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- Merge Client-Centered Therapy into this article Image File history File links Please see the file description page for further information. ...
Client-Centered Therapy or Person-Centered Therapy, now considered a founding work in the humanistic school of psychotherapies, began formally with Carl Ransom Rogers (born January 8, 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois, died February 4, 1987), broadly considered the most influenctial US psychotherapist in the short history of this field. ...
Person-Centered Therapy was developed by Carl Rogers. He referred to it as counseling rather than psychotherapy. He also believed that the relationship between the client and the therapist is not a patient-doctor relationship in which the patient passively submits to something that is done to him/her by the healer. On the contrary, it should be a person-to-person relationship in which the therapists talks with the client. By using the word "client" instead of "patient," Rogers wanted to indicate that the client is not sick in any organic sense. Carl Ransom Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an influential American psychologist, who, along with Abraham Maslow, was the founder of the humanist approach to psychology. ...
Core concepts
Congruence Rogers thought there were three selves in us: the self-concept, the real self, and the ideal self. The self-concept is the way a person sees him- or herself. The ideal self is who one would like to be or ought to be. The real self is who one actually is. Congruence is the amount of agreement between the self-concept, the real self and the ideal self. The more congruence, the more psychological health there is within the client. If a person’s idea of who she/he is bears a great similarity to what she/he wants to be, that person will be relatively self-accepting. It’s the aim of Person Centred Counselling to increase the client’s congruence.
'Unconditional positive regard' To create an atmosphere of psychological safety within the counseling relationship, Rogers believed the therapist should have unconditional positive regard for the client – that is, not judge the client’s character. If the client feels that his/her character is being evaluated, he/she will put on a false front or perhaps leave therapy altogether. Low self-regard, or low congruence, is the result of the client’s having been judged in the past. Parents, teachers, and other authority figures often act as if the child has no intrinsic value as a person unless he/she behaves the way they say he/she ought to behave. Thus, their regard is conditional. The Person-Centered therapist gives unconditional positive regard as a partial antidote for the client’s earlier experiences.
Empathetic understanding The person-centered therapist should sense the client’s world as if it were her/his own. However, the therapist must sense the client’s emotions without getting bound up in them. Two processes foster empathetic understanding: reflection and clarification. Reflection occurs when the therapist repeats fragments of what the client has said with little change, conveying to the client a nonjudgmental understanding of his/her statements. Clarification occurs when the therapist abstracts the core or the essence of a set of remarks by the client.
Self-actualization Rogers took the approach that every individual has the resources for personal development and growth and that it is the role of the counsellor to provide the favourable conditions (which for Rogers were congruence, empathy and unconditional positive regard) for the natural phenomenon of personal development to occur. He often saw personal development as the process of a person becoming more fully themselves.
See also Humanistic psychology is a school of psychology that emerged in the 1950s in reaction to both behaviorism and psychoanalysis. ...
In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical approach to understanding the mind, which argues that mental function can be understood by quantitative, positivist and scientific methods, and that such functions can be described as information processing models. ...
Critical psychology is both a critique of mainstream psychology and an attempt to apply psychology in more progressive ways (based, for example, on Marxist or feminist analyses) and contexts than have thus far been the case. ...
The Human Potential Movement came out of the social and intellectual milieu of the 1960s and was formed to promote the cultivation of extraordinary potential believed to be largely untapped in most people. ...
References - Bruno, Frank J. (1977). Client-Centered Counseling: Becoming a Person. In Human Adjustment and Personal Growth: Seven Pathways, pp. 362-370. John Wiley & Sons.
- Rogers, Carl. On Becoming a Person. ISBN 039575531X
External links - http://counsellingresource.com/types/person-centred/
- A bibliography about the Person-Centered Approach
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