Person to Person

Among variegated practitioners of talk-it-out treatment for emotional problems, Chicago's Psychologist Carl Ransom Rogers, 55, has long been a maverick. He calls his method "client-centered therapy," tries manfully to define it: "We see therapy as an experience, not in intellectual terms. We treat the client as a person, not as an object to be manipulated and directed." Snorts a Chicago psychoanalyst of neo-Freudian persuasion: "Rogers' method is unsystematic, undisciplined and humanistic. Rogers doesn't analyze and doesn't diagnose. We have no common ground." To Rogers that is fine.

Illinois-born Carl Rogers started at the University of Wisconsin as an agriculture major, finished with a B.A. in history. At Columbia University's Teachers College he plunged into psychology, emerged with a Ph.D. and headed for Rochester, where he worked with juvenile delinquents for twelve years. Rogers did not realize that he had developed a distinctive method of treating patients until, in 1940, he described his technique at a professional meeting and saw eyebrows lifting all around. By 1945 he had established himself at the University of Chicago as professor of psychology and set up a counseling center in a drab, three-story house on Drexel Avenue, half a block west of the campus. To the center trooped clients (Rogers avoids the term "patient") of all ages, from all walks of life. It has been going full blast ever since.

At top capacity (400 clients a year) the center has operated with two dozen staff counselors (all Ph.D.s in psychology from the university faculty). Each counselor takes seven or eight clients a week for two or three 45-minute visits each. Most clients are so disturbed that they have difficulty carrying on in their occupations, though not so severely ill that they need hospitalization.

Without Dreams. While giving credit to Freud as a pioneer, Rogers vigorously resists the tendency of analysts to worship the father-figure of psychoanalysis, and the parallel tendency to put the theory and the method of treatment ahead of all else, so that every patient is fitted to a Procrustean couch. Rogers may have exaggerated the differences between his method and that of other therapists who follow Freud but with modifications. Radical Rogers likes to talk about "treatment with no couches, no dream interpretations."

As Rogers describes his method: "The therapist has been able to enter into an intensely personal and subjective relationship with this client--relating not as a scientist to an object of study, not as a physician expecting to diagnose and cure, but as person to person. The therapist has been able to let himself go in understanding this client, satisfied with providing a climate which will free the client to become himself."

For such a climate the center on Drexel Avenue seems an inauspicious setting. Dowdy, poorly maintained and ill-furnished, it enables Rogers to boast: "Anybody can see that most of our money goes on salaries." Each cramped interviewing room contains only a desk and two chairs. The invariable procedure: invite the client to discuss anything at will. This is somewhat like Freudian free association, but with differences on which Rogers lays great stress: no attempt to dredge for harrowing emotional experiences in childhood or to seek cause-and-effect relationships between past experiences and present difficulties.

Without Anger or Fear. Far more than the analytic schools, Rogers emphasizes empathy: "To sense the client's private world as if it were your own, but without ever losing the 'as if quality'--this is empathy, and this seems essential to therapy. To sense the client's anger, fear or confusion as if it were your own, yet without your own anger, fear or confusion getting bound up in it." When this condition has been established, Rogers feels, a single interpretive remark by the counselor can work wonders in clarification for the client. There is never any attempt at actual guidance; always the aim is to enable the client, through greater insight, to accept experiences as they are.

For all the seeming vagueness of such a procedure, Rogers has tried hard to make it precise. The one kind of equipment on which he has not stinted money is a battery of recording machines. From transcripts of therapy sessions counselors can check their own and one another's performances; aspirants in training can learn the method--and clients often ask to have recordings played back to them, to help them understand changes in themselves.

How well does the method work? From elaborate follow-ups and independent appraisals, Rogers estimates that two out of ten cases get no better, two are moderately improved, six are. markedly improved. How long it takes depends not on the counselor but on the client: he ends therapy when he feels like it. During most of the center's twelve years, clients have averaged 40 to 50 interviews (at a cost, set largely by themselves, of $5 to $17 a session). Lately Rogers & Co. have been experimenting with short-term treatment: the client is told in advance that he is limited to ten weeks, 20 interviews. First results seem to be as good as from treatments where the clients set the limit.

Last week the client-centered method won notable new ground. The University of Wisconsin named Alumnus Rogers to be professor in psychology and psychiatry, giving him greatly expanded opportunities to spread his gospel of person-to-person therapy.

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