Person-Centered Therapy

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The student must then post two replies of at least 200 words each by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Sunday of the assigned Module. Students must use at least two scholarly journal articles published within the last three years for each reply. Any additional scholarly sources must be published within the last five years. Scholarly support for each question is necessary to answer the Discussion completely. Note: When doing the Christian integration part of this assignment, students must cite Christian Counseling journals and scholarly books. These citations count towards the citation requirements. Scholarly support will also be needed for cultural considerations. Finally, all citations should be formatted in the most current APA style.

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Chapter 8

Person-Centered Therapy

Person-centered therapy, originally called nondirective therapy in the 1940s and then client-centered therapy in the 1950s, was founded and developed by Carl Rogers (1902–1987). He began what some have considered a revolution in the counseling and therapy field by emphasizing that certain core therapeutic conditions (i.e., congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding) provided by the therapist in the relationship with the client are necessary and sufficient to facilitate client change. Rogers also had an optimistic view of human beings, including therapy clients, believing in their capacity for positive change and growth into fully functioning persons, given appropriate support and safety. Rogers’s person-centered approach focuses on the capacity of the client to heal and to grow in the context of a warm, empathic, and genuine therapeutic relationship with the therapist. He de-emphasized techniques and diagnoses that tend to dehumanize people. Instead, Rogers placed the client as a person and the therapeutic relationship in the center of effective counseling and therapy. This was revolutionary at a time when more-deterministic views prevailed, such as Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic approach and the beginnings of some behavioristic conditioning approaches that emphasized the clinical expertise of the therapist and therapeutic techniques for helping clients change. Rogers used the term “client” rather than “patient” to refer to the person receiving therapy because he did not perceive the client as someone who is “sick” and in need of a cure.

Rogers eventually expanded his person-centered therapy approach to areas other than counseling and therapy, such as marriage, education, business and management, administration, and politics. In his later years, he even became involved in applying his ideas and approach to efforts at reducing international conflicts and enhancing world peace.

Biographical Sketch of Carl Rogers

Carl Ransom Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was the fourth child in a family of six children, five of whom were boys. His father was a contractor and civil engineer who did well professionally and financially. Although his parents were warm and loving, they were also legalistic and controlling, influenced by their fundamentalist Protestant religious background that frowned on activities such as dancing, drinking, card playing, and going to the theater (see C. R. Rogers 1961). When Rogers was twelve years old, he and his family moved to a large farm near Chicago. A sensitive, shy introvert, Rogers was not very sociable and preferred to spend time with his books and in his own world of thought (H. E. Rogers 1965).

Rogers also spent much of his time in the summers using farm equipment and developing his interest in agriculture and scientific methods in farming (Kirschenbaum 1979). He initially pursued scientific agriculture as his major at the University of Wisconsin. Rogers became involved with the YMCA on campus and was selected to be one of the twelve students from the United States who traveled to Peking (now Beijing), China, in 1922 as delegates to the World Student Christian Federation Conference. In meeting other bright and creative students who had religious beliefs that differed from the strict fundamentalistic beliefs of his parents, Rogers experienced a deep transformation of his own religious views, becoming more open and liberal. He also became more of himself (Bankart 1997, 292), with his true personality emerging after being away for six months on this significant trip.

Rogers changed his major from agriculture to history and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1924. Two months later he married his childhood sweetheart, Helen Elliott, and they drove to New York City, where he studied at Union Theological Seminary, a school that was more liberal than his parents would have preferred (Thorne 2003). His father had offered to fund his theological studies at Princeton, but Rogers exercised his independence by going to Union instead. After two years at Union, where he took a few psychology courses, he left the seminary and began a PhD program in clinical and educational psychology at neighboring Columbia University. Rogers completed this doctoral program in 1931.

Rogers worked for twelve years in the Child Study Department at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, New York, where he gained valuable clinical experience working with underprivileged and delinquent children referred by social agencies and the court system (C. R. Rogers 1961). He also trained and supervised other psychologists and social workers. Eventually Rogers went beyond the traditional psychoanalytic approach to therapy and began to develop a more nondirective counseling approach. He wrote The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child (1939) during his time in Rochester.

