Catriel Fierro wins a Cheiron award for her work on the impact of Carl Rogers on psychotherapeutic research
The International Society for the History of Social and Behavioral Sciences has awarded Catriel Fierro, Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral researcher at the iHC, the Young Academic Award for the best paper presented at the society's annual conference.
The International Society for the History of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Cheiron) has awarded Catriel Fierro, Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral researcher at the iHC, the Young Academic Award for his paper «Bringing something to the (turn)table: Carl Rogers’ psychotherapy research program and phonographic sound recording projects in psychology in the 1930s».
The work, which Fierro has carried out together with the iHC researcher Mònica Balltondre Pla, examines why Carl Rogers’ phonographic recording project in psychotherapy research became canonical while similar efforts by contemporaries such as Harold Lasswell, Earl Zinn, and Felix Deutsch faded into obscurity. Drawing on previously unexamined archival materials, Fierro situates Rogers’ Ohio State University program within the broader landscape of 1930s U.S. phonographic research in psychotherapy. The paper shows that Rogers’ canonization resulted not only from individual genius, but also from the convergence of distinctive epistemic aims, institutional autonomy, effective use of student manpower, and strategic public dissemination.
The committee commends this paper as exceptionally well written. Fierro’s historiographical sophistication, methodological rigor, and artful use of primary sources make his analysis as compelling as it is intellectually engaging.