Resume about Sigmund Freud The Psychoanalys in group, Kurt Lewin Dinamic group, JL Moreno Founder of Psychodrama, Carl Rogers Encounter groups

For a decade following World War II social psychologists tended to view the individual as an element in a larger system. Research on small groups prospered, and attitudes and social perceptions were conceived to be antecedents and consequences of group activity. But by the 1960's social psychology had become much more individualistic. Interest in the group as a system had waned and research was generally focused on intraindividual events or processes that mediate responses to social situations. We now appear to be passing through a period of transition during which both the content and methodology of past research are being re-evaluated, and from which new trends are likely to emerge. Possible explanations of the changing orientation of social psychology are discussed, and predictions are advanced concerning future developments. It is suggested that social psychologists are responsive to the mood of the times, and that recent social and political unheavals presage a revival of the collectivistic approach.

Freud speaks of an ego, partly in a sense that foreshadows considerably later developments of ego psychology. However, the closer elaboration of this part of his work had to be postponed during a period in which his main concern was with the development of other aspects of psychoanalysis. All the revolutionary work of those years approached personality via what today we would call the study of the id. Thus, in analysis, a broad fundament of facts and hypotheses was laid down—on the laws governing unconscious mental processes, on the characteristics and development of instinctual drives and on some aspects of psychic conflict—the absence of which had been a severe handicap to preanalytic psychology. The fact that Freud's investigation of the id preceded his approach to structural psychology is indeed one of the most momentous events.

Children's play has been the subject of scientific discussion for many psychologists of various schools of thought, Child psychology, as it is taught in our universities, has occupied itself with the remarkable phenomenon that a considerable part of a growing child's day is taken up with play and has undertaken to make various contributions to the interpretation of this phenomenon. It will now be our endeavor to see what psychoanalysis has to contribute to the question of children's play.

Comparing the literature of academic psychology with the more casual psychoanalytic publications dealing with the subject, it will immediately be noticed that each draws attention to a different group of games. Academic psychology studies chiefly what one might designate "official" games of children—games which are typical and played by all children. In psychoanalytic literature, on the contrary, interest is chiefly centered on games of a different type—those of a more individual.

The work of Kurt Lewin dominated the theory and practice of change management for over 40 years. However, in the past 20 years, Lewin's approach to change, particularly the 3-Step model, has attracted major criticisms. The key ones are that his work: assumed organizations operate in a stable state; was only suitable for small-scale change projects; ignored organizational power and politics; and was top-down and management-driven. This article seeks to re-appraise Lewin's work and challenge the validity of these views. It begins by describing Lewin's background and beliefs, especially his commitment to resolving social conflict. The article then moves on to examine the main elements of his Planned approach to change: Field Theory; Group Dynamics; Action Research; and the 3-Step model. This is followed by a brief summary of the major developments in the field of organizational change since Lewin's death which, in turn, leads to an examination of the main criticisms levelled at Lewin's work. The article concludes by arguing that rather than being outdated or redundant, Lewin's approach is still relevant to the modern world.

A number of recent works on the history of group psychotherapy have misrepresented the nature of psychodrama and Moreno's contributions. In a recent book on the history of psychoanalysis in America, for example, Hale notes that Moreno was "inspired" by Freud. Others have erroneously claimed that Moreno was a "disciple" of Freud, or that he was a "psychoanalyst" who then developed psychodrama. The truth is that psychodrama arose quite independently from psychoanalysis. Moreno was aware of Freud and his method, but found it on the whole highly artificial and in being so limited to verbal interchange, unable to tap into the holistic process of human self-expression. Of course, Moreno shared with depth psychology the general idea of helping patients become more aware of disowned feelings and ideas. In finding psychoanalysis less than compelling, Moreno wasn't being unusually contrary; through the 1930s and well into the 1940s--the period in which Moreno did his most seminal work--a significant percentage of other psychiatrists in Europe and America were similarly doubtful of the claims of the psycho-analysts.

Carl Ransome Rogers, one of the giants of 20th-century psychology, has been recognized for his immense contribution to the science of psychology. At the same time, millions have found his person-centered philosophy to be a deeply satisfying moral system and have been willing to place their faith in what can be seen as Rogers's metaphysics.

Sigmund Freud The Psychoanalys in group

Sigmund Freud born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient, technically referred to as an "analysand", and a psychoanalyst. Freud redefined sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, created the theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship, and interpreted dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture.

While many of Freud's ideas have fallen out of favor or been modified by other analysts, and modern advances in the field of psychology have shown flaws in some of his theories, his work remains influential in clinical approaches, and in the humanities and social sciences. He is considered one of the most prominent thinkers of the first half of the 20th century, in terms of originality and intellectual influence.

 Development of psychoanalysis

In October 1885, Freud went to Paris on a traveling fellowship to study with Europe's most renowned neurologist and researcher of hypnosis, Jean-Martin Charcot. He was later to remember the experience of this stay as catalytic in turning him toward the practice of medical psychopathology and away from a less financially promising career in neurology research. Charcot specialised in the study of hysteria and susceptibility to hypnosis, which he frequently demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an audience. Freud later turned away from hypnosis as a potential cure for mental illness, instead favouring free association and dream analysis. Charcot himself questioned his own work on hysteria towards the end of his life.After opening his own medical practice, specializing in neurology, Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886. Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays, chief rabbi in Hamburg.After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients, Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many, he favored treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems. This came to be known as the "talking cure" and the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected or imprisoned in the unconscious mind. Freud called this denial of emotions "repression", and he believed that it was an impediment to the normal functioning of the psyche, even capable of causing physical retardation which he described as "psychosomatic". The term "talking cure" was initially coined by a patient, Anna O., who was treated by Freud's colleague Josef Breuer. The "talking cure" is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysis.Carl Jung initiated the rumor that a romantic relationship may have developed between Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who had moved into Freud's apartment at 19 Berggasse in 1896.[10] Psychologist Hans Eysenck has suggested that the affair occurred, resulting in an aborted pregnancy for Miss Bernays. The publication in 2006 of a Swiss hotel log, dated 13 August 1898, has been regarded by some Freudian scholars (including Peter Gay) as showing that there was a factual basis to these rumors.In his 40s, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias" (Corey 2001, p. 67). In that time, Freud was exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize a hostility he felt towards his father, Jacob Freud, who had died in 1896. He also recalled "his childhood sexual feelings for his mother, Amalia Freud, who was attractive, warm, and protective" (Corey 2001, p. 67). Freud considered this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in his life.After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1905, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. However, Freud often clashed with those supporters who critiqued his theories, the most famous being Carl Jung, who had originally supported Freud's ideas. Part of the disagreement between the two was in Jung's interest and commitment to religion, which Freud saw as unscientific.

Freud's ideas

Freud has been influential in two related but distinct ways: he simultaneously developed a theory of the human mind's organization and internal operations and a theory that human behavior both conditions and results from how the mind is organized. This led him to favor certain clinical techniques for trying to help cure mental illness. He theorized that personality is developed by a person's childhood experiences. In his philosophical writings he advocated an atheistic world view; he was eulogized as "'the atheist's touchstone' for the 20th century."

