Client Centred Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory

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This is not to assume that problems do not occur everywhere or that there aren't drawbacks inherent in allowing social guidelines to dictate your life, but that with such exaggerated freedom comes a press for individual responsibility and lack of clarity of where one might guide themselves. It's this part of truly understanding the self that is necessary to understand what is going on in front of us or in our own heads. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Personally, I found this the "easiest" of Dr Rogers' own works to read - however, bear in mind that other people respond quite differently!

This book exposes the meaning through which personal counseling is achieved through a subtle process of self-realization. Those ideas and concepts form a learning model that is still in use today, which is testament to its longevity. I felt that the first part of the book was helpful in defining the idea of client-centered therapy, expanding on the idea of how the process of this type of therapy is experienced by both the client and the counselor, and how this type of therapy can be beneficial in facilitating change in the client and helping the client achieve a more adjusted and integrated sense of self. I was impressed with Roger’s practical ways of writing about how the client centred approach should be implemented.Carl Rogers theorized that this level of disintegration and reintegration of the self can only occur in the total absence of judgment, in an environment of positive acceptance. What I missed in this book was a more elaborate discussion on the actual techniques of clarification, reflection, restatement, resonance that are used in therapy.

One might say that there is less self-consciousness and more self…That the self functions smoothly in experience, rather than being an object of introspection. I found the second half of the book more challenging since it provided examples of client-centered techniques in situations that did not apply to areas in which I work, but there were some chapters that I found completely engaging and helpful. It is once they accept all manners of gradient in assessing situations and see themselves as the assessors and judges of all things good and bad with no one thing actually possessing "good" or "bad" elements free from relative assessment that the client moves toward a more self-aware level of relation to the world around them. It should be noted for the author's benefit however that from the beginning he states that he feels words are incapable of capturing the entirety of the therapeutic process and understanding thereof.Therefore, experience should dictate and precede theory as words will always fall short of the full experience.

Maybe this approximation is only my own but I found Rogers' view to be similar to that of Zen Buddhism. Equally admirable is Rogers' claim that the therapist must involve himself personally in the therapeutic process.The former seems to be a structure of experiential and perceived experiential exposure of the "organism. Published in 1951, this appraoch was way ahead of its time; Rogers putting the client front and centre, thereby forever altering the client-therapist relationship from a top-down affair to a together-forward undertaking; yes, some of the ideas are outdated and the presented science does not hold up to today's standards; it is the therapeutic paradigm shift that makes this worth your time. Client-Centred Therapy crystallises the great progress that has been made in the development the techniques and basic philogopy of counselling.