Author
Marshall B. Rosenberg
The psychologist who spent a career mediating between people who could not talk, and reduced what he learned to four steps.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Marshall Rosenberg trained as a clinical psychologist under Carl Rogers and began his mediation work in the American South during school desegregation in the 1960s. He developed Nonviolent Communication there and went on to teach it in families, schools, prisons and conflict zones on several continents.
He founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication in 1984 to train others in the method. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, first published in 1999 and expanded in 2003, is the method's main text and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Rosenberg died in 2015.
The signature
Rosenberg writes in his own plain, slightly old-fashioned register, with dialogues from real mediations, and refuses to make the method sound easier than it is: observation without evaluation, he says, is the hardest thing in it.