Early work

Sigmund Freud memorial in Hampstead, North London. Sigmund and Anna Freud lived at 20 Maresfield Gardens, near this statue. Their house is now a museum dedicated to Freud's life and work. The building behind the statue is the Tavistock Clinic, a major psychological health care institution.Freud began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna. He took nine years to complete his studies, due to his interest in neurophysiological research, specifically investigation of the sexual anatomy of eels and the physiology of the fish nervous system. He entered private practice in neurology for financial reasons, receiving his M.D. degree in 1881 at the age of 25. He was also an early researcher in the field of cerebral palsy, which was then known as "cerebral paralysis." He published several medical papers on the topic, and showed that the disease existed long before other researchers of the period began to notice and study it. He also suggested that William Little, the man who first identified cerebral palsy, was wrong about lack of oxygen during birth being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom.Freud hoped that his research would provide a solid scientific basis for his therapeutic technique. The goal of Freudian therapy, or psychoanalysis, was to bring repressed thoughts and feelings into consciousness in order to free the patient from suffering repetitive distorted emotions.Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging a patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is lesser direct involvement on the part of the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst. Through this process, transference, the patient can discover and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts involving parents.The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Josef Breuer. Freud credited Breuer with opening the way to the discovery of the psychoanalytical method by his treatment of the case of Anna O. In November 1880 Breuer was called in to treat a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman (Bertha Pappenheim) for a persistent cough which he diagnosed as hysterical. He found that while nursing her dying father she had developed a number of transitory symptoms, including visual disorders and paralysis and contractures of limbs, which he also diagnosed as hysterical. Breuer began to see his patient almost every day as the symptoms increased and became more persistent, and observed that she entered states of absence. He found that when, with his encouragement, she told fantasy stories in her evening states of absence her condition improved, and most of her symptoms had disappeared by April 1881. However, following the death of her father in that month her condition deteriorated again. Breuer recorded that some of the symptoms eventually remitted spontaneously, and that full recovery was achieved by inducing her to recall events that had precipitated the occurrence of a specific symptom. In the years immediately following Breuer's treatment, Anna O. spent three short periods in sanatoria with the diagnosis "hysteria" with "somatic symptoms," and some authors have challenged Breuer's published account of a cure. (A contrary view has been published by Richard Skues.)In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique" and his newly developed analytic technique of interpretation and reconstruction. According to Freud's later accounts of this period, as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, but then came to believe that they were fantasies. He explained these at first as having the function of "fending off" memories of infantile masturbation, but in later years he wrote that they represented Oedipal fantasies.Another version of events focuses on Freud's proposing that unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse were at the root of the psychoneuroses in letters to Wilhelm Fliess in October 1895, before he reported that he had actually discovered such abuse among his patients. In the first half of 1896 Freud published three papers stating that he had uncovered, in all of his current patients, deeply repressed memories of sexual abuse in early childhood. In these papers Freud recorded that his patients were not consciously aware of these memories, and must therefore be present as unconscious memories if they were to result in hysterical symptoms or obsessional neurosis. The patients were subjected to considerable pressure to "reproduce" infantile sexual abuse "scenes" that Freud was convinced had been repressed into the unconscious. Patients were generally unconvinced that their experiences of Freud's clinical procedure indicated actual sexual abuse. He reported that even after a supposed "reproduction" of sexual scenes the patients assured him emphatically of their disbelief.As well as his pressure technique, Freud's clinical procedures involved analytic inference and the symbolic interpretation of symptoms to trace back to memories of infantile sexual abuse. His claim of one hundred percent confirmation of his theory only served to reinforce previously expressed reservations from his colleagues about the validity of findings obtained through his suggestive techniques.
 

Cocaine

As a medical researcher, Freud was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant as well as analgesic. He wrote several articles on the antidepressant qualities of the drug and he was influenced by friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who recommended cocaine for the treatment of "nasal reflex neurosis". Fliess operated on the noses of Freud and a number of Freud's patients' whom he believed to be suffering the disorder, including Emma Eckstein, whose surgery proved disastrous.Freud felt that cocaine would work as a panacea and wrote a well-received paper, "On Coca", explaining its virtues. He prescribed it to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow to help him overcome a morphine addiction acquired while treating a disease of the nervous system. Freud also recommended cocaine to many of his close family and friends. He narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering its anesthetic properties of which he was aware but had not written extensively. Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, received that distinction in 1884 after reporting to a medical society the ways cocaine could be used in delicate eye surgery. Freud was bruised by this, especially because this would turn out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world. Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished because of this early ambition. Furthermore, Freud's friend Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis" as a result of Freud's prescriptions and died a few years later. Freud felt great regret over these events, dubbed by later biographers as "The Cocaine Incident".[citation needed] He managed to move on although some speculate that he continued to use cocaine after this event. Some critics have suggested that most of Freud's psychoanalytical theory was a byproduct of his cocaine use.
 

The Unconscious

Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought were his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior. However, as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out, "contrary to what most people believe, the unconscious was not discovered by Freud. In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, William James, in Principles of Psychology his monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'". Boris Sidis, a Russian Jew who emigrated to the United States of America in 1887, and studied under William James, wrote The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society in 1898, followed by ten or more works over the next twenty five years on similar topics to the works of Freud. Historian of psychology Mark Altschule concluded, "It is difficult—or perhaps impossible—to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance." Freud's advance was not to uncover the unconscious but to devise a method for systematically studying it.Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". This meant that dreams illustrate the "logic" of the unconscious mind. Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it. The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought; its contents could be accessed with a little effort.One key factor in the operation of the unconscious is "repression". Freud believed that many people "repress" painful memories deep into their unconscious mind. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind, he also observed that repression varies among individual patients. Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a person's consciousness. Thus, people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences.Later, Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious: the descriptive unconscious, the dynamic unconscious, and the system unconscious. The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware. The dynamic unconscious, a more specific construct, referred to mental processes and contents that are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes. The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed, they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind, such as condensation and displacement.Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious, replacing it with the concept of the ego, super-ego, and id. Throughout his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious.
 

Psychosexual development

Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and thus turned to ancient mythology and contemporary ethnography for comparative material. Freud named his new theory the Oedipus complex after the famous Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. "I found in myself a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of my father. I now consider this to be a universal event in childhood," Freud said. Freud sought to anchor this pattern of development in the dynamics of the mind. Each stage is a progression into adult sexual maturity, characterized by a strong ego and the ability to delay gratification (cf. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality). He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much he believed that people desire incest and must repress that desire. The Oedipus conflict was described as a state of psychosexual development and awareness. He also turned to anthropological studies of totemism and argued that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal Oedipal conflict.Freud originally posited childhood sexual abuse as a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory" as insufficiently explanatory. He noted finding many cases in which apparent memories of childhood sexual abuse were based more on imagination than on real events. During the late 1890s Freud, who never abandoned his belief in the sexual etiology of neuroses, began to emphasize fantasies built around the Oedipus complex as the primary cause of hysteria and other neurotic symptoms. Despite this change in his explanatory model, Freud always recognized that some neurotics had in fact been sexually abused by their fathers. He explicitly discussed several patients whom he knew to have been abused.Freud also believed that the libido developed in individuals by changing its object, a process codified by the concept of sublimation. He argued that humans are born "polymorphously perverse", meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development—first in the oral stage (exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing), then in the anal stage (exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels), then in the phallic stage. Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the Oedipus Complex) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. (The term 'Electra complex' is sometimes used to refer to such a fixation on the father, although Freud did not advocate its use.) The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.Freud's views have sometimes been called phallocentric. This is because, for Freud, the unconscious desires the phallus (penis). Males are afraid of losing their masculinity, symbolized by the phallus, to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus—an unfulfillable desire. Thus boys resent their fathers (fear of castration) and girls desire theirs.
 

