American psychologist, one of the three founders of humanistic psychology (with Rollo May and Abraham Maslow), and the originator of the "client-centered" — later "person-centered" — approach to therapy. Where Freudian psychoanalysis placed interpretive authority in the analyst and behaviorism placed it in the experimenter, Rogers placed it in the client: therapy, on his account, works by providing the conditions under which a person's own tendency toward growth can resume.
Those conditions he specified precisely as three therapist attitudes — unconditional positive regard, empathic understanding, and congruence (the therapist's own transparent self-consistency). He was the first major clinician to insist on recording therapy sessions for study rather than relying on retrospective case notes, which effectively founded psychotherapy research as an empirical field. Client-Centered Therapy (1951) is the technical statement; On Becoming a Person (1961) is the book that carried his ideas into the general culture.
Rogers's influence beyond the clinic was substantial. His model of the "facilitator" rather than the instructor — developed in Freedom to Learn (1969) — became the intellectual backbone of the student-centered education movement; it moves in the same direction as Freire's critique of the "banking" model, though from a liberal-therapeutic rather than a liberationist starting point. Late in life Rogers extended the method to group conflict, facilitating encounters in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Central America; he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in the year of his death.
The humanistic psychology Rogers helped establish has been criticized — by Christopher Lasch among others — for underwriting a therapeutic individualism that detaches the self from political and moral community. The criticism has weight; it does not dissolve the clinical achievement.
Rogers is on the graph because his humanistic psychology is the parent of both non-directive education (where he influences Freire) and the ethical-relational picture of the therapist that shapes late-twentieth-century caring-professions discourse.