About Carol

Professional experience

Carol Wolter-Gustafson received her Ed.D. from Boston University. Since her first workshop with Carl Rogers in 1978, she has created student-centered courses in psychology and philosophy at Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachussetts; courses on Gender and Power as Visiting Professor at Universidad Iberoamericana, in Mexico City and at Temenos, in Sheffield, UK. She has made presentations and lectures and led workshops in the USA, Mexico, Europe, Russia, and Japan, on reconceptualizating the body-mind split to help create more fully-functioning persons. She has organized conferences for the Association for the Development of the Person-Centered Approach. Carol maintains a Client-Centered practice in Boston.

Personal experience

My personal and professional life has been about cultivating a pathway out of the "us-versus-them" territory and rhetoric that fuels violence locally and globally. I first met Carl Rogers at a nine-day residential workshop on Long Island in 1978, while I was a graduate student in the Department of Humanistic and Behavioral Studies at Boston University. Our department chair, Paul Nash, shared power, challenged hierarchy, and cultivated a person-centered, multinational, interdisciplinary program. I was fortunate to have these profound and innovative experiences early in my career.

As professor, psychotherapist, parent, partner and person, the themes that have been constant throughout my work are congruence and integrating theory and practice.

These themes guide my work with my graduate students in creating authentic democratic community with attention to issues of equity and human rights.

They lead me to write about the inherent and revolutionary implications of the PCA in embodying the core conditions, in research methods, and in issues of power, human development, gender and social change.

The emancipatory power of the Person-Centered Approach has nourished me personally, politically and intellectually. This fundamental passion is at the heart of my work.