Id, ego, and super-ego

In his later work, Freud proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: Id, ego, and super-ego. Freud discussed this model in the 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and fully elaborated upon it in The Ego and the Id (1923), in which he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (i.e., conscious, unconscious, and preconscious). The id is the impulsive, child-like portion of the psyche that operates on the "pleasure principle" and only takes into account what it wants and disregards all consequences.The term ego entered the English language in the late 18th century; Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) described the game of chess as a way to "...keep the mind fit and the ego in check". Freud acknowledged that his use of the term Id (das Es, "the It") derives from the writings of Georg Groddeck. The term Id appears in the earliest writing of Boris Sidis, in which it is attributed to William James, as early as 1898.The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which takes into account no special circumstances in which the morally right thing may not be right for a given situation. The rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical moralism of the super-ego; it is the part of the psyche that is usually reflected most directly in a person's actions. When overburdened or threatened by its tasks, it may employ defense mechanisms including denial, repression, and displacement. The theory of ego defense mechanisms has received empirical validation, and the nature of repression, in particular, became one of the more fiercely debated areas of psychology in the 1990s.
 

Psychotherapy

Freud's theories and research methods have always been controversial. He and psychoanalysis have been criticized in very extreme terms. For an often-quoted example, Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize winning immunologist, said in 1975 that psychoanalysis is the "most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century". However, Freud has had a tremendous impact on psychotherapy. Many psychotherapists follow Freud's approach to an extent, even if they reject his theories.One influential post-Freudian psychotherapy has been the primal therapy of the American psychologist Arthur Janov.Freud's contributions to psychotherapy have been extensively criticized and defended by many scholars and historians.Critics include H. J. Eysenck, who wrote that Freud 'set psychiatry back one hundred years', consistently mis-diagnosed his patients, fraudulently misrepresented case histories and that "what is true in Freud is not new and what is new in Freud is not true".Betty Friedan also criticised Freud and his Victorian slant on women in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Freud's concept of penis envy—and his definition of female as a negative—was attacked by Kate Millett, whose 1970 book Sexual Politics explained confusion and oversights in his work. Naomi Weisstein wrote that Freud and his followers erroneously thought that his "years of intensive clinical experience" added up to scientific rigor.Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen wrote in a review of Han Israëls's book Der Fall Freud published in The London Review of Books that, "The truth is that Freud knew from the very start that Fleischl, Anna O. and his 18 patients were not cured, and yet he did not hesitate to build grand theories on these non-existent foundations...he disguised fragments of his self-analysis as ‘objective’ cases, that he concealed his sources, that he conveniently antedated some of his analyses, that he sometimes attributed to his patients ‘free associations’ that he himself made up, that he inflated his therapeutic successes, that he slandered his opponents." Jacques Lacan saw attempts to locate pathology in, and then to cure, the individual as more characteristic of American ego psychology than of proper psychoanalysis. For Lacan, psychoanalysis involved "self-discovery" and even social criticism, and it succeeded insofar as it provided emancipatory self-awareness.David Stafford-Clark summed up criticism of Freud: "Psychoanalysis was and will always be Freud's original creation. Its discovery, exploration, investigation, and constant revision formed his life's work. It is manifest injustice, as well as wantonly insulting, to commend psychoanalysis, still less to invoke it 'without too much of Freud'." It's like supporting the theory of evolution 'without too much of Darwin'. If psychoanalysis is to be treated seriously at all, one must take into account, both seriously and with equal objectivity, the original theories of Sigmund Freud. Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe wrote, "The story of Freud and the creation of psychodynamic therapy, as told by its adherents, is a self-serving myth".
 

Kurt Lewin Dinamic group

Kurt Zadek Lewin (September 9, 1890 - February 12, 1947) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology.

Lewin is often recognized as the "founder of social psychology" and was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development.

Kurt Lewin: groups, experiential learning and action research.

Kurt Lewin was a seminal theorist who deepened our understanding of groups, experiential learning, and action research. What did he actually add to theory and practice of informal education?

Kurt Lewin's (1890-1947) work had a profound impact on social psychology and, more particularly for our purposes here, on our appreciation of experiential learning, group dynamics and action research. On this page we provide a very brief outline of his life and an assessment of his continuing relevance to educators. Kurt Lewin was born on September 9, 1890 in the village of Mogilno in Prussia (now part of Poland). He was one of four children in a middle class Jewish family (his father owned a small general store and a farm). They moved to Berlin when he was aged 15 and he was enrolled in the Gymnasium. In 1909 Kurt Lewin entered the University of Frieberg to study medicine. He then transferred to the University of Munich to study biology. Around this time he became in involved in the socialist movement. His particular concerns appear to have been the combating of anti-Semitism, the democratization of German institutions, and the need to improve the position of women. Along with other students he organized and taught an adult education program for working class women and men.

 

His doctorate was undertaken at the University of Berlin where he developed an interest in the philosophy of science and encountered Gestalt psychology. His PhD was awarded in 1916, but by then he was serving in the German army (he was injured in combat). In 1921 Kurt Lewin joined the Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin - where he was to lecture and offer seminars in both philosophy and psychology. He was starting to make a name for himself both in terms of publishing, and with regard to his teaching (he was an enthusiastic lecturer who attracted the interest of students). His work became known in America and he was invited to spend six months as a visiting professor at Stanford (1930). With the political position worsening considerably in Germany and in 1933 he and his wife and daughter settled in the USA (he became an American citizen in 1940). Kurt Lewin was first to work at the Cornell School of Home Economics, and then, in 1935, at the University of Iowa (this was also the year when his first collection of papers in English - A Dynamic Theory of Personality - was published).

The University of Iowa remained Kurt Lewin's base until 1944. There he continued to develop his interest in social processes, and to undertake research in that area. Significantly, he became involved in various applied research initiatives linked to the war effort (from 1940 onwards). These included exploring the morale of the fighting troops, psychological warfare, and reorienting food consumption away from foods in short supply. His social commitments were also still strong - and he was much in demand as a speaker on minority and inter-group relations. He wanted to establish a centre to research group dynamics - and in 1944 this dream was realized with the founding of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT. At the same time Kurt Lewin was also engaged in a project for the American Jewish Congress in New York - the Commission of Community Interrelations. It made use of Lewin's model of action research (research directed toward the solving of social problems) in a number of significant studies into religious and racial prejudice. It was also out of some of this work in 1946 with community leaders and group facilitators that the notion of 'T' groups emerged. He and his associates were able to get funding from the Office of Naval Research to set up the National Training Laboratories in 1947 in Bethel, Maine. However, Lewin died of a heart attack in Newtonville, Mass. on February 11, 1947, before the Laboratories were established.

Field theory

Here we will not enter into the detail of Kurt Lewin's field theory (it is beyond our remit). However, it is necessary to note its key elements. To begin it is important to recognize its roots in Gestalt theory. (A gestalt is a coherent whole. It has its own laws, and is a construct of the individual mind rather than 'reality'). For Kurt Lewin behaviour was determined by totality of an individual's situation. In his field theory, a 'field' is defined as 'the totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent'. Individuals were seen to behave differently according to the way in which tensions between perceptions of the self and of the environment were worked through. The whole psychological field, or 'lifespace', within which people acted had to be viewed, in order to understand behaviour. Within this individuals and groups could be seen in topological terms (using map-like representations). Individuals participate in a series of life spaces (such as the family, work, school and church), and these were constructed under the influence of various force vectors.

