Peter F. Schmid, Letter of support by Carl Rogers

Carl Ransom Rogers, 1902-1987

„I am pleased [...] to have been kept informed of your activities [...]. I appreciate very much your unwillingness to rigidly adhere to a position of orthodoxy or dogma.

I have worked throughout my professional life to discourage the setting up of a ‘Rogerian school’ or of ‘Rogerian disciples’. It has never been my intention that anyone should imitate me. Rather I have presented my hypotheses and theories as what I have learned through my own experience, and I expect that others will do the same.

Personally, I like it much better that you are setting up a ‘society, the aim of which is supposed to encourage and support the humanization of human relations and the progress of person–centered thinking and acting by making it public and developing it ...’ This means that you will be trying to learn more and expand and open up to understanding. If you were setting up a ‘society of person–centered therapists’, that would be likely to mean that you would become concerned with such meaningless questions as ‘How can we define a person–centered therapist and how can we rule out those who do not belong?’ I think that is an unprofitable enterprise. As to the matter of laws governing the education and work of psychologists, I have come very deeply to question the wisdom of accreditation procedures, even when they are designed with the best of intent. I believe that they always tend to freeze a profession in a past form, in spite of efforts to encourage innovation. [...] I am going to enclose a reprint, „Some New Challenges", which I addressed to clinical psychologists some years ago. The section on professionalism is particularly relevant [...]

I wish you well in your efforts of ‘improving the psycho–social situation’ in your country.

I like what you are doing and the way you are doing it. [...]

Cordially,

Carl Rogers." (July 30, 1979)