Aboout CSP: The beginning

Center for Studies of the Person; The Beginning

 

What you will see below are descriptions of the very early years of CSP as written by Howard Kirschenbaum in his book, The Life and Work of Carl Rogers,2008, that he wrote after numerous interviews with Carl himself. These excerpts are from Chapter 10, The California Years, Part 1, pages 364-370.

 In the 1960’s Carl Rogers came to California, from the University of Wisconsin

and joined the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute(WBSI). There in 1968, a group of people with Carl, and referring to their work as the Person-Centered Approach, split off from WBSI and formed Center for the Studies of the Person. An eclectic group of over 30 people who met once a week in an office in LaJolla, California.

Fifty years later a book was published, “ A Place to Be, CSP 50” You may wish to purchase this book on our Website Carl Rogers Library and Bookstore, as it is filled with wonderful writings and memories from members of those early days and beyond. In it you will read the very different perspectives the members have of CSP. Both of these books, are open and candid regarding the struggles that are found in any human endeavor.

I am deeply touched by the courage of Carl Rogers, who gave full access to Howard of his library and trusted him with writing about him and CSP to not just look good but to be real and authentic in revealing his and our organization’s flaws. It is rare and beautiful to have an organization share it’s light and darkness. If you read without judgment, you will not see either of these two but see our organization as it continues to attempt to be open, honest, real, congruent, and authentic as we can be about being: being a person and being an organization. As a friend and colleague of Carl, John Weir, once said, “We are always doing the best we can with what we have”.

Below are the excerpts from Howard’s book.

Pat Howley

 

Below is Carl’s writing about WBSI and his problems there and about CSP as it was forming:

I felt like the most important decision of our Trustees meeting was that the Centers were to be as autonomous as it is humanly possible to make them. This fact released untold energies in the Center for the Studies of the Person; as we called our group. New projects, new ways of raising money, the idea of all of us turning in our fees, so our full energies would go to the Center—dozens of new ideas were sprouting all over the place. It was an exciting period like the first days of WBSI.  .  . .

Within a week I was more depressed than I have ever been before. {He was feeling so sick about it physically that he saw a doctor.}  The reason was that although I deeply love WBSI and have worried about it during various previous crises, this was the first time that the dream had ever been strangled from within.

 Although Rogers’ version of these events got the most attention at the time, and his role is the best known, he was not necessarily the prime mover in the new center or splitting off from WBSI. As Tom Gillette described it a few years later, “I would put Bill Coulson and Bruce [Meador] and myself in the front lines of leading us out of WBSI and into CSP. Carl was in the second line”

In this version Rogers was as much caught up in the group process, in the momentum toward separation, as leading it. On the other hand, if Rogers did not support and go along with the division of WBSI, it probably would not have happened, and that sense he was ultimately responsible for what occurred.

Over the years the story of their departure has taken on mythic proportions with Rogers relating in his oral history shortly before his death how, “A group of us left WBSI in the middle of the night. That’s literally true. We weren’t quite sure whether they would agree to our taking our property that we felt belonged to us: desks, typewriters, files and so on; and so Bill Coulson’s idea . . . was to rent a moving truck, and one evening we went into the WBSI, took our all our things, brought them to the new quarters, and the next morning wer were established as the Center for Studies of the Person.”

Richard Farson who, in spite of this episode, remained friends with Rogers all his life, had a very different version of the story. He recalled,

I think there is a whole myth about their sneaking in the middle of the night and stealing stuff. They seem to be proud and happy about that. The fact of the matter(I remember the discussion very well I the board meeting) is we just would give them what they needed to start their organization. We gave them some contracts [i. e. contracts obtained by Center staff but legally owned by WBSI] and we gave them some furniture and so forth . . . They think that they stole some furniture but we gave it to them. The fact is that their organization was still WBSI . . . Their letterhead [said] “ a development of WBSI. “They didn’t have any corporate papers. They didn’t have an 501 (c) 3 {tax exempt status . They didn’t have what they needed, so we decided that we would sponsor that group. They didn’t become autonomous until they were able to stand on their own. We tried to help them.

Eventually Center for the Studies of the Person did achieve its independent legal status and the break was complete. What was experienced at the time as a most painful episode by everyone involved turned out to be a freeing move which neither Rogers nor the many CSP staff members I talked to ever regretted.