Rogers moved to Columbus, Ohio, to become a full professor at Ohio State University in 1940. In that same year, he gave a groundbreaking lecture titled “Newer Concepts in Psychotherapy” at the University of Minnesota on December 11 and recalled this date as the “day on which client-centered therapy was born” (Kirschenbaum 1979, 112). This significant lecture and his subsequent book, Counseling and Psychotherapy (1942), sparked a major response from mental health professionals, with both enthusiastic support for and scathing criticism of his nondirective counseling ideas (Thorne 2003), which deemphasized technique and diagnosis. Rogers therefore became a “quiet revolutionary” (see Farson 1975).

Rogers’s early ideas on nondirective counseling, or client-centered therapy, were partly influenced by Otto Rank, who, like Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, had broken away from Freud and his psychoanalytic group. Rogers attended a three-day seminar in Rochester conducted by Rank. He was thus exposed to Rank’s ideas emphasizing the uniqueness and experience of the client and the need for the therapist to relinquish the role of an authority and instead become more of a nonjudgmental helper (Rank 1945). Rogers’s thinking was also influenced by two other people with whom he had contact: Elizabeth Davis, a Rankian-trained social worker at the Rochester clinic, and Jessie Taft, who was one of Rank’s students (C. R. Rogers & Haigh 1983).

In 1945 Rogers went to the University of Chicago, where he became a professor of psychology and the director of the university counseling center. He further developed his theoretical ideas and also engaged in research with his colleagues and graduate students to evaluate the effectiveness of his nondirective counseling approach, which eventually was renamed client-centered therapy in his significant book Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory (C. R. Rogers 1951). In 1956 Rogers received the first distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, presented to him by the American Psychological Association, an organization he had served as president in 1946–1947. He thus became a well-known figure in the counseling and therapy field, and client-centered therapy established itself as a major approach to therapy.

Rogers left the University of Chicago in 1957 to assume a new position at the University of Wisconsin in the Department of Psychology and then in the Department of Psychiatry. He had a difficult time in the Department of Psychology, disagreeing with how graduate students were treated in a somewhat oppressive educational environment that did not offer them enough freedom and support to develop their own creative ideas and work. As a result, he had frequent conflicts with his colleagues (Thorne 2003; P. Sanders 2004).

Rogers undertook a large research project that evaluated the impact of the therapeutic relationship on schizophrenics who were hospitalized (C. R. Rogers et al. 1967), but the study encountered several problems and yielded few statistically significant findings. However, two conclusions could be made from the results of this research project: clients who experienced the highest level of accurate empathy were the most successful, and clients’ evaluation of the therapeutic relationship correlated more highly with therapeutic success or failure than the therapists’ evaluation. Rogers managed to write and publish another substantial book, On Becoming a Person (1961), which led to even greater renown for him. In 1957 he published what is now a classic article on the necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change, focusing on congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy. He resigned from the University of Wisconsin in 1962.

In 1964 Rogers moved to La Jolla, California, where he became a resident fellow at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute for four years. After leaving the institute in 1968, he helped form the Center for Studies of the Person in La Jolla, where he also became a resident fellow. The center was the base from which he traveled around the world to deal with international conflicts and to work on peacemaking efforts. He continued to publish significant books on a wider variety of topics covering the application of person-centered ideas to areas such as education (1969, 1983), encounter groups (1970), marriage (1972), and personal power, including psychotherapy, family life, administration, education, and politics (1977).

Rogers continued to travel, write, and work on international projects and global issues until the last days of his life. He received many awards and honors in his lifetime, including the Distinguished Professional Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 1972. He was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as a result of his tireless efforts to resolve global conflicts in a peaceful way. In 1987 Rogers broke his hip in a fall. He had successful surgery for the broken hip but died shortly thereafter from a heart attack on February 4, 1987 (Cain 1987a). Rogers has been described as a man who lived his life in a way that was consistent with his person-centered theory: as an author, therapist, and person he was consistently the same man (Cain 1987b).

Major Theoretical Ideas of Person-Centered Therapy

Perspective on Human Nature

Person-centered therapy as developed by Rogers has a positive and optimistic perspective on human nature. It views the person as basically good and trustworthy, with an inner and innate tendency toward growth and wholeness leading the person to be all they can be. This actualizing tendency, which is the major motivation in every human person, moves an individual toward self-actualization or becoming mature and autonomous, under appropriate conditions that are supportive and safe for the person (see C. R. Rogers 1961, 35).

