (Columbia, 2009).

Teaching at honorable schools such as the University of Rochester (1935-1940) and Ohio State University (1940-1044), his most prominent time as a professor was at the University of Chicago when he founded a therapeutic counseling center in 1945 (May et al., 1987). While he lived in Rochester, New York, he was appointed director of the Prevention of Cruelty to Children ...

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...under of several very important concepts such as client-centered therapy and his infamous Nineteen Propositions. Being a humanist, for Carl Rogers, was very important to him because he cared about how people felt. Rogers believed that his theories were necessary and sufficient for therapists trying to learn from their mistakes and move forward with helping their clients. He was not a psychologist for the money or social status, he was a psychologist because he genuinely felt it was his duty to help the needs of the people around him. Overall, Rogers definitely made the world around him a better place. With his strict positivity and everlasting concern for those around him, he was a performer of art in the psychology field. “He believed that psychologists were born, not made.” Every thing he did was for the aid of others, and not many people can fend for that.