. . . Although CSP was legally organized as a corporation, the members proudly thought of themselves as a “non-organization headed by a “non-director.” That is, the director has no power to direct anyone, but was empowered to speak for the organization publicly and to raise support for its various projects. It was a revolving position, one which Rogers never held. Not too far from WBSI they rented office space at 1123 Torry Pines Road in LaJolla.

Each member contributed a small sum to pay the rent and office expenses. They would all get together for weekly staff meetings , at which both personal and professional agendas were likely to be raised.

From this base, the members organized themselves into various “projects” many of them carryovers from WBSI, many of them new ones. By 1970, with the membership up to around forty-five, the following projects were listed in CSP’s brochure: Educational Innovation Project (using encounger groups to change a large school system, headed by Doug Land and Carl Rogers): the Conference Planning Service; the Research Design Center; the Project on Community: the Workshop Project; the Project for Developing Awareness through Interracial Encounters; the Institute for Drug Education: Psycreatin (for developing humanizing products for the general public); the collegiate Development Project and the Entry Training Project ( to facilitate the entry of unskilled people into the world of work).

Other than the secretarial staff no one received a salary from CSP. Members were responsible

For setting up and carrying out their own projects, and whether the funding came from granting institutions or in payment for services provided, each project had to support itself. Thus most of the members had other jobs or sources of income in addition to their work with CSP.

Membership was selective but fluid. By becoming involved with some Center members and working on their project, a person could participate in the life of the Center and gradually come to know many of the other members. If the person then desired to join, the members would vote on this. Any member could choose his or her own title, except for “director”. Rogers called himself a “Resident Fellow,” the same title he had held at WBSI. Norman Chambers, who became a member in 1969, recalled how, “Carl did the egalitarian thing very very well. Carl shared requests to do workshops with all of us. That was constant and contagious. It was a group of colleagues who were equal in every sense of the word . . . He was one member, not the member.

Shortly after breaking from WBSI, Rogers gave a slightly different picture of his place in CSP, telling an interviewer, “ . . . in previous years, I would have felt very responsible for that group, because, like it or not, I’m sort of the ideological head of the place, even though I am not the administrator. This time I really comfortably do not feel that responsibility. I feel that these are mature young people, and that they know what they’re getting into, and if the whole thing fails, they will all land on their feet, so I can relax and enjoy them and feel this is a damn good experience while it lasts.” It lasted a long time, and Rogers became less the “ideological head” of the group over the years, as others matured professionally and intellectually, although he always occupied that role to some degree.

With most members involved in jobs and careers outside of CSP; and with their devoting large portion of their time to teaching, counseling, group work, or research in the community, many members began having an expectation as to what they wanted from CSP. Many like Rogers, still wanted to be a group of close colleagues and friends working together for a common cause, that of helping people  and changing the world around them and, setting an example, making a significant difference in the conduct of the behavioral sciences throughout the country. Many others wished CSP might be primarily a “support group,” an association of like-minded people who could learn from each other, have fun together, and derive emotional and intellectual support from one another. They were already reaching out on their own jobs, helping others, and improving conditions around them. The second group wanted more personal benefits from CSP. Of course few individuals were totally  at one end of the continuum or the other. Rogers for example, believed that by work together they would naturally develop close personal ties and there would still be time left over for comradeship and mutual support. Others responded that that was all right for him, because he didn’t have a full-time job elsewhere. They had only several hours a week for CSP and had to choose whether they wanted to spend time primarily on professional projects or on mutually supportive discussions and activities.

For many years there remained sometimes a forceful tension between these two viewpoints. Rogers and many members remained active in professional outreach projects, others less so. Virtually all the members spoke highly of the personal benefits they derived from their “non-organization.” And there were enough in the active camp that during the 1970s to mid-80s CSP was a productive and creative milieu for the authorship of books and articles, for educational events and training programs at the Center and for innovative projects and outreach to individuals and institutions around the world. Particularly in the 70s is was a “Mecca” of sorts to which people would come for client-centered work—to meet Carl Rogers and his colleagues, take workshops, be visiting fellows, and experience CSP as an alternative organizational model. Someone one compared this period, perhaps a bit grandiosely, to Paris in the 1920s for all the current and future thinkers and leaders in psychology and social and intellectual change who gravitated to CSP and joined in its activities and values. It certainly remained the home of most of Rogers’ professional a