Rogers also described the organismic valuing process, which guides the actualizing tendency with an innate capacity to choose what will be self-enhancing or self-actualizing rather than what will be self-destructive. He believed that when person-centered therapists provide the therapeutic conditions of congruence (realness or genuineness), unconditional positive regard (warmth and acceptance or respect), and accurate empathic understanding (of the client’s inner, subjective world) in a way that the client can experience them, then the right conditions of support and safety enable the client to grow and self-actualize. On the other hand, if negative “conditions of worth” are imposed on a person or a client, usually by society and parental figures or other family members, then the actualizing tendency is alienated, and the individual may then develop defensive and maladaptive reactions to an environment that the individual experiences as oppressive and dangerous. The behavior that eventually results may include evil acts of cruelty and hatred, which Rogers acknowledged can and do occur. However, he was convinced that this is not the innate nature of a human being but rather an acquired aspect of human behavior (see Parrott 2003, 178).

Rogers believed that, given appropriate conditions fostering growth, human beings are basically good and trustworthy, capable of choosing their own direction in constructive and insightful ways, and able to be productive and effective in their lives (Cain 1987b). Person-centered therapy therefore focuses on the client and their capacity for healing, growth, and self-actualization as well as self-determination. It does not view the therapist as an authoritative expert. The ultimate responsibility for healing and growth in therapy lies with the client (see Corey 2021, 171), who is capable of becoming a fully functioning person when the actualizing tendency is allowed to blossom and be expressed.

Person-Centered Theory of Personality

Rogers developed and described both a theory of personality as well as a theory of psychotherapy from a person-centered perspective (C. R. Rogers 1959). His theory of personality consists of nineteen propositions that are somewhat complex, and it has therefore attracted much less attention than his theory of psychotherapy (C. R. Rogers 1980, 60).

Rogers’s (1959) theory of personality (including a theory of psychopathology) from a person-centered perspective, with its nineteen propositions, can be condensed into four major features, according to J. Sommers-Flanagan and Sommers-Flanagan (2018, 117–119).

The first feature of a person-centered theory of personality is that it is mainly a self-theory (Bankart 1997). Rogers described the organism as the locus of a person’s total psychological experience and the self as that part of the organism that is “me,” whether conscious or unconscious. Thus a person’s experience of self can differ from their total psychological experience as an organism. Rogers labeled such a discrepancy as incongruence. On the other hand, when a person’s experiences are in line with their total experiences as an organism, congruence exists between self and organism, a highly positive situation that facilitates the development and growth of the individual into a more mature, autonomous, and fully functioning person.

The second feature of Rogers’s theory of personality is his emphasis on phenomenology and the valuing of experience. It highly values personal, subjective experience that is direct and nonverbal, what has been called “intuitive knowing” (Bohart 1995, 91). Person-centered therapy seeks to help clients be more open to their own wide variety of subjective, personal experiencing and to decide which experiences can help them become more fully functioning persons.

The third feature of a person-centered theory of personality is its focus on learning and growth potential. Rogers emphasized that every person has an innate actualizing tendency that moves them in the positive direction of growth, maturity, and autonomy, becoming more who they really are. It is a potential for learning and growth in every moment of one’s life and experiences. Rogers observed: “There is one central source of energy in the human organism. This source . . . is most simply conceptualized as a tendency toward fulfillment, toward actualization, involving not only the maintenance but also the enhancement of the organism” (C. R. Rogers 1980, 123).

Sidebar 8.1: Features of Person-Centered Theory

(see J. Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan 2018, 117–119)

Self-theory

Phenomenology and the valuing of experience

Learning and growth potential

Conditions of worth

The fourth and final feature of a person-centered theory of personality concerns conditions of worth. In addition to one’s innate actualizing tendency to maintain and enhance oneself as an organism, there are also two important learned or acquired needs: the need for positive regard and the need for self-regard. If the need for positive regard or approval from significant others, especially parents or parental figures in one’s life, is not met because disapproval or negative feedback is sometimes given to the person for specific behaviors, then conditions of worth are set up for that person. The individual will then experience positive regard or approval from others for some of their behaviors, but negative regard or disapproval for other behaviors. This will result in a similar mix of internalized positive and negative self-regard and an incongruent sense of self, with discrepancies between the social self based on others’ expectations and the true self based on one’s actual feelings about personal experiences. Internal genuine values that are unconsciously appreciated organismically by the person often clash with externally imposed and consciously incorporated values from significant others. Under conditions of worth that are not supportive or safe, an individual will usually become increasingly out of touch with their true self, that is, become more incongruent and therefore ultimately unable to learn or grow from experience, leading to psychopathology. It is therefore crucial for an individual to experience unconditional positive regard in order for them to have appropriate self-regard, to recover from psychopathology, and to grow again as a person. We should also note that Rogers viewed people as capable of perception without awareness, a process called subception.

