Carl Rogers

I have been discovering Carl Rogers.  I got started because I was wondering who, in our intellectual or cultural history, is responsible for the idea that attending empathetically to another person's thinking has great benefits for both the one who is attended and the one doing the attending.  In discussing this with Sam and Hunter during the Portland AAPT meeting, I got to thinking about psychotherapy and did a little research.  It seems that our present conception of psychotherapy as an empathetic practice was pioneered by Carl Rogers, who called what he did "client-centered therapy" (and later, "person-centered therapy").  Here is a short description of his influence:

Certain ideas that Rogers championed have become so widely accepted that it is difficult to recall how fresh, even revolutionary, they were in their time.  Freudian psychoanalysis, the prevailing model of mind at mid-century, held that human drives – sex and aggression – were inherently selfish, constrained at a price and with difficulty by the forces of culture.  Cure, in the Freudian model, came through a relationship that frustrated the patient, fostering anxiety necessary for the patient to accept the analyst’s difficult truths.  Rogers, in contrast, believed that people need a relationship in which they are accepted.  The skills that the Rogerian therapist uses are empathy – a word that in Freud’s time was largely restricted to the feelings with which an observer invests a work of art – and “unconditional positive regard.”  Rogers stated his central hypothesis in one sentence:  “If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.”  By growth, Rogers meant movement in the direction of self-esteem, flexibility, respect for self and others.

From Rogers comes our contemporary emphasis on self-esteem and its power to mobilize a person’s other strengths. Rogers’s understanding of acceptance as the ultimate liberating force implies that people who are not ill can benefit from therapy and that nonprofessionals can act as therapists; the modern self-help group arises quite directly from Rogers’s human potential movement.  That marriage, like therapy, depends on genuineness and empathy is basic Carl Rogers.  It is Rogers, much more than Benjamin Spock, who speaks for nondirective parenting and teaching.

That's an excerpt from the prologue to the 1989 edition of Rogers's best-known book,  On Becoming a Person.  The book itself is a great read.  Rogers has a warm, personable voice, and the things he is saying, wow.  I want to take a bath in them.  Here is an excerpt I like:

I come now to a central learning which has had a great deal of significance for me.  I can state this learning as follows:  I have found it of enormous personal value when I can permit myself to understand another person.  The way in which I have worded this statement may seem strange to you.  Is it necessary to permit oneself to understand another?  I think that it is.  Our first reaction to most of the statements which we hear form other people is an immediate evaluation, or judgment, rather than an understanding of it.  When someone expresses some feeling or attitude or belief, our tendency is, almost immediately, to feel “That’s right”; or “That’s stupid”; “That’s abnormal”; “That’s unreasonable”; “That’s incorrect”; “That’s not nice.”  Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of his statement is to him.  I believe this is because understanding is risky.  If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding.  And we all fear change.  So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual, to enter thoroughly and completely and empathically into his frame of reference.  It is also a rare thing.

This excerpt seems to me to have everything to do with teachers and students.  When students express some "feeling or attitude or belief" about a physics situation, our immediate tendency is to judge it.  We don't even really know what the person is trying to say, but already we're saying "That's wrong," or "That sounds right," or "This makes no sense."  Not only about physics, either... I am struggling with my tendency to instantly evaluate what the teachers say about teaching and learning, without really understanding it.  And I think that one reason it is hard to take the trouble to understand a student's approach to physics, or a different teacher's approach to teaching, is that it puts our own expertise at risk.  We already know how we think of it.  If we permit ourselves to truly understand another person's physics thinking, we might be changed by that understanding, and that would mean we didn't have all the answers already.  Scary.

Here is another excerpt:

The next learning I want to state may be difficult to communicate.  It is this.  The more I am open to the realities in me and in the other person, the less do I find myself wishing to rush in to "fix things."  As I try to listen to myself and the experiencing going on in me, and the more I try to extend that same listening attitude to another person, the more respect I feel for the complex processes of life.  So I become less and less inclined to hurry in to fix things, to set goals, to mold people, to manipulate and push them in the way that I would like them to go.  I am much more content simply to be myself and let another person be himself.  I know very well that this must seem like a strange, almost an Oriental point of view.  What is life for if we are not going to do things to people?  What is life for if we are not going to mold them to our purposes?  What is life for if we are not going to teach them the things that we think they should learn?  What is life for if we are not going to make them think and feel as we do?  How can anyone hold such an inactive point of view as the one I am expressing?  I am sure that attitudes such as these must be a part of the reaction of many of you.

Yet the paradoxical aspect of my experience is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up.  It is a very paradoxical thing -- that to the degree that each one of us is willing to be himself, then he finds not only himself changing; but he finds that other people to whom he relates are also changing.  At least this is a very vivid part of my experience, and one of the deepest things I think I have learned in my personal and professional life.

This one snuck up on me, so familiar and then boom, so cosmic.  What is life for?  But I think he's right about how deeply radical it is to not be trying to fix people all the time, and how paradoxically transformative it can be.  The LAs in the Physics Interview Project (sometimes) find that when they can just let people be, and stay engaged with them in an accepting way, they observe amazing things, and even watch amazing changes take place.  Here are some things that LAs have said in their reflection papers that seem to me to be related (the names are pseudonyms):

Although I was responding, my responses were limited to illuminating questions and I gave no feedback about the accuracy or validity of any of her thought processes. This gave her the time and freedom to really think about her answers and freed her from defending them. This time to process without judgment and the freedom to change her mind resulted in just that; she changed her mind. – Ivy 

I enjoy understanding and tend to find fulfillment in knowing what and how much I can comprehend. To focus not on the correct answer but on trying to understand a person’s possibly incorrect view of physics was a challenge. Because I put so much personal emphasis on my own learning and reasoning abilities, hearing someone else speak falsely of a subject which I understand makes me want to correct them, feeling that everyone would always want to understand and know more, as I always do. – Tara 

In non-teaching situations, asking questions grants respect to others by allowing them to express their own ideas free from distortion that may result from a person’s particular perspective or opinion. Allowing space for others to talk about their thoughts, along with the experiences and emotions that have influenced their thinking, gives value to the person and their thinking. In addition, it affords the person asking the questions an ability to cultivate empathy or compassion for the individual, or simply a richer perspective on the topic discussed. – Sandra

Now I think that LAs are able to think this way partly because of the influence of Carl Rogers on American psychology.

You can see Rogers in action on YouTube, conducting a filmed therapy session with a woman named Gloria.  Take half an hour and watch all five parts.