What really underpins person-centred therapy: ethics or ontology? That is, is it more important how we treat people, or how we understand their fundamental being?
Of course, ethics and ontology are fundamentally intertwined: if we think people are highly malevolent, for instance, we may treat them with extreme caution. But ethics and ontology are not synonymous. You can, for instance, see people as inherently malevolent but still treat them kindly; you can also view people as actualising but treat them very badly. We have all, I am sure, witnessed such contradictions. Believing people are inherently good, prosocial, and actualising is not the same as treating them well. Perception is a predictor of intentions, intentions are a predictor of behaviour, but the relationship is not one-to-one.
Martin Heidegger is a case in point: the greatest of the existential philosophers who fundamentally challenged the mechanisation, de-humanisation, and objectification of human existence. For him, human being was the opening where the Being of the world came to light. Beautiful, deeply humane and humanising. But Heidegger was also a card-carrying Nazi. He betrayed Jewish colleagues; never published anything about the Holocaust; and, perhaps most disturbingly, never apologized for his pro-Nazism.
Heidegger, about 1933, with Nazi insignia
Emmanuel Levinas, the Jewish Lithuanian philosopher whose work critiques and develops Heideggerian philosophy, was a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, and lost several close family members to the holocaust, including his father and brother who were killed by the SS. You can imagine Levinas, reading the great tomes of Heideggerian literature, thinking: ‘Ontology… what the f….!! You’ve written beautiful ideas, brought Being to light so cleverly and yet, at the end of the day, you’ve colluded with one of the most brutal regimes in history. What good is all that writing, all that pontificating on Being, when your actions defended and legitimised a movement that violently persecuted millions, including those I loved.’ And, to massively over-simplify things, that’s essentially what Levinas wrote—along with Derrida and many of the other postmodernists. That there is something more important that ontology: there’s ethics, how we treat people. And that we can get so rooted and grounded in a particular model of being that, however theoretically humane, we can end up behaving in the most inhumane ways.
When I was a kid, as I’ve written in a previous blog, my favourite film was called The Little Island. In it, three beings, each of whom advocate for one virtue—good, truth, or beauty—end up coming to blow for their beliefs. One doctrine, one truth… how easy it is for those who see their ideology as the correct ideology to derogate and them demonise and then attempt to eradicate others (in acceptance and commitment therapy, the tendency to confuse our perception with the reality is termed cognitive fusion, and considered a major source of psychological difficulties). As social psychological research shows, once we identify with something, bias against the other is not far behind. And as we close into our echo chambers, our frustration and our anger, so that ire can grow. That’s why, for Levinas, care for the other needs to come first. It needs to remain our starting point and our focus. Levinas witnessed, first hand, the violence that ontology can do when held as an ultimate, primordial truth. Yes, of course, we need different models of the person, different philosophies and understandings of being; but, like a horse to a rider, these need to be tamed to a higher purpose: an ethic of care. Bolting, untamed ontology can kill.
I think most people come into person-centred therapy because, fundamentally, they care about people—not concepts. Yes, they may see the actualising tendency as the core of their person-centred beliefs, but they hold this because they have a fundamental desire to extend a deep empowerment to others. When people learn, for instance, that Abraham Maslow, one of the co-founders of humanistic psychology, wrote in his journal, ‘As for unemployed loafers today, in a time of shortages of help, I’d simply be willing to let them starve ultimately’, I think they are pretty horrified. The fact that Maslow was a leading exponent of actualisation theory doesn’t excuse or legitimise his statement. To talk about letting other people starve is horrifying, actualising ontology or not.
Those who criticise a pluralistic approach to person-centred therapy say that it claims to have no foundations: that it is a relativist, nihilist worldview (see, for instance, Ong et al., 2020). But that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the approach. In our 2011 book, John (McLeod) and I distinguish clearly between a foundational pluralism, that is relativism all the way down, and a normative pluralism, which roots a pluralistic perspective in a particular set of values and beliefs. And we explicitly identify our pluralistic approach with the latter: that is, pluralism is not a foundationless, everything-goes relativism. Rather, we absolutely acknowledge we have certain normative assumptions, but those assumptions are not about how people are, they’re about ethics: how we treat people. Pluralism leaves an ontological conceptualisation open because, like Levinas, we think the question of how we relate to people is more important than how we conceptualise them. More than that, we think that an approach which puts ontology before ethics, like the proverbial Procrustean Bed, can end up cutting off parts of people that do not fit into our a priori schema. So a pluralistic approach does have foundations, but it’s ethical foundations not ontological ones: ‘a prizing of diversity and difference which emerges from a set of fairly specific humanistic values and assumptions which, to a large extent, are not considered negotiable.’
