Rogers's clinical experience during his many years in academia was primarily with college students in the counseling centers at Ohio State and the University of Chicago. Thus the kind of person he treated--young, relatively intelligent, highly verbal, and generally facing adjustment problems rather than severe emotional problems-was vastly different from the kind of person treated by the Freudians and the clinical psychologists in private practice, who dealt primarily with older, more disturbed individuals. "It is intriguing to speculate to what extent the different samples of people with whom they worked led Freud and Rogers to their very different assumptions about the nature of human nature, one so basically pessimistic, the other so thoroughly optimistic" (Ross, 1987, p. 121).