Counseling Humanism
American origins of therapeutic culture
William Krause
In September 1956, two of America’s leading psychologists took the stage at a national convention to debate the role of social control in society. On one side of the debate was B.F. Skinner, the renowned pioneer of the behaviorist school, which had enjoyed professional influence during the 1920s and 1930s. Skinner’s opponent—Carl Rogers—had gained sway within psychological science by challenging the field’s foundational assumptions since the Second World War.
The debate was one of a string of public discussions between Skinner and Rogers on social control. Skinner, true to his behavioralist roots, maintained that social engineering of human behavior could be used for liberatory ends, and he dismissed the anxiety that behavioral manipulation by elites was authoritarian. But for Rogers, this posture neglected key dimensions of individuals’ inner lives, cognitive processing, feelings, and free will. Rogers’ focus on internal psychology was characteristic of a new intellectual stance dubbed “humanistic psychology”—an emerging school of thought that claimed to understand, and treat, whole people rather than consider them as fragments. From the humanist vantage, Skinners’ methods dehumanized people by neglecting key components of their personhood. “To believe, as Skinner does,” wrote Rogers in 1961, “that spontaneity, freedom, responsibility, and choice have no real existence, would be impossible for me.” Rogers, in his own self-conception, was less invested in behavioral engineering and manipulation than he was in crafting a novel therapeutic culture that would encourage human growth and flourishing.
By the time Rogers confronted Skinner onstage at the APA convention, many Americans were already convinced of the merits of therapeutic culture; historian Christopher Lasch later cited a follower of Rogers, who called the psychologist’s ideas and methods “as American as apple pie.” How was Rogers’ therapeutic practice made legible to American audiences? And how did Americans become literate, and indeed fluent, in psychotherapeutic language and techniques developed in large part by humanistic psychologists? To better understand how and why this occurred, we need to turn to the years immediately following the Second World War, when a group of postwar counselors retooled psychoanalytic thought for the specific needs of the early Cold War. Rogers was among a cohort of psychologists who designed new methods for therapeutic introspection, along with Rollo May and Abraham Maslow. By revising the foundational assumptions and existing practices of behaviorism as well as Freudian analysis, Rogers and others helped establish postwar therapeutic culture in the modern United States, often in domains far removed from the counselor’s office. Their efforts were part of the application of psychological thought to the complex social, political, and cultural problems generated by the early Cold War, which was a crucial moment in the rise of psychology as a prevailing mode of social analysis and understanding.
“By revising the foundational assumptions and existing practices of behaviorism as well as Freudian analysis, Rogers and others helped establish postwar therapeutic culture in the modern United States, often in domains far removed from the counselor’s office.”
As the vanguards of humanistic psychology, Rogers and Maslow independently articulated their ideas about human potential by emphasizing the latent capacity of humans to self-actualize. Maslow’s interest in human motivation placed the locus of control for healthy individuals within the person themselves. For Maslow, psychopathy derived from repression of one’s internal desire, rather than being its expression. Rogers, meanwhile, believed that the main goal of the therapeutic relationship was to create a positive relationship between counselor and client in order to help the patient adjust to the realities of midcentury life. In 1940, he became a professor of clinical psychology at Ohio State University, where he spent his time developing, articulating, and practicing these ideas. Like Maslow had, Rogers placed the locus of knowledge and insight within clients rather than expert counselors.
The writings of nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard supplied an unlikely intellectual source, helping Rogers develop his practice. Rogers’ personal papers include copious notes on Kierkegaard’s writings, such as his 1846 publication Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Christian thought, Rogers noted upon encountering Kierkegaard’s work, cannot be taught to a person any more easily than one can feel or think for someone. Kierkegaard thought that individuals needed to be encouraged to experience Christian belief, rather than merely receive it in the form of a dogmatic pamphlet or an evangelizing lecture. A major takeaway for Rogers was that individuals needed to be treated not like objects, but like thinking, feeling subjects—that sustained attention to an individual’s subjective experience would counteract the objectifying tendencies of life in an interconnected mass society.
