Carl Rogers and Client-Centered Therapy

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Recommended: Chapter seven of person- centered therapy

Carl Rogers was a psychotherapist who, in the early part of the twentieth Century, developed the concept of client-centered psychotherapy. He was a great proponent of the scientific method and was one of the first to incorporate it into psychotherapy. His person-centered approach to psychotherapy entailed an unconditional acceptance between client and counselor. And with all this said I still find it phenomenal yet suspicious that a therapist can listen to an individual without interjections and still assists in improving the individual by making them a person.

Rogers felt that the role of the counselor, instructor or any other individual who was responsible for the developing personal maturity in another, was to help that person become fully-functional. Rogers identified five specific categories which were important in this goal. They are the openness to experience, existential living, organismic trusting, experiential freedom and creativity.

To Rogers to be fully functioning was to live the good life. He defined this goal:

"The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. It is not...a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted, or fulfilled or actualized"(187).

Rogers therefore sees the fully functioning person as a person who is taking the right path in life, a path which is accelerated by favorable psychological conditions. This path is one in which is available to all persons and is inherent and ubiquitous. They can be enhanced, according to Rogers, with client-centered therapy.

But even with all this said, I am torn between stepping aside from my everyday views and willingly accepting the fact that client-centered therapy is the best way to produce an individual that will be psychologically on the right path and living the good life.

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