Well this response is interesting to me. You know one reason that Rogers was able to demonstrate the propositions of nondirective therapy so cogently was that he was the first person ever to record and publish complete cases of psychotherapy. This fourth innovation of Counseling and Psychotherapy was illustrated in the last 170 pages of the book--"The Case of Herbert Bryan," which included, verbatim, every client statement and every counselor statement for the eight sessions of counseling. This was a remarkable achievement before the invention of tape recorders. It required a microphone in the counseling room connected to two alternating phonograph machines in an adjoining room, which cut grooves in blank record disks that had to be changed every 3 minutes. With graduate student Bernard Covner, Rogers and his team recorded thousands of disks involving scores of clients. These recordings became pivotal in the clinical training of psychotherapists, which, in the 1940s, Rogers may have been the first to offer in an American university setting. The recordings and transcripts also allowed Rogers and his students to begin undertaking scientific research on the process of therapy--another important feature of Counseling and Psychotherapy. For example, Rogers could classify counselor responses as to degree of directiveness, count their frequency of occurrence, and correlate them with subsequent client statements of insight. He made many counselors uncomfortable by reporting how directive counselors used 6 times as many words as nondirective ones. When rogers moved to Wisconsin in 1957, he had joint appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry. This would allow him to conduct further research on therapy with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia residing in the Mendota state psychiatric hospital, work that he hoped would have an impact on the psychiatric profession. The massive and well-funded research project went forward, and after years of delay because of complications involving authorship and the unethical behavior of one of the team members, it was eventually published (Rogers, Gendlin, Kiesler, & Truax, 1967). The results were important. The client-centered therapists achieved no better patient outcomes than therapists of other orientations; however, regardless of orientation, those therapists who demonstrated higher levels of unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence achieved better patient outcomes than therapists who provided lower levels of the three conditions. This was but one of several important findings. And this is maybe a bit more information on how I relate the origins of NLP to the human potential movement, the 70's cultural revolution in america (but did it actually happen??) and what is often refered to as "californian idealism". Because as Rogers's professional interests and influence increasingly extended beyond the fields of counseling and psychotherapy, and as his frustrations with the research project in Wisconsin continued, he decided to move to La Jolla, California, where Rogers joined the staff of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in 1963. After 10 years, he and others then formed their own organization, Center for Studies of the Person, where Rogers remained for another 15 years. In California, for a quarter century, Rogers continued to promulgate the client-centered approach and to apply his theory and method to other fields--education, parenting, group leadership, and the health professions, to name a few. In each instance, he demonstrated how the facilitative conditions of positive regard, empathy, and congruence could unleash growth, creativity, learning, and healing in children, students, group members, clients, and others. Drawing on earlier essays, he expanded his ideas into many new books that explored the implications of his thinking in diverse fields. Applied to education, Rogers's work on "student-centered learning" illustrated how a teacher or, as he preferred, a "facilitator of learning" could provide the trust, understanding, and realness to free his or her students to pursue significant learning. Rogers's work coincided with and contributed to the "open education" movement in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere. His book Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become (Rogers, 1969) went through two new editions over the next 25 years (including posthumously, Rogers & Freiberg, 1994). And Now i'm starting to think a bit more about this and I wonder.. Did Rogers ever know of the work of Milton Erickson, John Grinder or Richard Bandler? I'd be very interested in what he thought about NLP.