Research 1 Abnormal Psychology Literature Mental Health Assessment 2 Environmental Science Counseling Techniques Experimental Psychology
Dizon, Jonah Elisha T. CAS-06-501A (TF/ 12:00PM- 1:30PM)
Person- Centered Counseling/ Therapy (Carl Rogers) First called non-directive therapy, later client-centered therapy, and currently person-centered therapy, this therapeutic approach, developed by Carl Rogers. Rogers’s work represents a way of being rather than a set of techniques for doing therapy. Emphasizing, understanding and caring rather than diagnosis, advice, and persuasion, Rogers believed that therapeutic change could take place if only a few conditions were met. The client must be anxious or incongruent and in contact with the therapist. Therapists must be genuine, in that their words, nonverbal behavior, and feelings agree with each other. They must also accept the client and care unconditionally for the client. Furthermore, they must understand the client’s thoughts, ideas, experiences, and feelings and communicate this empathic understanding to the client. If clients are able to perceive these conditions as offered by the therapist, Rogers believed that therapeutic change will take place. Rogers applied the core concepts of genuineness, acceptance, and empathy to a variety of human behaviors. He was committed to the group process as a positive means for bringing about personal change and trusted in the full growth characteristics of group members. Other areas of application included marriage and couples counseling, education, and administration. Especially in his later life, Rogers was committed to applying personcentered concepts to deal with international conflicts and to promote world peace. Personcentered therapy changed and grew, as did Carl Rogers’s approach to personality and psychotherapy.
History The person-centered approach is based on concepts from humanistic psychology, many of which were articulated by Carl Rogers in the early 1940s. Person-centered therapy is based on a philosophy of human nature that postulates an innate striving for selfactualization. Further, Rogers’s view of human nature is phenomenological; that is, we structure ourselves according to our perceptions of reality. We are motivated to actualize ourselves in the reality that we perceive. Rogers’s theory rests on the assumption that clients can understand the factors in their lives that are causing them to be unhappy. They also have the capacity for selfdirection and constructive personal change. Change will occur if a congruent therapist makes psychological contact with a client in a state of anxiety or incongruence. It is
essential for the therapist to establish a relationship the client perceives as genuine, accepting, and understanding. Therapeutic counseling is based on an I/ Thou, or person-toperson, relationship in the safety and acceptance of which clients drop their defenses and come to accept and integrate aspects that they have denied or distorted. The personcentered approach emphasizes this personal relationship between client and therapist; the therapist’s attitudes are more critical than are knowledge, theory, or techniques. Clients are encouraged to use this relationship to unleash their growth potential and become more of the person they choose to become. This approach places primary responsibility for the direction of therapy on the client. In the therapeutic context, individuals have the opportunity to decide for themselves and come to terms with their own personal power. The general goals of therapy are becoming more open to experience, achieving self-trust, developing an internal source of evaluation, and being willing to continue growing. Specific goals are not imposed on clients; rather, clients choose their own values and goals. Current applications of the theory emphasize more active participation by the therapist than was the case earlier. More latitude is allowed for therapists to express their values, reactions, and feelings as they are appropriate to what is occurring in therapy. Counselors can be fully involved as persons in the relationship.
Development In tracing the major turning points in Rogers’s approach, Zimring and Raskin (1992) and Bozarth and colleagues (2002) have identified four periods of development. In the first period, during the 1940s, Rogers developed what was known as nondirective counseling, which provided a powerful and revolutionary alternative to the directive and interpretive approaches to therapy then being practiced. While he was a professor at Ohio State University, Rogers (1942) published Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer Concepts in Practice, which described the philosophy and practice of nondirective counseling. Rogers’s theory emphasized the counselor’s creation of a permissive and nondirective climate. He caused a great furor when he challenged the basic assumption that “the counselor knows best.” Rogers also challenged the validity of commonly accepted therapeutic procedures such as advice, suggestion, direction, persuasion, teaching, diagnosis, and interpretation. Based on his conviction that diagnostic concepts and procedures were inadequate, prejudicial, and often misused, Rogers omitted them from his approach. Nondirective counselors avoided sharing a great deal about themselves with clients and instead focused mainly on reflecting and clarifying the clients’ verbal and nonverbal communications with the aim of helping clients become aware of and gain insight into their feelings.
In the second period, during the 1950s, Rogers (1951) wrote Client-Centered Therapy and renamed his approach client-centered therapy, to reflect its emphasis on the client rather than on nondirective methods and in addition, he started the Counseling Center at the University of Chicago. This period was characterized by a shift from clarification of feelings to a focus on the phenomenological world of the client. Rogers assumed that the best vantage point for understanding how people behave was from their own internal frame of reference. He focused more explicitly on the actualizing tendency as the basic motivational force that leads to client change. The third period, which began in the late 1950s and extended into the 1970s, addressed the necessary and sufficient conditions of therapy. Rogers (1957) set forth a hypothesis that resulted in three decades of research. A significant publication was On Becoming a Person (Rogers, 1961), which addressed the nature of “becoming the self that one truly is.” Rogers published this work during the time that he held joint appointments in the departments of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. In this book he described the process of “becoming one’s experience,” which is characterized by an openness to experience, a trust in one’s experience, an internal locus of evaluation, and the willingness to be in process. During the 1960s, Rogers and his associates continued to test the underlying hypotheses of the client-centered approach by conducting extensive research on both the process and the outcomes of psychotherapy. He was interested in how people best progress in psychotherapy, and he studied the qualities of the client–therapist relationship as a catalyst leading to personality change. On the basis of this research the approach was further refined and expanded (Rogers, 1961). For example, client-centered philosophy was applied to education and was called student-centered teaching (Rogers & Freiberg, 1994). The approach was also applied to encounter groups (Rogers,1970). The fourth phase, during the 1980s and the 1990s, was marked by considerable expansion to education, industry, groups, conflict resolution, and the search for world peace. Because of Rogers’s ever-widening scope of influence, including his interest in how people obtain, possess, share, or surrender power and control over others and themselves, his theory became known as the person-centered approach. This shift in terms reflected the broadening application of the approach. Although the person-centered approach has been applied mainly to individual and group counseling, important areas of further application include education, family life, leadership and administration, organizational development, health care, cross-cultural and interracial activity, and international relations. It was during the 1980s that Rogers directed his efforts toward applying the personcentered approach to politics, especially to the achievement of world peace. In a comprehensive review of the research on person-centered therapy over a period of 60 years, Bozarth and colleagues (2002) concluded the following:
• In the earliest years of the approach, the client rather than the therapist was in charge. This style of nondirective therapy was associated with increased understanding, greater self-exploration, and improved self-concepts. • Later a shift from clarification of feelings to a focus on the client’s frame of reference developed. Many of Rogers’s hypotheses were confirmed, and there was strong evidence for the value of the therapeutic relationship and the client’s resources as the crux of successful therapy. • As person-centered therapy developed further, research centered on the core conditions assumed to be both necessary and sufficient for successful therapy. The attitude of the therapist—an empathic understanding of the client’s world and the ability to communicate a nonjudgmental stance to the client—was found to be basic to a successful therapy outcome.
