Marshall Rosenberg and Carl Rogers: The Wisconsin Years Behind NVC

The year was 1960. Marshall was 25, and he had just gotten a D.

He was a graduate student in clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where Carl Rogers was teaching, and he did not even need this class. It was part of a minor. A friend had warned him off the professor, a sociologist named Michael Hakeem: a hard marker, the friend said, who could not stand clinical psychologists. Marshall went anyway, turned in the kind of report that always got him an A, and got a D.

He could have dropped the minor. He stayed. Years later he said that Hakeem was teaching him “more every day than I had ever learned before.”

Most short biographies of Marshall Rosenberg say one line about this period: he earned his PhD at Wisconsin and studied under Carl Rogers. All true. But the line hides the more interesting story, which is about two teachers, not one, and about the moment a young psychologist began to suspect that the people he was trained to treat were not sick at all.

Did Marshall Rosenberg study with Carl Rogers?

Yes. Marshall Rosenberg earned his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Wisconsin in 1961, where he studied under Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centered therapy, according to PuddleDancer Press, the publisher of his books. Rogers taught at Wisconsin from 1957 to 1963. Rosenberg also took part in Rogers’ research project there, and Rogers’ ideas about empathy and genuineness run through the Nonviolent Communication he went on to build.

But the influence was not only an idea passed from a famous teacher to a student. It came through a handful of moments that Rosenberg remembered for the rest of his life. He described them, in his own words, in life-history interviews with the researcher Marjorie Cross Witty, published in her 1990 Northwestern University dissertation, Life History Studies of Committed Lives. Most of the scenes below come from his telling there.

This is part 2 of our series on how NVC came to be. Part 1 follows the eight-year-old boy in Detroit in 1943, where the question behind NVC first took hold. For the full arc of his life and work, see our biography of Marshall Rosenberg.

A program designed to push people out

Graduate school was not a gentle place. Rosenberg arrived at Wisconsin feeling he could handle anything, and found what he called the most competitive situation imaginable. The first-year proseminar, which everyone had to take, was designed to flunk out half the class. Everybody knew it. He compared it to boot camp.

Of the 27 students in his first-year class, only three got through. He was one of them. His explanation was short: he had been through worse in Detroit.

It matters that he learned psychology in a place like this. A program that treated students as people to be sorted, ranked and weeded out was teaching something underneath the official curriculum. Rosenberg noticed. Much later, NVC would ask a question that program never asked: what does this person need in order to learn?

Michael Hakeem: the teacher who gave him a D

Rosenberg chose his minor, social disorganization in the sociology department, out of the same interest that had followed him since childhood: what makes people violent. That is how he ended up in Hakeem’s class.

The first assignment was to critique a paper by Menninger, a famous name in American psychiatry. Students were not usually asked to critique anything, Rosenberg said; they were asked to feed back what they had read. His report came back with a D.

Hakeem’s message was simple and, in 1960, unusual. Psychology and psychiatry were dangerous, he argued, because they did not separate scientific judgments from value judgments. He had already made the case in print: in 1957 he published a critique of the psychiatric approach to preventing juvenile delinquency in the journal Social Problems.

What landed for Rosenberg was this:

• A diagnosis can be a judgment in disguise. Calling someone “neurotic” sounds like a scientific fact. Hakeem showed him it was often a value judgment, dressed in scientific-sounding language.
• He was already surrounded by it. Rosenberg was working in a mental hospital, where everyone used these terms as though they described something real.
• Labels carry power. Hakeem argued that a profession built on labels could easily be used to control people, even by the state.

Rosenberg also read Erving Goffman’s Asylums in this period, and got to know other sociologists, students of Hakeem, who studied the dangers of labeling. A few years later, in private practice in St. Louis, he watched a young man who had protested the Vietnam War get sent for psychiatric observation and labeled schizophrenic. He began to see, he said, how dangerous it was to give psychology and psychiatry so much power.

By the end of the course the two were close. Hakeem gave him an A. Rosenberg went back years later to tell him what a great influence he had been.

Where Hakeem shows up in NVC

If you have learned any NVC, you have met Hakeem’s lesson without knowing his name.

The first component of NVC is observation: saying what actually happened, without mixing in an evaluation. “You were twenty minutes late” is an observation. “You’re unreliable” is an evaluation that sounds like a fact. It is the same move Hakeem made with “neurotic,” brought out of the hospital and into the kitchen.

Rosenberg makes the link plain in Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Among the kinds of language he says block compassion, he lists blame, insults, put-downs, labels, criticism, comparisons, and diagnoses, all as forms of judgment. Diagnoses. A psychologist putting his own profession’s favorite tool on that list is not a small thing. You can hear the sociology class in it.

Meeting Carl Rogers in a circle of chairs

Around the same time there was another teacher. Carl Rogers, one of the best-known psychologists in the United States, had come to Wisconsin, and the students waited for him, Rosenberg said, as if the Messiah was coming to end their misery.

The first time Rosenberg met him, the chairs had been put in a circle. Rosenberg did not even realize he was sitting next to him. Rogers said he would like to get started. And then he said nothing else.

One student, Charles Truax, pushed him. Come on, he said in effect, drop the nondirective approach: the reality is that you know more than the rest of us.