Hall and Lindzey summarize the central features of Kurt Lewin's field theory as follows:

Behaviour is a function of the field that exists at the time the behaviour occurs,

Analysis begins with the situation as a whole from which are differentiated the component parts, and

The concrete person in a concrete situation can represented mathematically.

Kurt Lewin also looked to the power of underlying forces (needs) to determine behaviour and, hence, expressed 'a preference for psychological as opposed to physical or physiological descriptions of the field'.

In this we can see how Kurt Lewin drew together insights from topology (eg lifespace), psychology (need, aspiration etc.), and sociology (eg force fields – motives clearly being dependent on group pressures). As Allport in his foreword to Resolving Social Conflict put it, these three aspects of his thought were not separable. 'All of his concepts, whatever root-metaphor they employ, comprise a single well-integrated system'. It was this, in significant part, which gave his work its peculiar power.

 

Group dynamics

It is not an exaggeration to say that Kurt Lewin had a profound impact on a generation of researchers and thinkers concerned with group dynamics. Brown argues that two key ideas emerged out of field theory that are crucial to an appreciation of group process: interdependence of fate, and task interdependence.

Interdependence of fate. Here the basic line of argument is that groups come into being in a psychological sense 'not because their members necessarily are similar to one another (although they may be); rather, a group exists when people in it realize their fate depends on the fate of the group as a whole'. This is how Lewin  put it when discussing the position of Jews in 1939:

It is not similarity or dissimilarity of individuals that constitutes a group, but rather interdependence of fate. Any normal group, and certainly any developed and organized one contains and should contain individuals of very different character…. It is easy enough to see that the common fate of all Jews makes them a group in reality. One who has grasped this simple idea will not feel that he has to break away from Judaism altogether whenever he changes his attitude toward a fundamental Jewish issue, and he will become more tolerant of differences of opinion among Jews. What is more, a person who has learned to see how much his own fate depends upon the fate of his entire group will ready and even eager to take over a fair share of responsibility for its welfare.

It could be argued that the position of Jews in 1939 constitutes a special case. That the particular dangers they faced in many countries makes arguing a general case difficult. However, Lewin's insight does seem to be applicable to many different group settings. Subsequently, there has been some experimental support for the need for some elementary sense of interdependence.

Task interdependence. Interdependence of fate can be a fairly weak form of interdependence in many groups, argued Lewin. A more significant factor is where there is interdependence in the goals of group members. In other words, if the group's task is such that members of the group are dependent on each other for achievement, then a powerful dynamic is created.

These implications can be positive or negative. In the former case one person's success either directly facilitates others' success of, in the strongest case, is actually necessary for those others to succeed also… In negative interdependence – known more usually as competition – one person's success is another's failure.

Kurt Lewin had looked to the nature of group task in an attempt to understand the uniformity of some groups' behaviour. He remained unconvinced of the explanatory power of individual motivational concepts such as those provided by psychoanalytical theory or frustration-aggression theory ( op. cit. ). He was able to argue that people may come to a group with very different dispositions, but if they share a common objective, they are likely to act together to achieve it. This links back to what is usually described as Lewin's field theory. An intrinsic state of tension within group members stimulates or motivates movement toward the achievement of desired common goals (Johnson and Johnson 1995: 175). Interdependence (of fate and task) also results in the group being a 'dynamic whole'. This means that a change in one member or subgroups impacts upon others. These two elements combined together to provide the basis for Deutch's (1949) deeply influential exploration of the relationship of task to process (and his finding that groups under conditions of positive interdependence were generally more co-operative. Members tended to participate and communicate more in discussion; were less aggressive; liked each other more; and tended to be productive as compared to those working under negative task interdependence).

 

Democracy and groups

Gordon W. Allport, in his introduction to Resolving Social Conflicts (Lewin 1948: xi) argues that there is striking kinship between the work of Kurt Lewin and that of John Dewey.

Both agree that democracy must be learned anew in each generation, and that it is a far more difficult form of social structure to attain and to maintain than is autocracy. Both see the intimate dependence of democracy upon social science. Without knowledge of, and obedience to, the laws of human nature in group settings, democracy cannot succeed. And without freedom for research and theory as provided only in a democratic environment, social science will surely fail. Dewey, we might say, is the outstanding philosophical exponent of democracy, Lewin is its outstanding psychological exponent. More clearly than anyone else has he shown us in concrete, operational terms what it means to be a democratic leader, and to create democratic group structure.

One of the most interesting pieces of work in which Lewin was involved concerned the exploration of different styles or types of leadership on group structure and member behaviour. This entailed a collaboration with Ronald Lippitt, among others (Lewin et. al 1939, also written up in Lewin 1948: 71-83). They looked to three classic group leadership models - democratic, autocratic and laissez-faire – and concluded that there was more originality, group-mindedness and friendliness in democratic groups. In contrast, there was more aggression, hostility, scapegoating and discontent in laissez-faire and autocratic groups. Lewin concludes that the difference in behaviour in autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire situations is not, on the whole, a result of individual differences. Reflecting on the group experiments conducted with children he had the following to say:

There have been few experiences for me as impressive as seeing the expression in children's faces change during the first day of autocracy. The friendly, open, and co-operative group, full of life, became within a short half-hour a rather apathetic looking gathering without initiative. The change from autocracy to democracy seemed to take somewhat more time than from democracy to autocracy. Autocracy is imposed upon the individual. Democracy he has to learn.

This presentation of democratic of leadership in groups became deeply influential. Unfortunately, as Gastil (1994) notes, Lewin and his colleagues never developed their definition beyond this rough sketch. This has left them open to the charge that their vision of democratic leadership contains within it some worrying themes. In particular Kariel (1956, discussed by Gastil 1994) argued that the notion is rather manipulative and élitist. What is more there has also been some suggestion that Mao's mass-line leadership in China, 'used a model like Lewin's to mask coercion under the guise of participative group processes' (discussed by Gastil 1994). Such a possibility would have been disturbing to Lewin, whose commitments and intentions were democratic. He argued that democracy could not be imposed on people, that it had to be learnt by a process of voluntary and responsible participation. However, the problem becomes clearer when he discusses the nature of democratic leadership at moments of transition. Change needed to be facilitated and guided.

To instigate changes toward democracy a situation has to be created for a certain period where the leader is sufficiently in control to rule out influences he does not want and to manipulate the situation to a sufficient degree. The goal of the democratic leader in this transition period will have to be the same as any good teacher, namely to make himself superfluous, to be replaced by indigenous leaders from the group.

There are some elements here that ring a little of Rousseau's view of the tutor's role in Emile . Is it up to the leader to manipulate the situation in this way – or is there room for dialogue ?

'T' groups, facilitation and experience

In the summer of 1946 Kurt Lewin along with colleagues and associates from the Research Center for Group Dynamics (Ronald Lippitt, Leland Bradford and Kenneth Benne became involved in leadership and group dynamics training for the Connecticut State Interracial Commission. They designed and implemented a two-week programme that looked to encourage group discussion and decision-making, and where participants (including staff) could treat each other as peers. Research was woven into the event (as might be expected given Lewin's concern for the generation of data and theory). The trainers and researchers collected detailed observations and recordings of group activities (and worked on these during the event). Initially these meetings were just for the staff, but some of the other participants also wanted to be involved.

