Teachers David Rogers: Client-Centered Therapy

When Rogers began his studies at Union he still had every intention of a Christian minister and during the summer of his first year, as part of his seminary training, he acted as the pastor of a small church in Vermont. Rogers began to question his religious studies, so during his second year at Union he found an outlet by taking several courses at the Teachers’ College of Columbia University. He enrolled in a clinical psychology course under the guidance of Leta Hollingworth, thanks to whom he had his first experience of working with disturbed children. Eventually, he fully enrolled to Teachers’ College, supported by his wife Helen. In the same year that Rogers began to study for his degree in clinical and educational psychology at Teachers’ …show more content…
On December 11th, 1940, before an audience at the University of Minnesota, he delivered a lecture entitled Newer concepts in psychotherapy and he later came to consider the date of this lecture as the birth of client-centered therapy. Rogers essentially gave a critique of the older methods of therapy, and described newer practices. The lecture’s reception ranged from enthusiastic approval to aggressive criticism and it inspired Rogers to write his second book. In 1942, Rogers published Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer Concepts in Practice. It was in this book that the term ‘client’ first appeared and the first complete published transcript of a course of therapy was published. Rogers stayed at Ohio State for four years, and in 1945 he moved to the University of Chicago, having been invited to establish a counseling