To: (The email Network)

From: John Shlien

Date: 8/22/00, 11:18 AM

Re: Fred

Dear Friends,

Jane Zimring called a few minutes ago. Fred is gone, she said, and asked that you all be informed.

This was a deep love. She sounds calm, and has her friends, and family, all with her.

Around August 14, I phoned her to say that Fred’s paper was distributed by Jere, and highly praised, and to please tell him how fine it was. She said she would tell him, but wasn't sure that he would hear it.

This morning, she said that a day or two later, he spoke, saying, “Wasn't it nice of John to call”. So she thinks, we like to think, that he heard the message. She said that he worked so hard, to try to finish that paper.

God bless.

[This message is published with the express permission of Jane Zimring. She has no doubt, is quite certain, that Fred heard the message, and knew that his final piece of work had been received and appreciated. In that, we can all take comfort. It gives full personal meaning to “Rest In Peace”.] JMS

Nat Raskin

Fred Zimring was one of the brightest stars in the firmament of client-centered therapy. He was a world-class educator and practitioner, and was unexcelled at explaining the approach, challenging its assumptions, and suggesting new ways of looking at phenomena which most of us thought were settled.

Fred was born in Chicago in 1924, attending public elementary school and the University of Chicago high school. He was a student at the University when he entered the United States Army in 1943, and saw service in Iwo Jima. After being discharged, he returned to the University of Chicago, graduated from the Law School and passed the bar. He practiced law for a year, and decided to go back for a Ph.D. in General Psychology, granted in 1958. He then served as Dean of Students in the Division of Social Sciences for twelve years.

Fred got into psychology because of his general interest in personality and emotions and because he was interested in personal change; he was not functioning as well as he wished. He was skeptical at his first meeting with Carl Rogers, who seemed imprecise.

His attitude changed quickly at a demonstration where Rogers worked with a student acting as a client. In a few minutes of dialogue, some entirely new things emerged in the student's awareness. Fred was impressed no end by a process that seemed magical. Here was someone with a problem, who talks to someone who knows how to listen, and new thoughts and possibilities mysteriously occur. This inspired Fred to take courses at the Counseling Center and then to join its staff, as a student for five years and as a faculty member for twelve.

In 1971 Fred accepted a position at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, as Clinical Director of the Psychology Department; he held this until the end of his life, receiving the Diekhoff award for excellence in graduate teaching in 1999.

Fred's teaching skills led him to be invited many times to work in Eastern and Western Europe and he was invited to Greece repeatedly where, in three to ten day "intensives," he "lectured, facilitated, understood, supported, refereed, shared jokes and lived with us ... smiling, laughing, poking fun at his own step-by-step way of teaching...he earned our profound respect and love." Fred was generous in contributing scholarship money to allow students to attend the year 2000 annual meeting of ADPCA.

Fred co-authored the chapter on Carl Rogers and Client/Person-Centered Therapy for the American Psychological Association's 1992 commemorative volume on "The History of Psychotherapy, a Century of Change," edited by Donald K. Freedheim. He was co-editor, with Jerold Bozarth, of the Person-Centered Journal, from 1992 to 1994. In this role, he encouraged people to write, and helped them to get published.

The International Archives of the Person-Centered Approach, originated and managed by Alberto Segrera, lists 45 publications and talks by Fred beginning in 1958 which show the range of his contributions. He was interested in the process of experiencing and in the interaction between cognition and feeling and emotion — for example, cognitive processes as a cause of therapeutic change.

Fred stated that the main thrust of his professional activity was to understand why changes took place as a result of client-centered therapy and of empathy in particular, believing that Rogers' explanations of why changes occur seem to be "initial, tentative suggestions, rather than a finished product...I have gone on from Rogers' rather general self-theory explanations to more refined explanations drawn both from self theory and cognitive theory." In his last paper, dated March 15, 2000, he characteristically proposed a new framework to explain why therapeutic change occurs.

A generous, uniquely talented, fun-loving and lovable person, he is irreplaceable and will be sorely missed.