Rogers’ interpretation of Kierkegaard’s thinking translated neatly to therapeutic practice. In order to “humanize” the practice of psychotherapeutic counseling, Rogers helped foster the experience of learning and epiphany in patients by using a technique he referred to as “client-centered” or “non-directive” counseling. In this kind of counseling relationship, sessions would be guided not by the therapist but by the client themselves. Rather than evaluate clients and dictate findings to the patient as if they were an object, the non-directive therapist asked probing questions in an attempt to encourage “aha moments” from the patient. Rogers believed that the role of the counselor was not necessarily to provide observations or judgments. Rather, he wanted to work with patients to “tease out” insights through the process of therapy. To wit, Rogers believed that the client–counselor relationship should be more democratic.
The guiding philosophy at the heart of the client-centered or non-judgmental therapeutic relationship was that people possessed the necessary abilities for their own psychological liberation (whatever that might look like for them), and the role of the counselor was to create environmental conditions to enable this liberation. Rogers clarified this point in a 1952 article for Scientific American, repeating his approach to human nature and psychological adjustment: “the individual has within him the capacity, at least latent, to understand the factors in his life that cause him unhappiness and pain, and to reorganize himself in such a way as to overcome those factors” and that “these powers will become effective if the therapist can establish with the client a relationship sufficiently warm, accepting and understanding.” In other words, if psychotherapists offered open-minded, ostensibly non-judgmental spaces for clients to honestly discuss their problems, patients would eventually experience psychological breakthroughs and even self-actualization. With the right affective environment, the individual could ‘free’ themselves. But first, they needed to open up.
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The Rogerian formulation of non-judgmental, client-centered therapy bloomed amid a broader reconsideration of the central assumptions guiding the American psychological profession. Following the Second World War, liberal academics grew interested with the individual psyche—in the feedback loops between cognition and behavior, in the interaction between individuals within a group, in the effects of organized life on the cognitive autonomy of the individual, and in the synergy between political, social, and mental systems. The rise in humanistic psychology coincided with this “cognitive revolution.” At times, humanistic formulations helped carry some of the core languages, assumptions, and frameworks of midcentury psychology out of the ivory tower and the counselor’s office and into the organs of U.S. society.
This cognitive revolution resulted partially from an effort to correct the perceived deficiencies of behaviorism on the one hand and Freudianism on the other. The generation of behavioralists that had achieved institutional prominence in the period between the First and Second World Wars cared little for the individual mental interior—and even less for what individuals had to say about their own emotional worlds. In continental Europe, Freud and Jung scientifically plumbed the deep unconscious, describing in detail their ideas about the individual. But on American shores, experimental researchers like John Watson and Skinner tinkered with behaviors. In the behavioralist formulation, individuals were, like lab rats, merely objects whose behavior could be observed, predicted, shaped, and ultimately known by expert psychologists. American psychology’s newfound status as an objective discipline rested, in part, on the claim that internal mental states were mercurial and subjective, and thus undeserving of sustained scientific attention.
Freudianism had more of a fraught path prior to the Second World War. By the 1920s, many scientifically minded academic psychologists in the United States had moved beyond Freud. Outside the academy, however, the reading public was abuzz with interest in Freud’s writings. In her book Encountering America, historian Jessica Grogan notes how Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, his concept of talk therapy, and his writings on sexuality helped Americans process the newer, ostensibly modern world that came into focus in the twentieth century. “[Freud’s] ideas were transmitted,” writes Grogan, “beginning in the 1920s, through popular books, newspapers, films, and public lectures.” But the newer generation of psychologists was less enthralled.
For Rogers, Freudian psychotherapy was built on a shoddy foundation; the notion that people were guided by roiling, invisible subconsciouses that could only be understood by experts left little room for the dignity of the individual to think, feel, and know for themselves. Freudian psychoanalysis reinforced the kind of authoritarian relationship between citizen and expert that concerned many liberal academics by the midcentury. An encounter in the late 1930s with Otto Rank—a one-time member of Freud’s inner circle turned post-Freudian psychotherapist—helped Rogers better articulate what he saw as the need to revive individual agency in the process of psychotherapy. Rogers reflected on the encounter: “I became infected with Rankian ideas and began to realize the possibilities of the individual being self-directing... I value the dignity and rights of the individual sufficiently that I do not want to impose my way upon him.”
