Issue of Technology Transfer Is Snag for 1979 U.N. Meeting
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others. His preoccupation these days is with encounter groups in which other facilitators are trained and in which he feels he can have the most "impact." In an interview with Science, Rogers said he is increasingly disinclined to associate himself with any organization or institution. "I feel a lot of institutions could fall apart and I wouldn't feel badly." There would be chaos, he acknowledges, but "also a lot of new and healthy things." For example, "It would be a marvelous thing for our high schools if compulsory education through high school years was abolished." If only those who wanted to learn had to go to school, that "would make education what it should be." Compulsory education "has run the course of its usefulness, and become a prison." He has equally radical attitudes toward professional psychology. Not only does he have little faith in graduate education in the training of psychotherapists, he also has no faith in licensing and credentialing. "There are licensed incompetent psychologists and unlicensed incompetent psychologists," he says, proportionately just as many of the former as the latter. "The only answer I see," he says, "is people need to be educated as to what they ought to look for in therapy and not be guided solely by credentials." Rogers, like many other people, thinks what is really wrong with psychotherapy is that "it's so expensive that it's primarily for the middle class.... The profession needs another whole direction." He thinks the only way to get help to the masses is to train lay people in empathy and listening skills. He is not so sure people can be trained to be "caring," but in his experience they can learn the other skills in a relatively short time. People could be trained in their communities and be available without charge. Although Rogers believes that his approach is effective with the seriously mentally ill as well as hard-core criminals, he acknowledges that because of manpower involved it would be extraordinarily costly. But problems could become more manageable if institutional environments were made more "therapeutic"-if ward personnel in mental hospitals, or any hospitals for that matter, were trained to listen. What this amounts to is basically preventive (psychological) medicine. And where it should all start is in educational institutions. The ideas are there, and so is the knowledge about how to apply them. Why are they not more widely applied? "The fact that they're simple makes them very threatening," says Rogers. "The public's not ready." But Rogers seems immune from disillusionment; on the contrary, his faith in the innately healthy strivings in human nature has steadily increased over the years. He has been holding quite a few encounter groups to train facilitators in foreign countries in recent years, and he now thinks his popularity is greater in such diverse places as Germany, Japan, and Brazil than it is here. The reason may be that Rogers is now regarded as a conservative in the humanist movement, and his distaste for gimmickry makes him somewhat old hat in the U.S. where the movement has become increasingly antirational and fragmented into innumerable schools based on body therapies, mysticism, and so forth. But in a country like Brazil, where CSP held giant training groups for facilitators last year, the political implications of Rogers' theories are keenly appreciated. (He has word, in fact, that his latest work will probably be banned in South Africa.) Rogers' friends probably prize him most for-as they often put it-"giving people permission to be themselves." He has shown through his research that that's not only "okay" but it works; and through his life that, whatever his failings, it's okay to be Carl Rogers. Said the University of Santa Clara on giving him an honorary degree: "You have made it respectable to be human." -CONSTANCE HOLDEN