Rogers took it seriously. Then he answered. He believed, he said, that everybody, no matter how much schooling they had, probably has a couple of ideas of their own. He would be glad to share his. It would take about five minutes. “And what will we do for the rest of the semester?”

“I’ve been thinking about that ever since,” Rosenberg said.

What Rosenberg took from Carl Rogers

The seminar was a small scene, but it held most of what Rogers was known for. In his person-centered approach, the person in front of you is the expert on their own life, and the helper’s job is to listen with real empathy rather than to diagnose or direct. Wikipedia’s account of NVC summarizes the influence as Rogers’ emphasis on congruence, empathic listening and realness.

Three things from Rogers are especially easy to trace in NVC:

• Trust in the other person’s own wisdom. Rogers would not lecture a room of students who, he believed, had ideas of their own. NVC’s empathy works the same way. You do not fix or advise. You try to understand what the other person feels and needs, and trust them to find their way from there. Our guide to empathic listening goes into how that looks in practice.
• Realness. Rogers valued being genuine over being impressive. NVC’s honest self-expression, saying what you feel and need without blame, carries the same value.
• Learning by experience. Rosenberg called the seminar an eye opener: the power of letting things evolve without being didactic. NVC is still taught mostly through practice, not lecture.

There was one more moment he remembered. One night at Rogers’ house, he saw Rogers cry about the graduate program. It tore him up to think that people were being trained to be psychotherapists by being run through something so cruel and competitive. Rosenberg said the tears felt good to him. They matched the pain he was going through himself.

Rogers also invited Rosenberg into his research project. Rosenberg said he was chosen because of a viewpoint he had already developed working with delinquent girls: that we should stop trying to “therapize” people.

”Don’t cure us. Teach us how to live.”

Something was coming together in him. Rosenberg loved a line he attributed to one of Joseph Conrad’s novels, one the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz liked to quote: “Don’t cure us. Teach us how to live.”

He was reading behavioral psychologists too. Albert Bandura had written an article called “Psychotherapy as a learning process,” and Rosenberg remembered thinking: what if we just got clear about what people need, and taught them how to do things, rather than treating them as sick? Hakeem pointed him to a book called Moral Therapy, about an earlier era of psychiatry that treated patients less as sick than as down on their luck, and which, Rosenberg noted, often worked better than the scientific approaches of his own day.

You can see the whole of NVC’s stance packed into that turn:

• People are not broken. Behind every action is an attempt to meet a need, and needs are something everyone shares.
• What people often lack is skill, and skill can be taught.
• So the job is education, not cure.

It is why NVC is taught as a practice anyone can learn, by parents, teachers, managers and neighbors, rather than as a therapy reserved for professionals. It is also why you will find NVC Rising describing what we do as learning, in a year-long NVC Learning Community, not as treatment.

At Mendota State Hospital, where he worked in those years, he started acting on it. He saw husbands and wives together, because it made no sense to him to see half of a couple; it seemed like common sense to teach two people the skills to connect and work out their differences in the same room. He started calling it family therapy, without having heard the term before.

A direction, not yet a method

By the time Rosenberg left Wisconsin he had something important: a direction. People were not sick and needed skills. Labels were judgments. The listener’s job was to trust the speaker.

What he did not have yet was a method. That would be tested a few years later, in a tense meeting in St. Louis, when a man stood up and went straight at him, and the boy from Detroit was ready to fight. That is part 3 of the story.

Frequently asked questions

Who influenced Marshall Rosenberg? Carl Rogers is the best-known influence, through his person-centered approach and his emphasis on empathy and genuineness. Rosenberg himself also credited the sociologist Michael Hakeem, who taught him that psychiatric diagnoses often hide value judgments, and he named Albert Bandura’s idea of therapy as a learning process. Later, Gandhi’s nonviolence shaped the name he gave his work.

What is the connection between Carl Rogers and Nonviolent Communication? Rosenberg studied under Rogers at the University of Wisconsin and worked on his research project there. NVC carries Rogers’ core values: listening with empathy instead of advising, trusting each person’s own wisdom, and speaking genuinely. Rosenberg turned those values into a learnable process with four components: observation, feeling, need and request.

Where did Marshall Rosenberg get his PhD? He earned his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. He had studied as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan.

Is NVC the same as person-centered therapy? No. Person-centered therapy is a form of psychotherapy practiced by trained therapists with clients. NVC is a communication practice meant for everyone, in families, workplaces and communities. It borrows Rogers’ empathy and genuineness, and adds a concrete structure that people can practice in everyday conversations. Our plain-language overview of what NVC is covers the basics.

What does “Don’t cure us. Teach us how to live” mean for NVC? It sums up the shift Rosenberg made in graduate school: from seeing people as patients with illnesses to seeing them as learners who may lack some skills. NVC is built on that idea. It treats compassion and clear communication as skills that can be learned and practiced, not as traits you either have or lack.

Before it had a name

There is something freeing in how ordinary these turning points were. A bad grade. A silence in a seminar. A famous psychologist crying at home about how his students were being treated. None of it looked like history at the time.

It is worth asking what your own version of these moments was: the teacher who would not hand you the answer, the label you were given and later set down. Rosenberg spent the rest of his life working out how to speak without those labels, so that the person in front of him could stay a person.