For the midcentury liberal intelligentsia, there were political stakes involved. Theodor Adorno famously worried about the mental states of those particularly susceptible to totalitarian political systems. His work articulated anxieties that certain mental habits like closed-mindedness, irrationality, and conformity would render people more vulnerable to political demagoguery, and perhaps even totalitarianism. But concerns about modernity’s effect on the self existed in popular media as well. One midcentury writer reflected in The Saturday Evening Post on the effects of mass life on the individual soul, increasingly noticed by commentators such as William Whyte and David Riesman: “modern mass society, while it raises the material level of all, tends to swallow up the individual in its intricate machinery. Modern society becomes a kind of bureaucratically organized flight from the Self; a flight into which everybody can easily drift.” Life on a large scale challenged the boundaries of the person, and thinkers at the midcentury were worried about what this might mean for national and international politics.
“Life on a large scale challenged the boundaries of the person, and thinkers at the midcentury were worried about what this might mean for national and international politics.”
Citizens, it seemed to the midcentury intelligentsia, needed help adjusting themselves to the realities of midcentury organized society. In his book on the cognitive revolution, historian Jamie Cohen-Cole notes that an interdisciplinary idealization of the “open mind” provided a liberal democratic antidote to the authoritarian personality. The ideal citizen in a liberal democracy thought creatively, maintained an open mind, was sensitive to those around them, and was ultimately guided by rationality rather than by repressed impulses. The newer methods for constructing the self required a focus on the individual mental interior. This interdisciplinary interest in cognition—taken up by psychologists, yes, but also linguists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers—was coterminous with Carl Rogers’ cultivation of client-centered or non-judgmental therapy. Rogers rose to prominence amidst this widespread interest in the psyche. But what was ultimately unique about the client-centered formulation was that the patient, rather than the therapist, would be the one running the show.
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Recent scholars have meticulously studied sensibilities that emerged during the midcentury moment—including concepts such as creativity and coolness. These ideas did not surface as neutral descriptions of cultural activity, but rather performed spiritual and psychological work by offering users a degree of mental insulation from world-historical events. Joel Dinerstein, in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017), writes that “cool” was “the endgame of the West provided by its internal dissidents,” and “an intellectual’s mask of composure in the face of nuclear anxiety, post-Holocaust mediations, and the concurrent rise of oppressed peoples.” Creativity, too, was in part an existential solution to a set of technical, scientific, and political problems. In The Cult of Creativity (2023), Samuel Franklin argues that the idea of creativity “emerged as a psychological cure for these structural and political contradictions of the postwar order,” such as the de-individualizing machinery of administrative bureaucracies and the soul-crushing torrent of student evaluations in public schools. These studies reveal that citizens and experts alike devised cultural solutions to some of the anxieties generated by life during the Cold War.
In the case of humanistic psychology, expert psychologists similarly crafted resources to help assuage what they saw as the key threats to the American psyche. In these efforts, the school and the workplace were among the zones of organized life that received sustained attention. During the 1950s, educational psychologists established “student-centered teaching” classroom practices, which borrowed some of the assumptions from humanistic psychology in order to create ostensibly more-democratic classrooms. Humanistic psychologists like Rogers intended student-centered teaching to mitigate against what they saw as authoritarian classroom practices by creating ostensibly safe, inclusive environments for students to grow intellectually. Throughout his writings on learning in the 1950s, Rogers inveighed against the behaviorist assumptions that he believed guided midcentury educational practices. For instance, in his 1951 book Client-Centered Therapy, Rogers framed his pedagogical method as more democratic than its behaviorist predecessors. From his perspective, the humanistic learning promoted in his work was “not education which would be relevant in an authoritarian culture.” Authoritarian education was adept at producing “well-informed technicians who will be completely amenable to carrying out all orders of constituted authority without questioning.” Student-centered classroom teaching, on the other hand, was more suitable for socializing children to a democratic culture. By adopting humanistic approaches in the classroom, the instructor “creates a classroom climate which respects the integrity of the student, which accepts all aims, opinions, and attitudes as being legitimate expressions of the student’s internal frame of reference at that time.” Through student-centered teaching, children and college students came into contact with some of the core foundations of humanistic psychology.
