The Importance Of Rogerian Therapy

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When the term client-centered is invoked, the emphasis is on a therapeutic relationship with patients who pay for the visit and who are expected to be in charge of their own cure and who are therefore called clients. Rogerian therapy is respectful, treating all human beings as equal to one another, and Rogers leaves the direction of the process to the client. The professional has a role to play: to provide the atmosphere of unconditional positive regard and permissiveness, empathic understanding, and congruence. The emphasis is on a genuine relationship more than a nondirective technique coldly applied at a distance from the client. This authenticity in the relationship has driven a contemporary therapist to propose the concept of fallibility …show more content…

As Rychlak (1981), Rogers and Kinget (1967), and Hall et al. (1998) have pointed out, Rogers, in his first decade, worked on the necessary and sufficient conditions to guarantee empathic understanding and absence of threats to the client. Freedom and respect, nondirectiveness, and client-centeredness were the clear focal points for the creation of the Rogerian paradigm. In 1963, his book On Becoming a Person went a step further in the direction of a process concept of therapy, growth, and development. The fully functioning person with peaceful and dynamic trust in the organism became the highlight of the new Rogerian era. Encounter groups (Ewen, 1998; Hall et al., 1998; Rogers, 1970; Swenson, 1987) for persons in search of personal growth and a more fluid experience of life became the main attraction of the movement in the United States and …show more content…

His movement extended its reach beyond counseling and psychotherapy into general education and was called the person-centered approach. According to Ewen (1998), Rogers considered the educational system to be widely influenced by a coercive and authoritarian philosophy. Highly directive and power-hungry teachers reinforced students’ passivity and submissive attitudes. Exams and tests promoted parrot-like behaviors of learning. He found generalized lack of trust in teachers’ constant monitoring of student progress. He denounced the recourse to tricky questions and unfair grading styles as widespread practices among teachers everywhere. He highlighted the total prominence placed on thinking skills with the consequent obliteration of the emotional dimension of experience portrayed as meaningless and not scholarly (Rogers, 1969; Goleman, 1995). The best students gave up on education and learning because they did not find it pleasant, meaningful, or relevant enough. Rogers (1977) said that school systems were “primarily institutions for incarcerating or taking care of the young, to keep them out of the adult world” (p. 256). He described the basic elements of nondirective teaching: the creation of a permissive climate, which fostered the students’ capacity to think and learn for themselves. Rogers believed that empathy, unconditional positive regard, and

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