These issues have real, in-the-world consequences. Take a young person who goes to see a school counsellor; and say that school counsellor holds, most fundamentally, that the young person is an actualising organism who has the answers to their problems within themselves. So the counsellor responds to the young person with primarily empathic unfolding responses, reflecting back to the young person what they are saying to help them dig deeper into their experiences. For many young people, as the research shows, that can be extremely helpful, but we also know that there are young people who want something different (see for instance here). For instance, one young person who had person-centred counselling—from an experienced, well-trained, adherence-checked counsellor—said ‘I didn’t receive any techniques or stratigies [sic] to help me. I often came away feeling worse as my problems were out there with nothing to help.’ Now if the counsellor puts their model of the person first—that the young person has the answers within them—there is a real danger that they can miss such actual, expressed wants and needs. Of course, most person-centred therapists wouldn’t do that: they’d be responsive, and I think that evidences that, in reality, relating does tend to be given priority by person-centred therapists over ontology. But the more definitively person-centred therapists hold a particular view of being, the more constrained they may be in their flexibility and openness.
Rogers hypothesises that a set of six conditions were necessary and sufficient for therapeutic personality change in clients. However, his hypotheses were based on the evidence in the 1950s, and the psychotherapy research field has moved on massively since then. The research evidence now tells us a different—though not entirely unrelated—story (see here). Moreover, as Rogers, himself, acknowledged, to make any ‘totalising’ statement about what all clients need doesn’t allow for the highly individual ways in which clients may benefit from therapy. This has taken me a long time to feel brave enough to say: but my view is that it is unethical for therapists to work with clients holding a fixed and definitive belief that, in all cases, Rogers’s conditions are necessary and sufficient for therapeutic personality change. It just isn’t true, and it’s failing to recognise the uniqueness of the individual clients that we work with. That’s not to say that therapists shouldn’t recognise Rogers’s brilliance, or the importance of the core conditions to therapeutic work. But to hold that ontological assumption foremost, that ‘I know who you are irrespective of what you say to me’, is, I think, to put the therapists’ own needs (for instance, for security or self-belief) before the needs of our individual clients.
It also turns therapy into a religion: a set of beliefs which remain consistent irrespective of empirical evidence. And, of course, religions are absolutely legitimate—many of our clients will be religious or spiritual. But the difference is, religions are something that people (or their families and communities) decide on for themselves. By contrast, as therapists, our ‘religion’ exist in relation to the people we work with; and so owning it and bracketing it takes on more importance. If a young person went to see a school pastor, and if that pastor started telling them that they should see the world in a specifically Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish way—without explicit agreement from the young person and/or their parents that that is what was going to happen—there would be uproar. Similarly, if we believe in a particular ontology, that’s great—we’re all, always going to have particular models of how people work. But when we work with clients, we need to recognise that that is our ontology, and it’s a perspective, not a truth.
Sometimes I do feel that such pluralistic principles and thinking lie outside of the person-centred approach: that person-centred therapy is defined by its ontology—a belief in the actualising organism—and that pluralism is of a different type and order. But then, when I talk to students coming into the person-centred field, or reflect back on Rogers’s writings, or read research evidence on clients’ multifacted needs and wants, I really do feel that what Rogers’s person-centredness is about, first and foremost, is a particular mode of relating to others. And I feel that even more when I hear about people being brutalised in the name of ‘person-centredness’: for instance, students being shamed for being ‘too directive’ (as I’ve witnessed or been told about many times), or writings (including my own) being rubbished and demonised by other members of the person-centred. When I experience that, it makes me feel that, yes, what we’ve tried to articulate through pluralism is a really valid, legitimate, and important attempt to articulate what person-centredness is about. And I feel that most of all when I hear about clients—albeit, undoubtedly a minority—coming into person-centred therapy and leaving confused and disappointed, because they felt the therapist was inflexibly un-directive: working from assumptions about who they are, and what they wanted, that just didn’t suit and weren’t transparent.
Ultimately, it may be that someone will show that I’m wrong: that ‘person-centred’ really does refer to a model of the person rather than an ethic and a mode of relating. And, at that point, I’d be happy to walk away from the approach. Because for me, whatever we call it, what matters most is how we treat clients and what we try to do with them, not our particular theoretical model of who they are. But I just can’t quite bring myself to think that, ultimately, the person-centred approach is a cold, impersonal set of theoretical assumptions about the nature of human being. When I think of Rogers, what strikes me most is not the theories, but a felt-sense of a warm and caring man who wanted to bring more compassion, acceptance, and understanding into the world. Naïve, perhaps, but there’s also an astuteness of utmost importance in being able to name what matters most.
Further Reading
Our original paper on the pluralistic approach to person-centred therapy can be found here: Cooper, M., & McLeod, J. (2011). Person-centered therapy: A pluralistic perspective. Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies, 10(3), 210-223, or in blog form here.
Nicola Blunden has written a major new account of the pluralistic approach to person-centred therapy here: Blunden, N. (2024). Pluralistic person-centred therapy. In M. Cooper (Ed.), The tribes of the person-centred nation: An introduction to the schools of therapy related to the person-centred approach (3rd ed., pp. 201-226). PCCS.
Acknowledgements
Artwork by Jules Allan