At the start of one of the early evening observers' sessions, three of the participants asked to be present. Much to the chagrin of the staff, Lewin agreed to this unorthodox request. As the observers reported to the group, one of the participants - a woman - disagreed with the observer on the interpretation of her behaviour that day. One other participant agreed with her assertion and a lively discussion ensued about behaviours and their interpretations. Word of the session spread, and by the next night, more than half of the sixty participants were attending the feedback sessions which, indeed became the focus of the conference. Near the conference's end, the vast majority of participants were attending these sessions, which lasted well into the night.

Lippitt has described how Lewin responded to this and joined with participants in 'active dialogue about differences of interpretation and observation of the events by those who had participated in them'. A significant innovation in training practice was established. As Kolb has commented:

Thus the discovery was made that learning is best facilitated in an environment where there is dialectic tension and conflict between immediate, concrete experience and analytic detachment. By bringing together the immediate experiences of the trainees and the conceptual models of the staff in an open atmosphere where inputs from each perspective could challenge and stimulate the other, a learning environment occurred with remarkable vitality and creativity.

It was this experience that led to the establishment of the first National Training Laboratory in Group Development (held at Gould Academy in Bethel, Maine in the summer of 1947). By this time Lewin was dead, but his thinking and practice was very much a part of what happened. This is how Reid describes what happened:

A central feature of the laboratory was “basic skills training,” in which an observer reported on group processes at set intervals. The skills to be achieved were intended to help an individual function in the role of “change agent”. A change agent was thought to be instrumental in facilitating communication and useful feedback among participants. He was also to be a paragon who was aware of the need for change, could diagnose the problems involved, and could plan for change, implement the plans, and evaluate the results. To become an effective change agent, an understanding of the dynamics of groups was believed necessary.

What we see here is the basic shape of T-group theory and the so-called 'laboratory method'. Initially the small discussion groups were known as 'basic skill training groups' but by 1949 they had been shortened to T-group. In 1950 a sponsoring organization, the National Training Laboratories (NTL) was set up, and the scene was set for a major expansion of the work (reaching its heyday in the 1960s) and the evolution of the encounter group.

The approach was not without its critics – in part because of what was perceived as its Gestalt base. In part, because it was seen by some as lacking substance. Reid reports that Grace Coyle, who had spent time at Bethel, felt that many of the training groups handled group situations badly; and that the leaders were starting to believe that they had 'discovered everything there was to know about group relations and were unaware of  the inquiry and work of others'. There may have been some element of this – but there was also innovation here. Four elements of the T-group are particularly noteworthy here according to Yalom (and they owe a great deal to Lewin's influence):

Feedback . Lewin had borrowed the term from electrical engineering and applied it to the behavioural sciences. Here it was broadly used to describe the adjustment of a process informed by information about its results or effects. An important element here is the difference between the desired and actual result. There was a concern that organizations, groups and relationships generally suffered from a lack of accurate information about what was happening around their performance. Feedback became a key ingredient of T-groups and was found to 'be most effective when it stemmed from here-and-now observations, when it followed the generating event as closely as possible, and when the recipient checked with other group members to establish its validity and reduce perceptual distortion'.

Unfreezing. This was taken directly from Kurt Lewin's change theory. It describes the process of disconfirming a person's former belief system. 'Motivation for change must be generated before change can occur. One must be helped to re-examine many cherished assumptions about oneself and one's relations to others'. Part of the process of the group, then, had to address this. Trainers sought to create an environment in which values and beliefs could be challenged.

Participant observation. 'Members had to participate emotionally in the group as well as observe themselves and the group objectively'. Connecting concrete (emotional) experience and analytical detachment is not an easy task, and is liable to be resisted by many participants, but it was seen as a essential if people were to learn and develop.

Cognitive aids. This particular aspect was drawn from developments in psychoeducational and cognitive-behavioural group therapy. It entailed the provision of models or organizing ideas through the medium brief lectures and handouts (and later things like film clips or video). Perhaps the best known of these was the Johari Window (named after, and developed by, Joe Luft and Harry Ingram). Yalom  comments, 'The use of such cognitive aids, lectures, reading assignments, and theory sessions demonstrates that the basic allegiance of the T-group was to the classroom rather than the consulting room. The participants were considered students; the task of the T-group was to facilitate learning for its members'.

Action research

Kurt Lewin is also generally credited as the person who coined the term ' action research '.

The research needed for social practice can best be characterized as research for social management or social engineering. It is a type of action-research, a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action, and research leading to social action. Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice (Lewin).

His approach involves a spiral of steps, 'each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action and fact-finding about the result of the action'. The basic cycle involves the following:

 

This is how Lewin describes the initial cycle:

The first step then is to examine the idea carefully in the light of the means available. Frequently more fact-finding about the situation is required. If this first period of planning is successful, two items emerge: namely, “an overall plan” of how to reach the objective and secondly, a decision in regard to the first step of action. Usually this planning has also somewhat modified the original idea.

The next step is 'composed of a circle of planning, executing, and reconnaissance or fact finding for the purpose of evaluating the results of the second step, and preparing the rational basis for planning the third step, and for perhaps modifying again the overall plan'. What we can see here is an approach to research that is oriented to problem-solving in social and organizational settings, and that has a form that parallels Dewey's conception of learning from experience.

The approach, as presented, does take a fairly sequential form – and it is open to literal interpretation. Following it can lead to practice that is 'correct' rather than 'good' – as we will see. It can also be argued that model itself places insufficient emphasis on analysis at key points. Elliott, for example, believed that the basic model allows those who use it to assume that the 'general idea' can be fixed in advance, 'that “reconnaissance” is merely fact-finding, and that “implementation” is a fairly straightforward process'. As might be expected there was some questioning as to whether this was 'real' research. There were questions around action research's partisan nature – the fact that it served particular causes. There were also questions concerning its rigour, and the training of those undertaking it.  However, as Bogdan and Biklen  point out, research is a frame of mind – 'a perspective that people take toward objects and activities'. Once we have satisfied ourselves that the collection of information is systematic, and that any interpretations made have a proper regard for satisfying truth claims, then much of the critique aimed at action research disappears. In some of Lewin's earlier work on action research there was a tension between providing a rational basis for change through research, and the recognition that individuals are constrained in their ability to change by their cultural and social perceptions, and the systems of which they are a part. Having 'correct knowledge' does not of itself lead to change, attention also needs to be paid to the 'matrix of cultural and psychic forces' through which the subject is constituted.

Action research did suffer a decline in favour during the 1960s because of its association with radical political activism. However, it has subsequently gained a significant foothold both within the realm of community-based, and participatory action research; and as a form of practice oriented to the improvement of educative encounters (eg Carr and Kemmis 1986). The use of action research to deepen and develop classroom practice has grown into a strong tradition of practice (one of the first examples being the work of Stephen Corey in 1949). For some there is an insistence that action research must be collaborative and entail groupwork.

Action research is a form of collective self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social or educational practices, as well as their understanding of those practices and the situations in which the practices are carried out… The approach is only action research when it is collaborative, though it is important to realise that action research of the group is achieved through the critically examined action of individual group members.