In addition to these four major features of Rogers’s person-centered theory of personality, he also provided descriptions of fully functioning persons that individuals are motivated to become as they allow their organismic valuing processes to be more fully utilized. According to Rogers, “Fully functioning persons are open to experience, are characterized by existential living, trust their organisms, are creative, and live richer lives than do other people” (1961, 187–196, emphasis in original, see also Ryckman 2008, 454). Rogers later expanded and elaborated on these characteristics of the fully functioning person to include the following descriptions of what he termed emerging persons (e.g., corporate executives who are committed to living a simpler life, countercultural young people, nuns and priests who have overcome dogmatism to live more meaningfully, and ethnically diverse people and women who have overcome passivity to live more assertive and constructive lives): “They are honest and open; they are indifferent to material comforts and rewards; they are caring persons; they have a deep distrust of cognitive based science and a technology that uses that science to exploit and harm nature and people; and they have a trust in their own experience and a profound distrust of all external authority” (C. R. Rogers 1977, 255–274, emphasis in original; see also Ryckman 2008, 455–456).

Therapeutic Process and Relationship

Rogers’s theory of psychotherapy, compared to his theory of personality, is much better known and more widely applied in the practice of counseling and psychotherapy. It focuses on the therapeutic process and the therapeutic relationship between the therapist and the client as the crucial factors in effective therapy. Rogers believed that a client should lead in the process of therapy and be free to choose specific goals or direction in therapy. The basic aim of person-centered therapy is not to solve problems but to provide the necessary and sufficient therapeutic conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding so that the client can freely grow to become more of a fully functioning person in a safe and supportive therapeutic environment.

Clients who are becoming more fully functioning or more actualized have been described by Rogers (1961) as being open to experience, trusting in themselves, evaluating themselves more internally than externally, and being willing to continue growing.

More specifically, Rogers described the following necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change in his theory of psychotherapy:

For constructive personality change to occur, it is necessary that these conditions exist and continue over a period of time:

1. Two persons are in psychological contact.

2. The first, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable and anxious.

3. The second person, whom we shall term the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship.

4. The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client.

5. The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s internal frame of reference and endeavors to communicate this experience to the client.

6. The communication to the client of the therapist’s empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved. (1957, 95)

Rogers was firmly convinced that these core conditions alone are sufficient and necessary for therapeutic or positive personality change to occur in any client. He believed that no other conditions or therapeutic methods are necessary for therapeutic personality change to take place in a client. Such a person-centered approach places major emphasis on the equality and mutuality of the therapist-client relationship, in which the therapist is a fellow traveler with the client on the client’s journey through life. The therapist is not viewed as an expert with specialized knowledge for accurate diagnosis of the client and techniques for solving the problems of the client. Instead, the therapist is a guide who provides and communicates congruence or genuineness, unconditional positive regard or acceptance, and accurate empathic understanding to the client to facilitate the client’s growth into a more fully functioning person. However, this therapeutic process is not as easy to achieve as one might think. The therapist must trust the client and provide this special kind of therapeutic relationship with the client (see J. Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan 2018, 119), both of which are more difficult to maintain than they seem. Both the therapist and the client are imperfect human beings, with obvious limitations. Therefore, a therapist, even a person-centered therapist, cannot be expected to always be real, accepting, and understanding (with congruence, unconditional positive regard, and accurate empathic understanding) with and for every client. However, the person-centered therapist will attempt to develop these therapeutic conditions and attitudes toward a client.

Rogers realized that his theory of psychotherapy was radical and controversial because he strongly asserted that his six conditions of therapeutic personality change are the only sufficient and necessary ones for clients, as well as for other people, to grow and become more fully functioning. He therefore disagreed with therapists who insisted on other necessary conditions, such as specific therapeutic techniques, to bring about therapeutic change. However, even when therapists view Rogers’s core conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding as neither necessary nor sufficient to produce therapeutic change, or as necessary but not sufficient for such change, most of them still appreciate these conditions as helpful. They are often taught as the clinical foundations for any effective approach to counseling and psychotherapy, and therefore they have been incorporated into almost every contemporary school of counseling and psychotherapy. Congruence or genuineness, unconditional positive regard or acceptance, and empathic understanding or accurate empathy will now be covered in more detail as crucial components of the therapeutic relationship, especially in person-centered therapy.

