McLeod, J. (2019). Person-centred, humanistic, and experiential approaches. In An introduction to counselling and psychotherapy: Theory, research, and practice (6th ed.) (pp. 151-154). McGraw Hill.
The approach to therapy developed by Carl Rogers and his colleagues, called at various times ‘non-directive’, ‘client-centred’, ‘person-centred’ or ‘Rogerian’, has not only been one of the most widely adopted models of counselling and psychotherapy over the past 70 years but has also supplied ideas and methods that have been integrated into many other approaches. This chapter provides an overview of the person-centred approach to therapy, in the context of the cultural and philosophical sources that shaped its origins, an account of how the approach has evolved over time, its key principles and emergent forms of practice. It also explores the distinctive contribution of other humanistic and experiential approaches to therapy that have been strongly influenced by person-centred ideas and values.
The emergence of client-centred therapy in the 1950s was part of a broader movement in American psychology to create a ‘humanistic’ alternative to the two theories that at that time dominated the field: psychoanalysis and behaviourism. This movement became known as the ‘third force’ (in contrast to the other main forces represented by the ideas of Freud and Skinner). Apart from Rogers, the central figures in early humanistic psychology included Abraham Maslow, Charlotte Buhler and Sydney Jourard. These writers shared a vision of a psychology that would have a place for the human capacity for creativity, growth and choice, and were influenced by the European tradition of existential and phenomenological philosophy, as well as by Eastern religions such as Buddhism. The image of the person in humanistic psychology is of a self striving to find meaning and fulfilment in the world. Bugental (1964) formulated six ‘basic postulates’ for humanistic psychology:
- Human beings, as human, supersede the sum of their parts. They cannot be reduced to components.
- Human beings have their existence in a uniquely human context, as well as in a cosmic ecology.
- Human beings are aware and aware of being aware (i.e., they are conscious).
- Human consciousness always includes an awareness of oneself in the context of other people.
- Human beings have some choice and, with that, responsibility.
- Human beings are intentional, aim at goals, are aware that they cause future events, and seek meaning, value and creativity.
Humanistic psychology has always consisted of a broad set of theories and models connected by shared values and philosophical assumptions, rather than constituting a single, coherent, theoretical formulation (Cain 2002; McLeod 2002, Rice and Greenberg 1992). Within counselling and psychotherapy, the most widely used humanistic approaches are person-centred and gestalt, although psychosynthesis, transactional analysis and other models also contain strong humanistic elements. The term ‘experiential therapy’ is sometimes used to describe these approaches, because of their shared acknowledgement of the primacy of working with the here-and-now experiencing of the client and the therapist. Following a period in which the humanistic tradition appeared to be waning as a source of influence and inspiration in counselling and psychotherapy, there are signs of a revival in this approach (Cain et al. 2016; Schneider and Längle 2012; Schneider et al. 2014)
The person-centred approach, along with other humanistic therapies, places a strong emphasis on working with the actual momentary lived experiencing of the person. Because of this, these approaches espouse a phenomenological approach to knowledge. Phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry evolved by Husserl and other thinkers (see Moran 2000; Moran and Mooney 2002), which is widely employed in existential philosophy, and which takes the view that valid knowledge and understanding can be gained by exploring and describing the way things are experienced by people (rather than trying to construct knowledge through abstract theorising). The aim of phenomenology is to depict, grasp, and understand the nature and quality of personal experience. Phenomenology inquiry involves ‘bracketing off’ the assumptions one holds about the phenomenon being investigated, and striving to describe it in as comprehensive and sensitive a manner as possible. The act of ‘bracketing off’ and ‘suspending’ assumptions is carried out to ensure that, as far as possible, the phenomenological researcher (or therapist) does not impose their theoretical assumptions about experience on to the phenomena (events, process, experiences) that are the object of inquiry.
The birth of the person-centred approach is usually attributed to a talk given by Rogers in 1940 on ‘new concepts in psychotherapy’ to an audience at the University of Minnesota, subsequently published as a chapter in Counseling and Psychotherapy (Rogers 1942). Rogers suggested that the therapist could be of most help to clients by allowing them to find their own solutions to their problems. In 1975, Rogers was invited to join the University of Chicago, as Professor of Psychology and the Head of the Counseling Center. Over the following 20 years, a whole new generation of American counsellors was trained at Chicago, or by colleagues of Rogers at other colleges. Rogers was also successful in attracting substantial funding to enable a continuing programme of research, which resulted in a shift away from the concept of ‘non-directiveness’ in the direction of what beame known as a ‘client-centered’ way of working that involved consideration of the process tha toccured in the client, particularly in relation to changes in self-concept of the client (Rogers 1951; Rogers and Dymond 1954).