Just why it must be collective is open to some question and debate (Webb 1996), but there is an important point here concerning the commitments and orientations of those involved in action research. One of the legacies Kurt Lewin left us is the 'action research spiral' – and with it there is the danger that action research becomes little more than a procedure. It is a mistake, according to McTaggart (1996: 248) to think that following the action research spiral constitutes 'doing action research'. He continues, 'Action research is not a 'method' or a 'procedure' for research but a series of commitments to observe and problematize through practice a series of principles for conducting social enquiry'. It is his argument that Lewin has been misunderstood or, rather, misused. When set in historical context, while Lewin does talk about action research as a method, he is stressing a contrast between this form of interpretative practice and more traditional empirical-analytic research. The notion of a spiral may be a useful teaching device – but it is all too easily to slip into using it as the template for practice.

Conclusion

As this brief cataloguing of his work shows, Lewin made defining contributions to a number of fields. He had a major impact on our appreciation of groups and how to work with them; he pioneered action research; he demonstrated that complex social phenomenon could be explored using controlled experiments; and he helped to move social psychology into a more rounded understanding of behaviour (being a function of people and the way they perceive the environment). This is a formidable achievement.  Sixty years on, he still excites discussion and argument, and while we may want to qualify or rework various aspect of his work (and that of his associates) we are deeply indebted to him both for his insights and the way he tried to bring a commitment to democracy and justice to his work. The consistent theme in all Kurt Lewin's work, according to David A. Kolb  was his concern for the integration of theory and practice. This was symbolized in his best known quotation: 'There is nothing so practical as a good theory'. It's a lesson that we still need to learn.

JL Moreno, Founder of Psychodrama

Jacob Levy Moreno (born Iacob Levy, Bucharest, Romania, May 18, 1889; died New York, USA, May 14, 1974) was a Jewish Romanian-born Austrian-American leading psychiatrist and psychosociologist, thinker and educator, the founder of psychodrama, and the foremost pioneer of group psychotherapy. During his lifetime, he was recognized as one of the leading social scientists.

 

JL Moreno, Founder of Psychodrama

Psychotherapy in various forms and under various names has existed for many years. The term “mental therapeutics” was used in 1876 in a paper published in the American Journal of Insanity (now the American Journal of Psychiatry). An original form of psychotherapy, psychodrama was introduced in the 1920s and was accepted by the psychiatric community.

Jacob Levy Moreno, MD, the originator of psychodrama, was born in Romania in 1892 and grew up in Vienna. In 1917 he received his medical degree from the University of Vienna, where his education included experience in the psychiatry clinic. He then became a health officer and set up a general practice in a suburb of Vienna. He came to the United States in 1925 and settled in New York.

For some years in Vienna, Moreno had experience with storytelling in children's groups, followed by having the children act out the stories. He later used this method with adults, founding a theater named Das Stregreif in 1921 in which actors and audiences acted out real and imagined stories.

Moreno entered psychodrama through the practice of sociometry, an observational charting of how people interact in groups. This practice furnished objective evidence of interpersonal and intergroup relations. He lectured and exhibited at psychiatric meetings and founded and edited a journal, titled Sociometry (which was later taken over by a sociological association).

In time, he elaborated his psychodrama approach to group psychotherapy. In 1931 he published The First Book on Group Psychotherapy, noting in it that “ it was the first time that the terms group-therapy and group-psychotherapy were put into circulation and studied within the framework of empirical science.”

Moreno expanded his theory of psychodrama into a psychotherapy that was accepted by psychiatric leaders such as William H. White, MD, Adolph Meyer, MD, Smith Ely Jeliffe, MD, and others.

Important in Moreno's theories were the concepts of role taking, spontaneity, creativity, tele (empathy), and catharsis. In the process of acting out conflicts and problems in interpersonal relations, the actors gained insight and were helped by the group process to remedy problem behavior patterns and improve coping skills.

Moreno was critical of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic technique, though he related free association to spontaneous acting out. He had met Freud at a lecture in Vienna and always expressed his admiration for him as a scientist but deprecated the analytic method as a therapy as being passive and one sided and having a limited ability to help people.

At APA's annual meeting in 1931, Moreno was asked at the last moment to discuss a paper by AA Brill, MD, a leading psychoanalyst of the day. Brill's paper was titled “Abraham Lincoln as a Humorist,” wherein he concluded that Lincoln had a “schizoid-manic” personality. Moreno tore apart Brill's paper as being based on unproven and unsubstantiated conclusions. (Brill never forgave Moreno.)

Moreno was a prodigious author of books and papers, and his prose and poetry are easy to read. He was a flamboyant and colorful figure. After his death in 1974, psychodrama as a therapeutic technique appeared to have receded, but group therapy flourishes in many forms.

Psychodrama is effective because it emphasizes engagement through active role play and dramatic dialogue as the major factors which lead to transformational change. Throughout this paper four main psychotherapeutic techniques are reviewed which define psychodrama. They include the following: promoting dynamic group interaction, compelling experiential participation in subjective phenomena, providing opportunities for catharsis, and facilitating basic psychotherapeutic techniques. Each approach is considered, in turn.

If the future of mankind can be 'planned,' then conscious evolution through training of spontaneity opens a new vista for the development of the human race (JL Moreno).

Toward the end of his first published book, Who Shall Survive?, Jacob L. Moreno described his hope for humanity -- the transformation of human consciousness through the integration of creative play, spontaneity, and psychological theory. Psychodrama is the tool that Moreno developed as a method to facilitate this transformation. It is an action-oriented method of psychotherapy which incorporates the mind, body, and spirit in active role play. Psychodrama is also experiential, as deeply held perceptions, patterns, and beliefs are expressed, bringing the unconscious into consciousness. It is a mode of psychotherapy in which active role play facilitates therapeutic change.

A pioneer in group therapy, Moreno suggested that when an individual acts out particular roles or incidents within a group, he or she will explore unconscious patterns, uncomfortable emotions, deep conflicts, and meaningful life themes in the safety of the therapeutic group. Internal patterns and conflicts are made external. People actually experience struggles as opposed to simply talking about them in a detached manner. As a result, one will be able to gain new awareness and insight. This awareness allows for increased clarity in seeing the alternatives for changing life patterns.

Psychodrama is essentially an existential encounter between a group of people. By employing a social network to facilitate deep change, Moreno invited people to live out the Golden Rule -- reversing roles and imagining what it may be like to be the other person, promoting empathy, compassion, and self-reflection.

Furthermore, psychodrama is unique in its attempts to go beyond the linear methods of talk therapy to promote deep self-awareness and integration. Moreno's methodology is a growth model emphasizing individual responsibility and the creating of one's destiny. Unique to psychodrama is the use of primarily role play in therapy to promote joy, enthusiasm, excitement, playfulness, vitality, deep feelings, sharing, and the integration of these emotions with the greater spiritual self.

This paper considers the theoretical underpinnings of Moreno's psychodrama as a school of thought and as a method of psychotherapy. Psychodrama is best understood as a modality integrating aspects of existential therapy, Gestalt therapy, transactional analysis and Jungian analytical psychology as a holistic form of multimodal psychotherapy. Indeed, psychodrama is a synthesis of many innovative forms of therapy from the last 50 years.

