A Supposedly Objective Thing I’ll Never Use Again: Carl Rogers, Word Association Tests and the Emotional Adjustment of Children (1900-1927)

CATRIEL FIERRO

Workshop; International Workshop on the History of Psychology and the Sciences of the Human Mind; 2022

MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE

In the field of clinical psychology, Carl Ransom Rogers (1902-1987) requires little to none introduction. However, historians have recently suggested that we are lacking narratives on Rogers’ early ideas and techniques in the context of both the development of clinical psychology and the emergence of psychological testing as clinicians’ foremost scholarly activity during the early 20th century. As a result, this paper pursues two main goals. Firstly, it attempts to describe the development of the European experimental tradition of emotional adjustment research through word-association tests as carried out by two paradigmatic scholars: Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) and Whately Smith (1892 – 1947). Secondly, the paper attempts to reconstruct Rogers’ first original research project on emotional adjustment testing in young children as well as his epistemological assumptions and underpinnings regarding test objectivity, validity and reliability. By drawing on unpublished documents and heretofore overlooked primary sources I show that although Rogers initially drew from Jung and Smith’s complex and refined tradition, he ultimately rejected it as well as the tests themselves. Rogers was first allured by Smith’s quantitative, empiricist and experimental philosophy of psychology, but he was eventually deterred when the data he gathered through his own Masters’ research suggested that word association tests had no real, effective clinical value when used in children. By showcasing the complex process of test construction and validation, Rogers’ case sheds light on the context, the research practices and the methodological problems faced by clinical psychologists during the 1920s.