A further phase in the development of client-centred counselling and psychotherapy focused on developing a research-informed model of the therapeutic relationship. Rogers’ 1957 paper on the ‘necessary and sufficient’ conditions of empathy, congruence and acceptance, later to become known as the ‘core conditions’ model, was an important landmark in this phase, as was his formulation of a ‘process conception’ of therapy. The book that remains the single most widely read of all of Rogers’ writings, On Becoming a Person (Rogers 1961), is a compilation of talks and papers produced during this phase.
In 1957, Rogers and several colleagues from Chicago were given an opportunity to conduct a major research study based at the University of Wisconsin, investigating the process and outcome of client- centred therapy with hospitalized schizophrenic patients. Although this project triggered a crisis in the formerly close-knit team of colleagues (Barrett-Lennard 1979; Kirschenbaum 2007), it did generate a wide range of new ideas (Rogers et al. 1967), including instruments for assessment concepts such as emphathy, congruence, and depth of experiencing acceptance (Barrett-Lennard 2014; Kelin et al. 1986; Truax and Carkhuff 1967). Eugene Gendlin began to construct a model of the process of experiencing that was to have a lasting impact. The opportunity to work with highly disturbed clients, and the difficulties in forming therapeutic relationships with these clients, led many of the team to re- examine their own practice, and in particular to arrive at an enhanced appreciation of the role of congruence in the therapy process. Client-centred therapists involved in the project discovered that the largely empathic, reflective mode of operating, which had been effective with anxious college students and other clients at Chicago, was not effective with clients locked into their own private worlds. To make contact with these clients, the counsellor had to be willing to take risks in being open, honest and self- disclosing (Rogers and stevens 1968).
The end of the Wisconsin experiment also marked the end of what Barrett- Lennard (1979) has called the ‘school’ era in client-centred therapy. Up to this point, there had always been a definable nucleus of people around Rogers, and an institutional base, which could be identified as a discrete, coherent school of thought. After the Wisconsin years, the client-centred approach fragmented, as the people who had been involved with Rogers moved to different locations, and pursued their own ideas largely in isolation from one another. The extension of client-centred ideas to encompass groups, organisations and society in general meant that it was no longer appropriate to view the approach as being about clients as such, and the term ‘person-centred’ came increasingly into currency as a way of describing an approach to working with larger groups as well as with individual clients (Mearns and Thorne 2013). Currently, person-centred therapy remains one of the most practiced approaches in many countries, and its ideas and methods have been assimilated into many other models of practice.
As with other mainstream approaches to therapy, such as psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioural, the person-centred approach encompasses a number of distinct yet overlapping groupings (Bohart 1995). Warner (2000a) and Sanders (2004) have described the person-centred approach as being similar to a therapeutic ‘nation’, comprising a number of ‘tribes’. These ‘tribes’ include classical client-centred/person-centred therapy, focusing approaches, experiential therapy such as emotion-focused therapy, expressive therapy, pre-therapy, and some version of existential therapy. There are three basic therapeutic principles that define membership of the person-centred nation.
The first principles is that person-centred practitioners seek to create a relationship with clients that is characterised by a high degree of respect, equality, and authenticity. The client is regarded as the expert on their own life and problems, and it is within the context of a facilitative relationship that the person can come to identify and accept their own personal solutions to the challenges of life. The second key therapeutic principle is an assumption that it is particularly helpful to work with clients in ways that enable them to become more aware of their moment-by-moment or ‘here-and-now’ experiencing. The idea is that patterns of thought and feeling that are associated with difficulties in everyday life situations are being continually re-created, wherever the client might be, and that a willingness to enter the now provides the client and therapist with opportunities to learn about these patterns, and change them. Another way of looking at this form of therapeutic activity is to view it as process-oriented work – the concept of process is a central construct in all forms of person-centred practice. The third principles is that each individual is viewed as engage din a process of personal growth, becoming, or actualisation. Human existence is characterised by directionality, striving, and agency that is expressed in many different forms of creative endeavour.