Defining psychodrama

As mentioned, psychodrama is a technique for expressing difficult emotions and facing deep conflicts by having group participants enact significant life events. It is a method to externally express the internal psyche and work with a person's representation of the past, present, and future in the current moment. For this reason Moreno defined psychodrama as "the science which explores 'the truth' by dramatic methods". Moreno emphasized that the main goal of psychodrama was to help clients discover their inner truth, express repressed emotions, and create authentic relationships with others.

The basic mechanics of psychodrama involve group participants assuming specific roles. The protagonist in the group is the person who represents the themes of the group drama. His or her experience is the primary one represented. Auxiliary egos are represented by group members who assume the roles of significant others in the protagonist's drama. Moreno labeled the audience those group members who witness the drama and represent the world at large. The stage is considered the physical space in which the drama is conducted, while the director is the trained psychodramatist who guides participants through each phase of the session.

After all phases of the enactment are complete group members share their individual experiences. Generally this involves participants revealing the subjective experience of playing their role -- relating feelings, experiences, awareness in the moment, and thoughts regarding their own life.

Carl Rogers Encounter groups

CARL ROGERS

1902 - 1987

Biography

Carl Rogers was born January 8, 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the fourth of six children.  His father was a successful civil engineer and his mother was a housewife and devout Christian.    His education started in the second grade, because he could already read before kindergarten.

When Carl was 12, his family moved to a farm about 30 miles west of Chicago, and it was here that he was to spend his adolescence.  With a strict upbringing and many chores, Carl was to become rather isolated, independent, and self-disciplined.

He went on to the University of Wisconsin as an agriculture major.  Later, he switched to religion to study for the ministry.  During this time, he was selected as one of ten students to go to Beijing for the “World Student Christian Federation Conference” for six months.  He tells us that his new experiences so broadened his thinking that he began to doubt some of his basic religious views.

After graduation, he married Helen Elliot (against his parents’ wishes), moved to New  York City, and began attending the Union Theological Seminary, a famous liberal religious institution.  While there, he took a student organized seminar called “Why am I entering the ministry?”  I might as well tell you that, unless you want to change your career, never take a class with such a title!  He tells us that most of the participants “thought their way right out of religious work.”

Religion’s loss was, of course, psychology’s gain:  Rogers switched to the clinical psychology program of Columbia University, and received his Ph.D. in 1931.  He had already begun his clinical work at the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  At this clinic, he learned about Otto Rank’s theory and therapy techniques, which started him on the road to developing his own approach.

He was offered a full professorship at Ohio State in 1940.  In 1942, he wrote his first book, Counseling and Psychotherapy.  Then, in 1945, he was invited to set up a counseling center at the University of Chicago.  It was while working there that in 1951 he published his major work, Client-Centered Therapy, wherein he outlines his basic theory.

In 1957, he returned to teach at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsisn.  Unfortunately, it was a time of conflict within their psychology department, and Rogers became very disillusioned with higher education.  In 1964, he was happy to accept a research position in La Jolla, California.  He provided therapy, gave speeches, and wrote, until his death in 1987.

Details

Rogers tells us that organisms know what is good for them.  Evolution has provided us with the senses, the tastes, the discriminations we need:  When we hunger, we find food -- not just any food, but food that tastes good.  Food that tastes bad is likely to be spoiled, rotten, unhealthy. That what good and bad tastes are -- our evolutionary lessons made clear!  This is called organismic valuing.

Among the many things that we instinctively value is positive regard, Rogers umbrella term for things like love, affection, attention, nurturer, and so on.  It is clear that babies need love and attention. In fact, it may well be that they die without it.  They certainly fail to thrive -- i.e. become all they can be.

Another thing -- perhaps peculiarly human -- that we value is positive self-regard, that is, self-esteem, self-worth, a positive self-image.  We achieve this positive self-regard by experiencing the positive regard others show us over our years of growing up.  Without this self-regard, we feel small and helpless, and again we fail to become all that we can be!

Like Maslow, Rogers believes that, if left to their own devices, animals will tend to eat and drink things that are good for them, and consume them in balanced proportions.  Babies, too, seem to want and like what they need.  Somewhere along the line, however, we have created an environment for ourselves that is significantly different from the one in which we evolved.  In this new environment are such things as refined sugar, flour, butter, chocolate, and so on, that our ancestors in Africa never knew.  These things have flavors that appeal to our organismic valuing -- yet do not serve our actualization well.  Over millions of years, we may evolve to find brocolli more satisfying than cheesecake -- but by then, it’ll be way too late for you and me.

Our society also leads us astray with conditions of worth.  As we grow up, our parents, teachers, peers, the media, and others, only give us what we need when we show we are “worthy,” rather than just because we need it. We get a drink when we finish our class, we get something sweet when we finish our vegetables, and most importantly, we get love and affection if and only if we “behave!”

Getting positive regard on “on condition” Rogers calls conditional positive regard.  Because we do indeed need positive regard, these conditions are very powerful, and we bend ourselves into a shape determined, not by our organismic valuing or our actualizing tendency, but by a society that may or may not truly have our best interests at heart.  A “good little boy or girl” may not be a healthy or happy boy or girl!

Over time, this “conditioning” leads us to have conditional positive self-regard as well.  We begin to like ourselves only if we meet up with the standards others have applied to us, rather than if we are truly actualizing our potentials.  And since these standards were created without keeping each individual in mind, more often than not we find ourselves unable to meet them, and therefore unable to maintain any sense of self-esteem.

Incongruity

The aspect of your being that is founded in the actualizing tendency, follows organismic valuing, needs and receives positive regard and self-regard, Rogers calls the real self.  It is the “you” that, if all goes well, you will become.

On the other hand, to the extent that our society is out of synch with the actualizing tendency, and we are forced to live with conditions of worth that are out of step with organismic valuing, and receive only conditional positive regard and self-regard, we develop instead an ideal self.  By ideal, Rogers is suggesting something not real, something that is always out of our reach, the standard we can’t meet.

This gap between the real self and the ideal self, the “I am” and the “I should” is called incongruity.  The greater the gap, the more incongruity.  The more incongruity, the more suffering.  In fact, incongruity is essentially what Rogers means by neurosis:  Being out of synch with your own self.  If this all sounds familiar to you, it is precisely the same point made by Karen Horney!

 

Defenses

When you are in a situation where there is an incongruity between your image of yourself and your immediate experience of yourself (i.e. between the ideal and the real self), you are in a threatening situation.  For example, if you have been taught to feel unworthy if you do not get A's on all your tests, and yet you aren't really all that great a student, then situations such as tests are going to bring that incongruity to light -- tests will be very threatening.

When you are expecting a threatening situation, you will feel anxiety.  Anxiety is a signal indicating that there is trouble ahead, that you should avoid the situation!  One way to avoid the situation, of course, is to pick yourself up and run for the hills.  Since that is not usually an option in life, instead of running physically, we run psychologically, by using defenses.

Rogers' idea of defenses is very similar to Freud's, except that Rogers considers everything from a perceptual point-of-view, so that even memories and impulses are thought of as perceptions.  Fortunately for us, he has only two defenses:  denial and perceptual distortion.

Denial means very much what it does in Freud's system:  You block out the threatening situation altogether.  An example might be the person who never picks up his test or asks about test results, so he doesn't have to face poor grades (at least for now!).  Denial for Rogers does also include what Freud called repression:  If keeping a memory or an impulse out of your awareness -- refuse to perceive it -- you may be able to avoid (again, for now!) a threatening situation.

