It’s generally accepted now that the person-centred approach isn’t just one ‘thing’: it’s made up of lots of different ‘tribes’ or ‘branches’, like the ‘classical approach’ and ‘emotion-focused therapy’ (see blog here).
But how do all these different strands come together? It seems to me that we can think about the person-centred approach—from where it started to where it is now—in terms of four ‘currents’. Like the different movements of water running through an ocean, these current flows into each other and intermingle; but at the same time they have some distinctive elements and can, at times, pull in different directions.
1. The Client-as-Expert
This is pretty much where Rogers started from, and is still seen by many—particularly of a ‘classical’ persuasion—as the defining (or even sole) stream of person-centred theory and practice. It’s the belief, as Carl Rogers puts it in 1961, that:
‘It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried…
Rogers work was a reaction to the more didactic, expert-led styles of counselling that were prevalent in his early years. He wanted to develop a ‘new’ form of psychotherapy and counselling that, instead of being directive, was non-directive: that trusted the client to be able to take the lead and find the answers that were right for them.
Central to this current, as it developed, was the concept of the actualising tendency. This is the idea that all of us have an inherent tendency—and ability—to maintain and enhance ourselves, and can do so given the right conditions (of empathy, acceptance, and congruence).
In recent years, however, there’s been some challenges to the concept of the client-as-expert. It is based, for instance, on an assumption that all wisdom and knowledge is ‘within’ the client, but contemporary philosophy and psychology have questioned the idea that the client—like any of us—is a self-enclosed, separate and distinct entity. Aren’t we all fundamentally relational beings (see Current #2, below)? Also, most developmental theorists and researchers, like the infamous Swiss psychologists Jean Piaget, would say that learning can happen from the ‘outside-in’ as well as the ‘inside-out’. If you go to a CPD workshop, for instance, it’s great to have space to brainstorm, discuss, and develop your own ideas; but isn’t there also a place for being directly taught things through, for instance, Powerpoint. We don’t want death-by-Powerpoint, but at the same time some degree of it can be really useful; so does learning—therapeutic or otherwise—always need to be just self-generated? Isn’t that a bit black-and-white?
2. Relational
So another current running through the person-centred approach is an emphasis on the importance of relationship. This is evident in Rogers’ ‘necessary and sufficient’ conditions which include empathy, unconditional acceptance, congruence, and contact—and it’s very clear in much of his later work, when he focuses on the healing power of relationships and of encounter in groups. For Rogers, and for most practitioners across the person-centred approach, it is not techniques or ‘interventions’ that really help someone, but the cultivation of an in-depth personal relationship. That’s been central to the work that Dave Mearns and I have done on relational depth: where the relational encounter is really brought to the fore.
From this relational perspective, the client—like all human beings—is seen, not so much a separate and distinct individual, but as part of a relational and communal network: we’re all in it together. And it’s when we find our togetherness with others that we thrive most fully. This links person-centred therapy to other approaches like interpersonal therapy and Bowlby’s attachment theory, that also put relating at the heart of healthy development.
Rogers’ focus on the client-as-expert draws from humanistic philosophy (for instance, the French eighteenth century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau), whereas the relational elements are more associated with contemporary dialogical and ‘intersubjective’ philosophy—as, for instance, in the work of the twentieth century Austrian-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Are we separate or are we inter-related? Peter Schmid, the late great person-centred writer, brought these two currents together brilliantly by showing how we could be both.
3. Experiential/Emotion-Focused
Rogers, as we’ve seen with Current #1, starts with the client, and from here he goes on to adopt a phenomenological perspective on both the person and on therapeutic work. Phenomenology, which Rogers takes in the 1940s from two psychologists, Snyggs and Combs, is a philosophical and psychological approach which emphasises experiencing as the starting point for understanding human beings and their psychological processes. Experiencing is our subjective, ever-changing, moment-by-moment ‘all that is going on’ that is potentially available to awareness. It’s our perceptions and our senses, our desires and meanings. Experiencing is my sense, right now, of a slight chill on my shoulders as winter creeps in, the darkening light in the room, and my feeling of excitement and engagement as I write this.
Rogers model of psychological distress is all about how we get estranged from our experiencing. We come to see ourselves as fixed ‘selves’, with particular qualities and characteristics (based on what we have been told are ‘good’ characteristics) and so we get alienated from that natural flow. That’s a problem, because that flow of experiencing has, as we saw in Current #1, an actualising direction: it is towards maintaining and enhancing ourselves. So, for instance, if we deny the feelings of vulnerability or hurt that are part of that organismic experiencing, we don’t allow ourselves to strive for what we need: which, for instance, might be care or protection from others.