Congruence

Congruence in the therapist is also referred to as genuineness, or authenticity and transparency. In other words, a person-centered therapist who is congruent or integrated in the therapeutic relationship with the client is real, honest, and open, engaging in appropriate self-disclosure to the client, involving both positive as well as negative feelings. When the congruent therapist is genuine with the client, the client is enabled to be more real as well, and hence to be more truly in touch with their own real self. Congruence or genuineness is therefore essential for effective counseling and psychotherapy from a person-centered perspective (see C. R. Rogers 1961).

Unconditional Positive Regard

Unconditional positive regard is also referred to as acceptance, warmth, prizing, or respect. It is a nonpossessive deep and real caring for the client that is nonjudgmental and positive, allowing and accepting the client to have the feelings they are experiencing at the moment in the therapeutic relationship. There is also a total valuing of the client in an unconditional way, respecting the client regardless of their behavior. Such unconditional positive regard of the therapist for the client will more likely lead to forward movement or therapeutic change, according to Carl Rogers (1986, 198). The therapist’s unconditional positive regard for the client will enhance the client’s own unconditional self-regard and therefore help the client to grow and become a more fully functioning person, because conditions of worth have been reduced or removed. Rogers was aware that therapists are not perfect people and therefore cannot experience and communicate unconditional positive regard to all their clients all the time. However, it is essential from a person-centered therapy perspective for therapists to have deep respect and genuine caring or warmth for their clients in effective therapy (C. R. Rogers 1977; see Corey 2021, 175).

Empathic Understanding or Accurate Empathy

Empathic understanding, or accurate empathy, refers to the therapist’s ability to enter deeply into the client’s subjective world or internal frame of reference, and feel with the client as sensitively and accurately as possible. Although it involves deep listening, it is more than just reflection of the client’s feelings. It is an entering into the client’s subjective experiences, feeling the client’s feelings without losing the therapist’s own identity or being overwhelmed by the client’s feelings. Such empathic understanding experienced and expressed by the therapist to the client will help the client be in deeper touch with and understanding of their subjective experiences or feelings, including those that may not be as clear or obvious initially.

There are therefore at least two levels of accurate empathy, or empathic listening (see C. R. Rogers 1975, 1980): empathic understanding of what the client is feeling or experiencing and deeper empathic listening for and understanding of meanings in the client’s experiences, meanings of which the client is hardly aware. This latter deeper empathy is sometimes called advanced empathy, whereby the therapist deeply hears the message behind the message (G. Egan 2002).

Empathy is actually a multidimensional rather than a simple construct (see A. J. Clark 2007, 2010; Elliott, Bohart, Watson, & Greenburg 2011). In his integral model of empathy, Arthur Clark (2010) describes the following three ways of empathic knowing that are crucial in the process of counseling:

1. Subjective empathy involves the therapist’s identifying with the client’s present experiences through intuition and imagining the experiences of the client.

2. Interpersonal empathy involves the therapist’s communicating deeply with the client about their inner and subjective phenomenological experiences, with the client’s feedback.

3. Objective empathy involves the therapist’s making use of theoretical knowledge and other sources of knowledge outside the client’s inner experiences, to facilitate deeper understanding of the client (cited in J. Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan 2018, 121).

Empathy has been the most researched and discussed of the three core therapeutic conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding described by Rogers in person-centered therapy (see Bohart & Greenberg 1997; J. C. Watson 2002; see also Norcross & Lambert 2019). Most recently, in reviews and meta-analyses of the research on psychotherapy relationships that work, empathy and positive regard (and affirmation) are now both listed as demonstrably effective, and congruence/genuineness is rated as probably effective (see Norcross & Lambert 2019, 632). In the meta-analysis on empathy (Elliott, Bohart, Watson, & Murphy 2019, 259–261) eighty-two studies were used, sixty-four in the meta-analysis on positive regard and affirmation (Farber, Suzuki, & Lynch 2019, 303–305) and twenty-one in the meta-analysis on congruence/genuineness (Kolden et al. 2019, 337–338). Empathy has been acknowledged by almost every major approach to counseling and psychotherapy as a crucial factor or even necessary ingredient in effective therapy (Cain 2010).

However, in reviewing the writings of Rogers on these three core therapeutic or therapist conditions, Jerald Bozarth concluded that genuineness and empathic understanding can be viewed as the two contextual attitudes for the primary condition

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