The concept of experiencing is absolutely central to the person-centred approach – the person is viewed as responding to the world on the basis of their flow of moment-by-moment experiencing. The concept of experience can be defined as an amalgam of bodily sensed thoughts, feelings and action tendencies, which is continually changing. The person-centred approach therefore positions itself differently from cognitive–behavioural therapy, which makes a firm distinction between cognition and emotion, and psychodynamic theory, which makes a firm distinction between conscious and unconscious. Within the person-centred approach, cognition and emotion, and conscious/unconscious material, are always interwoven within the ‘phenomenal field’ (i.e., the flow of experiencing) of the person.
The person, in the person- centred approach, is viewed as acting to fulfil two primary needs. The first is the need for self- actualization; the second is the need to be loved and valued by others. Both these needs are, following Maslow (1943), seen as being independent of biological survival needs. The person is very much seen as an embodied being, through the concept of ‘organismic valuing’ (i.e., the person has an inner embodied sense of what is right or wrong for them).
The idea of the self-concept is another key person-centred concept. The self-concept of the person is understood as those attributes or areas of experiencing about which the person can say ‘I am . . .’ For example, a client in therapy may define themselves in terms such as ‘I am strong, I can be angry, I sometimes feel vulnerable’. For this person, strength, anger and vulnerability are parts of a self- concept, and when they feel vulnerable, or angry, there will usually be a congruence between feelings and resulting words and actions. But if this person does not define themselves as ‘nurturing’, and is in a situation where a feeling of care or nurturance is evoked, they will not be able to put that inner sense or feeling accurately into words, and will express the feeling or impulse in a distorted or inappropriate way. Someone who is not supposed to be nurturing may, for instance, become very busy ‘doing things’ for someone who needs no more than companionship, comforting or a human touch. Where there is a disjunction between feelings and the capacity for accurate awareness and symbolization of these feelings, a state of incongruence is said to exist. Incongruence is the very broad term used to describe the whole range of problems that clients bring to counselling.
Why does incongruence happen? Rogers argued that, in childhood, there is a strong need to be loved or valued, particularly by parents and significant others. However, the love or approval that parents offer can be conditional or unconditional. In areas of unconditional approval, the child is free to express his or her potential and accept inner feelings. Where the love or acceptance is conditional on behaving only in a certain way, and is withdrawn when other behaviour or tendencies are exhibited, the child learns to define themselves in accordance with parental values. Rogers used the phrase conditions of worth to describe the way in which the self-concept of the child is shaped by parental influence. In the example above, the person would have been praised or accepted for being ‘useful’, but rejected or scorned for being ‘affectionate’ or ‘soft’. Incongruence, therefore, results from gaps and distortions in the self- concept caused by exposure to conditions of worth.
The notion of locus of evaluation explains how the self-concept is created and how it changes. Rogers observed that, in the process of making judgements or evaluations about issues, people could be guided by externally defined sets of beliefs and attitudes, or could make use of their own internal feelings on the matter, their organismic valuing process. An over-reliance on external evaluations is equivalent to continued exposure to conditions of worth, and is associated with seeking to conform and to please others. In contrast, one of the goals of person-centred therapy is to help the individual to accept and act on their own personal, internal evaluations. Rogers had a positive and optimistic view of humanity, and believed that an authentic, self-aware person would make decisions based on an internal locus of evaluation that would be valid not only for themselves, but for others too. Although it is perhaps not explicitly articulated in his writings, his underlying assumption was that each person carried a universal morality, and would have a bodily sense of what was right or wrong in any situation.
The person- centred theory of the self-concept suggests that the person possesses not only a concept or definition of self ‘as I am now’, but also a sense of self ‘as I would ideally like to be’. The ‘ideal self’ represents another aspect of the consistent theme in Rogers’ work concerning the human capacity to strive for fulfilment and greater integration. One of the aims of person-centred therapy is to enable the person to move in the direction of his or her self-defined ideals.
A distinctive feature of the person-centred theory is an explicit attempt to describe the fully functioning person. The main features of the fully functioning person were described by Rogers (1963) as: a capacity for openness to experience, engaging in a process of being and becoming, an ability to live in the moment, using feelings to guide action, and being autonomous rather than dependent on others. While these ideas are clearly grounded in the cultural milieu in which Rogers lived and worked, they have also proved to be sufficiently universal to be applicable (with some adaption) in most cultures.
