He was offered a full professorship at Ohio State University in 1940. In 1942, he wrote his first book, Counseling and Psychotherapy. In it, Rogers suggested that the client, by establishing a relationship with an understanding, accepting therapist, can resolve difficulties and gain the insight necessary to restructure his life.
Then, in 1945, he was invited to set up a counseling center at the University of Chicago. It was while working there, in 1951, he published his major work, Client-Centered Therapy, wherein he outlines his basic theory. In 1956 Rogers became the first President of the American Academy of Psychotherapists. In 1957 he arrived at the University of Wisconsin. However, following several internal conflicts at the department of psychology at Wisconsin, Rogers became disillusioned with academia.
In 1964, Rogers was selected 'humanist of the year' by the American Humanist Association, and he received an offer to join the staff of the Western Behavioral Studies Institute (WBSI) for research, which he accepted and then moved to La Jolla, California. He remained in La Jolla, doing therapy, speeches and writing until his sudden death 23 years later.
Rogers and some colleagues are also the founders of 'Group Encounter' (for young people, managers etc.) and of 'Marriage Encounter' (ME).
Rogers' idea of the 'fully functioning person' involved the following qualities, which show marked similarities to Buddhist thinking:
- Openness to experience:-The accurate perception of one's feelings
and experience in the world
- Existential living:-Living in the present, rather than the past
(gone) or the future (yet to come)
- Organismic trusting:-Trusting one's own thoughts and feelings
as accurate; do what comes naturally
- Experiential freedom:-To acknowledge one's freedoms and take
responsibility for one's own actions
- Creativity:-Full participation in the world, including contributing to others' lives
Quotes:
"Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone
of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none
of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to
experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer
approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me.
Neither the Bible nor the prophets -- neither Freud nor research
--neither the revelations of God nor man -- can take precedence
over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative
because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it
can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent
error or fallibility is always open to correction." Carl Rogers,
from 'On Becoming a Person
"If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-intitiated learning." Carl Rogers
