Person Centred

Person-centred therapy was originally developed in the 1940s by Carl Rogers and his colleagues. From the outset, Rogers’ intention was to provide a radical alternative to the prevailing psychodynamic and behavioural approaches to psychotherapy and also to psychiatry and the medical model in which all these can be seen as rooted. 

Person-centered therapy is based on a phenomenological view  of human life (a study of the way we experience the meaning of phenomena) and helping relationships.  Rogers’s clearly stated theory has generated a vast amount of research on a revolutionary hypothesis. 

This hypothesis states that:

• A congruent therapist who provides unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding will stimulate psychotherapeutic personality change in a vulnerable, incongruent client if the client perceives these attitudes. 

This hypothesis, which developed within the context of individual psychotherapy, has been tested over decades in work with individuals of all ages, couples, families and groups, as well as in many different contexts in which the aim is to foster human growth and development. The ethical basis of the theory is evident in the value placed on the human right to self determination and the commitment to practices that foster human psychological and social freedom

Although it is sometimes used somewhat imprecisely to refer to a way of doing therapy, the person-centred approach is a global term for the application of the principles derived from the above hypothesis. It is one of the most striking things about his method of psychotherapy - which has variously been referred to as ‘non-directive therapy’, ‘client-centred therapy’ and ‘person-centred therapy’  – that it, or rather the ideas underpinning it, gave rise to something described as an ‘approach’. 

This is the person-centred approach of which Wood (1996: 163) pointed out: 

[It] is not a psychology, a school, a movement or many other things frequently imagined. It is merely what its name suggests, an approach. It is a psychological posture, a way of being, from which one confronts a situation. 

This ‘way of being’ with clients has the following elements: 

• a belief in a formative directional tendency; 

• a will to help; 

• an intention to be effective in one’s objectives; 

• a compassion for the individual and respect for his or her autonomy and dignity; 

• a flexibility in thought and action; 

• an openness to new discoveries; 

• ‘an ability to clearly grasp the linear, as well as perceiving reality holistically or all-at-once’: 

• a tolerance for uncertainty or ambiguity. 

The ‘person-centred approach’ is not only a way of doing counselling and psychotherapy (between which person-centred therapists do not make a distinction) but a way of being in relationship, a relationship which can be with another individual, a group, a nation or even the planet .