Carl Rogers (1902-1987)
Carl Rogers was born January 8, 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb
of Chicago, the fourth of six children.
He attended the University of Wisconsin as an agriculture major.
Later, he switched to religion to 
study
for the ministry.
After graduation, he married Helen Elliot (against his parents’ wishes),
moved to New York City, and began attending the Union Theological
Seminary.
Soon after, Rogers became disenchanted with religion and switched
to the clinical psychology program of Columbia University, where he received
his Ph.D. in 1931.
He was offered a full professorship at Ohio State in 1940.
Theory
Rogers thought that people have the basic tendency towards
good mental health, and consequently considered mental illness as distortions
of that natural tendency. Rogers entire theory is built on a single “force
of life” he calls the actualizing tendency, which is the built-in motivation present in every life-form to develop its potentials
to the fullest extent possible. Rogers believed that all creatures strive to make the very best of their
existence.
With this single great motive for developing our potential, Rogers subsumed all other motives beneath it or subsidiary to it. Further, whereas Maslow applied his notions of "self-actualization" to humans, Rogers made it a much more general principle which was valid for all living forms.
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”, Rogers called incongruity, and was the cause of suffering and neurosis.
The fully-functioning person
Rogers described the "fully-functioning" individual as possessing the following attributes:
1. Openness to experience.
2. Existential living.
3. Organismic trusting.
4. Experiential freedom.
5. Creativity.
Therapy
Carl Rogers therapy, known as client-centered, is dependent on the fact that, if independence is what you are helping a client to achieve, then they
will not achieve it if they remain dependent on you, the therapist. Thus, clients need to try out their own insights in their life and make progress towards indepedence.
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