Schools were one domain that received attention from academics; the workplace was another. In 1954, Rogers bewailed the soul-sucking tendency of the midcentury workplace. From his perspective, the ability to be creative was reserved for the privileged few: managers, artistic designers, and researchers. For everyone else, “life is devoid of original or creative endeavor.” Through participation in impersonal workplaces, rigid hierarchies, and tedious and soul-crushing labor, the typical white-collar worker learned how to live not as a democratic citizen, but rather as an authoritarian subject. But in the workplace, too, humanistic psychologists attempted to save the day. One such effort was the National Training Laboratory for Group Development in Bethel, Maine. Started in 1947, the NTL was a corporate training program that sought to help participants learn how to collaborate by using practices resembling group therapy. Thomas Gordon—one of its participants and a disciple of Rogers—focused on what he called “group-centered leadership” in attempts to render the modern workplace more compatible with their vision of participatory democracy. And Abraham Maslow turned directly toward writing about industrial management, publishing Eupsychian Management: A Journal in 1965. If the workplace bred authoritarian sensibilities, couldn’t managers use humanistic psychology to help cultivate democratic—and crucially, productive—workplaces?
“If the workplace bred authoritarian sensibilities, couldn’t managers use humanistic psychology to help cultivate democratic—and crucially, productive—workplaces?”
Through student-centered teaching and group-centered leadership, humanistic psychology and its attendant assumptions made their way to the broader U.S. public. Although Rogers and the humanistic psychologists ebbed in popularity after the 1960s, their ways of thinking lived on in self-help literature, leadership training modules, child-rearing practices, and in education. Throughout the 1970s, Rogers published books with titles such as Carl Rogers on Personal Power: Inner Strength and Its Revolutionary Impact (1977). Gordon, meanwhile, developed parenting guides and courses to help raise children without relying on punishment as a mode of discipline. But fewer and fewer readers, it seemed, needed convincing of the power of introspection, disclosure, and therapeutic adjustment.
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Person-centered therapy and its sway in American popular culture has ebbed and flowed since the 1970s. For one, Rogers and the humanistic psychologists lost intellectual clout by the 1980s, though they continued to publish books and engage in public debate. Would-be adherents were either disillusioned by humanistic psychology’s inability to fulfill its utopian promises or persuaded by the New Right’s disdain for therapeutic culture. Still, the wave of client-centered therapy has had a lasting impact in the United States, even if the personal influence of its major figures ebbed. Sensitivity training is a seemingly permanent feature of the workplace, and contemporary pedagogical practices that encourage instructors to teach entire people share similar cadences to the humanistic movement. We can see residues of the humanistic psychology movement in seemingly unrelated forms of therapeutic adjustment. Active meditation, yoga, and other contemporary somatic therapies in the United States derive from the movement’s approach to “organismic wholeness” and corporeal experience. “If anything,” writes Grogan, “it’s the utter pervasiveness of the humanistic perspective that has made evidence of its influence so elusive.”
The legacy of person-centered therapy is an open question in scholarly discourse, with intellectual and cultural historians disputing its historical influence. Some identified therapeutic adjustment as an individualized response to the stubborn, recursive problems generated by life in an organized society. Historian Christopher Lasch, for instance, claimed that humanistic psychology was among the “modern psychiatric movements” that have “carried on the tradition of liberal religion and self-improvement and shored it up with scientific pretensions.” Meanwhile, in his classic work No Place of Grace (1981), Jackson Lears sketched turn-of-the-nineteenth-century therapeutic movements as patchwork cures to the mental maladies of the fin-de-siècle social world. Although his work traces therapies that had their origins in the “cultural turmoil” of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Lears wrote to an audience of scholars who would be more familiar with Rogerian techniques of psychological adjustment. For Lears—among other historians—therapeutic modes of cultural adjustment helped sustain “new secular modes of capitalist cultural hegemony.” By trapping individuals in endless feedback loops of “morbid introspection,” Lears believed the therapeutic orientation attempted patchwork solutions to deeper modern problems. From this vantage, the humanistic movement developed technologies of enmeshment by casting the ills of mass society as psychological and intellectual, and by trying to adjust people to a fundamentally alien world.
The influence of humanistic psychology and the therapeutic culture it helped create is likely more complicated than this picture suggests. But tracing its history since the Second World War enables us to see the tensions fixed in Cold War attempts at socially engineered autonomy, expert-led cultural change, and intellectual cures for deeply entrenched modern troubles. Grasping these seemingly invisible dimensions of American culture allows us to better understand the Cold War’s lasting—and still-unfolding—impact on the world in which we live.