Eugene Gendlin, who was probably the most important of Rogers’ progeny, was particularly central to this experiential current. For Gendlin, it was this process of connecting with our bodily-felt experiencing, and allowing it to ‘carry forward’ (and carry us forward with it), that was the healing process. But, critically, Gendlin did not believe that clients would always know how to connect with, and unfurl, that experiencing in the most helpful way possible. So, in the development of ‘focusing’, Gendlin proposed methods that could help clients—or people more generally—create the environment in which their bodily felt senses, their embodied wisdom, could be carried forward.
Along with felt-senses, a core part of our experiencing is our emotions: our hurt, our fears… and also an enormous spectrum of affects like anger, shame, and joy. These emotions are often a particularly hidden part of our experiencing, because we have been taught that showing emotions is not ‘good’: to be people who others like (and to like ourselves), we shouldn’t have many of the feelings we have. But the problem is, we do have them, and they’re an important part of us; and the more we suppress them the more they can tend to resurface—and often in less controlled and more destructive ways. This emphasis on emotions have been particularly developed by the ‘emotion-focused therapy’ (EFT) branch of the person-centred approach.
We can see here that a focusing on experiencing and emotions (Current #3) emerges from a belief in clients’ (Current #1) self-righting and self-healing capacities: if we help clients to connect with their true, primary emotions, then they can find ways of sorting out their own problems. But here’s the question: how able are clients, actually, to connect with their own experiences and emotions and draw on them to improve things in their lives? This is where these current can start to part ways. From a Client-as-Expert position, clients know best: we don’t need to do anything to help them connect with their experiences and emotions other than what we always do, which is to empathise, accept, and be real. But those from an experiential and emotion-focused approach tend to believe that, actually, clients can sometimes do with a bit of help in getting in touch with their underlying emotions and that therefore there can be a place for therapists’ techniques and expertise. This isn’t about directing the content of what client’s say; but it is about adopting a more ‘process-directive’ stance: helping clients develop skills and techniques that can support them to connect with their deeper felt-senses and emotions.
4. Ethical/Political
Finally, there’s a way of ‘reading’ the person-centred approach which really brings to the fore it’s commitment to social justice, equality, and engaging with others in caring and community-spirited ways. This egalitarian spirit was, perhaps, what drove Rogers in the first place—he wanted clients to be treated as equals to their counsellors, rather than as lesser beings—and it is certainly there in his later work with groups and communities. Rogers, in this later life, was amazing in travelling to places like Northern Ireland and South Africa to try and help overcome political conflict (see, for instance, The Steel Shutter, which documents his work in Northern Ireland). It is clear here that Rogers saw the person-centred approach in much broader terms than just as a clinical practice: for him it was about transformation at a social and global level to a better, fairer world.
Our own pluralistic approach to person-centred therapy is one attempt to really follow through on this current in the person-centred approach (see blog here). For instance, in terms of therapeutic practice, we really prioritise engaging with clients in caring and respectful ways. This is likely to mean seeing the client as an expert in their own life (Current #1), and also focusing on relationships (Current #2) and experiences and emotions (Current #3); but these are all in service of a respectful, caring relationship—not ends in themselves. So, for instance, if a client really feels that they would benefit from therapist expertise, and we have expertise that might help, why not? Who are we to decide for the client what it is that they really need or want in therapy.
But the pluralistic approach also goes broader than that, and understands the therapeutic process as just one forum within which positive change can happen. There’s also change, for instance, at the social and economic level; and pluralism argues that tackling issues like racism, economic inequalities, and looming climate catastrophe can all be really important ways of helping clients. Here, there’s a focus on prizing of difference and diversity—within the client, across people, across communities and nations—which is much broader than therapeutic work alone. It is about creating a better world for us all.
Conclusion
From the dawning of Rogers’ work to the person-centred field today, we can watch these four currents mingling, merging, separating, pulling apart, and mingling again. No doubt, there are other currents that flow through the person-centred approach: for example, an existential current; or a current of creativity—as articulated, for instance, in the work of Natalie Rogers and the person-centred creative arts field today. None of these currents are the one, ‘true’ Rogerian perspective: Rogers, like all of us, said different things at different times and in subtly different ways. And, even if he did not, there’s new perspectives and directions coming into—and out of—the person-centred field all the time, that can only add to our richness, complexity, and depth.
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A Chinese translation of this blog is available here.