Rogerian Dialogue Theory

Biography

Rogers is often described as the most influential psychotherapist in American history, and some consider him the most influential American psychologist. He spent most of his career at academic institutions—Ohio State University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The last 20 years of his life were spent in La Jolla, California, first as an associate of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute and then as a founder of the Center for Studies of the Person. He wrote 16 books and over 200 articles and made outstanding contributions not only to the theory, research, and practice of psychology and psychotherapy, but also to education and related fields. He was among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology.

Among his many honors, Rogers was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Academy of Psychotherapists, and the American Association of Applied Psychology. He received the APA's two most prestigious awards, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award and the Distinguished Professional Contribution Award, the first recipient of each, and he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Concern for Communication

Although Rogers was professionally a psychotherapist, he saw himself also as engaging in communication work. The opening chapter in his collection of essays A Way of Being is called “Experiences in Communication,” and late in his life he called his caring about communication the overriding theme of his professional life.

Further, Rogers was concerned not only with therapeutic relationships, but with relationships more generally. An essay from his most famous book, On Becoming a Person, offered a tentative general law of interpersonal relationships, not as a dogmatic statement but, as was common for Rogers, as a hypothesis that he hoped would be researched. Another essay from that book described the therapeutic relationship as a special instance of all interpersonal relationships. He incorporated both of these ideas into his “Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships, as Developed in the Client-Centered Framework,” and he wrote books and articles about family life, education, leadership, personal development, and group processes.

The central idea of Rogers's theory of psychotherapy, and the central thread of his theory of dialogue, concerns the importance of mutually constructed and mutually acknowledged relationship. In stressing mutuality, Rogers was working against the individualistic grain of most American psychology of his time. Rogers believed that if he could communicate effectively, a certain quality of relationship that we can call dialogic would be likely to develop. In turn, that relationship would be helpful and growth producing, not only to the other person, but also to him as well.

Rogers's Approach to Psychotherapy

Rogers's theory of psychotherapy was derived inductively. Rather than begin with an idea of how therapy ought to proceed, he carefully observed and analyzed his own and others' practices and developed his conception of successful psychotherapy from noticing what worked and what did not. In this way, Rogers was an early practitioner of what came to be known as grounded theory, or theory arising from experience.

...