Perceptual distortion is a matter of reinterpreting the situation so that it appears less threatening.  It is very similar to Freud's rationalization.  A student that is threatened by tests and grades may, for example, blame the professor for poor teaching, trick questions, bad attitude, or whatever.  The fact that sometimes professors are poor teachers, write trick questions, and have bad attitudes only makes the distortion work better:  If it could be true, then maybe it really was true!  It can also be much more obviously perceptual, such as when the person misreads his grade as better than it is.

Unfortunately for the poor neurotic (and, in fact, most of us), every time he or she uses a defense, they put a greater distance between the real and the ideal.  They become ever more incongruous, and find themselves in more and more threatening situations, develop greater and greater levels of anxiety, and use more and more defenses....  It becomes a vicious cycle that the person eventually is unable to get out of, at least on their own.

Rogers also has a partial explanation for psychosis:  Psychosis occurs when a person's defense are overwhelmed, and their sense of self becomes "shattered" into little disconnected pieces.  His behavior likewise has little consistency to it.  We see him as having "psychotic breaks" -- episodes of bizarre behavior.  His words may make little sense.  His emotions may be inappropriate.  He may lose the ability to differentiate self and non-self, and become disoriented and passive.

The fully-functioning person

Rogers, like Maslow, is just as interested in describing the healthy person.  His term is "fully-functioning," and involves the following qualities:

1.  Openness to experience.  This is the opposite of defensiveness.  It is the accurate perception of one's experiences in the world, including one's feelings.  It also means being able to accept reality, again including one's feelings.  Feelings are such an important part of openness because they convey organismic valuing.  If you cannot be open to your feelings, you cannot be open to acualization.  The hard part, of course, is distinguishing real feelings from the anxieties brought on by  conditions of worth.

2.  Existential living.  This is living in the here-and-now.  Rogers, as a part of getting in touch with reality, insists that we not live in the past or the future -- the one is gone, and the other isn't anything at all, yet!  The present is the only reality we have.  Mind you, that doesn't mean we shouldn't remember and learn from our past.  Neither does it mean we shouldn't plan or even day-dream about the future.  Just recognize these things for what they are:  memories and dreams, which we are experiencing here in the present.

3.  Organismic trusting.  We should allow ourselves to be guided by the organismic valuing process.  We should trust ourselves, do what feels right, what comes natural.  This, as I'm sure you realize, has become a major sticking point in Rogers' theory.  People say, sure, do what comes natural -- if you are a sadist, hurt people; if you are a masochist, hurt yourself; if the drugs or alcohol make you happy, go for it; if you are depressed, kill yourself....  This certainly doesn't sound like great advice.  In fact, many of the excesses of the sixties and seventies were blamed on this attitude.  But keep in mind that Rogers meant trust your real self, and you can only know what your real self has to say if you are open to experience and living existentially!  In other words, organismic trusting assumes you are in contact with the acutalizing tendency.

4.  Experiential freedom.  Rogers felt that it was irrelevant whether or not people really had free will.  We feel very much as if we do.  This is not to say, of course, that we are free to do anything at all:  We are surrounded by a deterministic universe, so that, flap my arms as much as I like, I will not fly like Superman.  It means that we feel free when choices are available to us.  Rogers says that the fully-functioning person acknowledges that feeling of freedom, and takes responsibility for his choices.

5.  Creativity.  If you feel free and responsible, you will act accordingly, and participate in the world.  A fully-functioning person, in touch with acualization, will feel obliged by their nature to contribute to the actualization of others, even life itself.  This can be through creativity in the arts or sciences, through social concern and parental love, or simply by doing one's best at one's job.  Creativity as Rogers uses it is very close to Erikson's generativity.

Therapy

 Carl Rogers is best known for his contributions to therapy.  His therapy has gone through a couple of name changes along the way:  He originally called it non-directive, because he felt that the therapist should not lead the client, but rather be there for the client while the client directs the progress of the therapy.  As he became more experienced, he realized that, as "non-directive" as he was, he still influenced his client by his very "non-directiveness!"  In other words, clients look to therapists for guidance, and will find it even when the therapist is trying not to guide.

So he changed the name to client-centered.  He still felt that the client was the one who should say what is wrong, find ways of improving, and determine the conclusion of therapy -- his therapy was still very "client-centered" even while he acknowledged the impact of the therapist.  Unfortunately, other therapists felt that this name for his therapy was a bit of a slap in the face for them:  Aren't most therapies "client-centered?"

Nowadays, though the terms non-directive and client-centered are still used, most people just call it Rogerian therapy.  One of the phrases that Rogers used to describe his therapy is "supportive, not reconstructive," and he uses the analogy of learning to ride a bicycle to explain:  When you help a child to learn to ride a bike, you can't just tell them how.  They have to try it for themselves.  And you can't hold them up the whole time either.  There comes a point when you have to let them go.  If they fall, they fall, but if you hang on, they never learn.

It's the same in therapy.  If independence (autonomy, freedom with responsibility) is what you are helping a client to achieve, then they will not achieve it if they remain dependent on you, the therapist.  They need to try their insights on their own, in real life beyond the therapist's office!  An authoritarian approach to therapy may seem to work marvelously at first, but ultimately it only creates a dependent person.

There is only one technique that Rogerians are known for:  reflection.  Reflection is the mirroring of emotional communication:  If the client says "I feel like shit!" the therapist may reflect this back to the client by saying something like "So, life's getting you down, hey?"  By doing this, the therapist is communicating to the client that he is indeed listening and cares enough to understand.

The therapist is also letting the client know what it is the client is communicating.  Often, people in distress say things that they don't mean because it feels good to say them.  For example, a woman once came to me and said "I hate men!"  I reflected by saying "You hate all men?"  Well, she said, maybe not all -- she didn't hate her father or her brother or, for that matter, me.  Even with those men she "hated," she discovered that the great majority of them she didn't feel as strongly as the word hate implies.  In fact, ultimately, she realized that she didn't trust many men, and that she was afraid of being hurt by them the way she had been by one particular man.

Reflection must be used carefully, however.  Many beginning therapists use it without thinking (or feeling), and just repeat every other phrase that comes out of the client's mouth.  They sound like parrots with psychology degrees!  Then they think that the client doesn't notice, when in fact it has become a stereotype of Rogerian therapy the same way as sex and mom have become stereotypes of Freudian therapy.  Reflection must come from the heart -- it must be genuine, congruent.

Which brings us to Rogers' famous requirements of the therapist.  Rogers felt that a therapist, in order to be effective, must have three very special qualities:

1.  Congruence -- genuineness, honesty with the client.

2.  Empathy -- the ability to feel what the client feels.

3.  Respect -- acceptance, unconditional positive regard towards the client.

He says these qualities are "necessary and sufficient:"  If the therapist shows these three qualities, the client will improve, even if no other special "techniques" are used.  If the therapist does not show these three qualities, the client's improvement will be minimal, no matter how many "techniques" are used.  Now this is a lot to ask of a therapist!  They're just human, and often enough a bit more "human" (let's say unusual) than most.  Rogers does give in a little, and he adds that the therapist must show these things in the therapy relationship.  In other words, when the therapist leaves the office, he can be as "human" as anybody.

I happen to agree with Rogers, even though these qualities are quite demanding.  Some of the research does suggest that techniques don't matter nearly as much as the therapist's personality, and that, to some extent at least, therapists are "born" not "made."