André Rochais is the founder of PRH.
He was born into a working-class family in 1921 in Moulins, a small town in the Cholet region, France. At age 14 he began working with the San Gabriel brothers, where he was trained as a teacher. In 1940, during World War II, he completed two years of forced labor in Germany. Between 1945 and 1952 he became head of various educational centers. Later, he studied philosophy and theology.
He was always drawn to adult education and wanted to help them become more themselves. In 1966, his encounter with the work of Carl Rogers confirmed his intuitions about the existence of a deep and positive zone, the core of the personality, and beyond the disturbances in which contemporary psychology was above all interested. This confirmation reminded him of his own research on the human being, his psychological makeup and the roots of his dysfunctions.
Gradually, he developed a methodology, related to both pedagogy and psychology, which, later, would become PRH psychopedagogy. The objective of this psychopedagogy is threefold: it seeks the growth of people, seeks to harmonize their behaviors and improve their interpersonal relationships. He wants to equip people with the necessary tools to help them discover the deep area of their personality so that they can rely on it in their development as a person, and in this way, be able to understand where their malfunctions come from and thus be able to remedy them. This is how he created the first training sessions focused on self-knowledge, making his discoveries accessible to anyone.
In 1970, he created a training and research organization, PRH (Personnalité et Relations Humaines or Personality and Human Relations), which soon spread and is now present on all five continents.
Tireless, and helped by his collaborators who are passionate about the same type of research as him, André Rochais created a structured set of courses and training aimed at the different areas of social and emotional life, as well as the relational area, the education of children, and group life. He requires PRH trainers to undergo careful training and disseminate the training courses and tools that continue to be developed.
André Rochais died in 1990 in Poitiers (France) after a serious illness, which gradually affected him at work.
