Overview

Client-centered therapy emerged as a distinctive school of thought in the 1940s in the United States. Originally formulated by Midwesterner Carl Ransom Rogers, the theory and practice continue to evolve here in the United States and internationally. Over many years as a practicing therapist, Rogers observed that human beings possess vast resources for self-understanding and self-direction. The Rogerian hypothesis advances the idea that individuals are most able to access their own creative resources when provided a relationship offered by a genuine, congruent therapist who is experiencing unconditional positive regard and warm acceptance and is empathically receptive to the client's own perceived realities. Rogers's theory of personality, therapy, and interpersonal relationships (Rogers, 1959b) has been tested over decades in work with individuals of all ages; with couples, families, and groups; and in education, intergroup conflict, and peace and reconciliation work in Northern Ireland, Central America, South Africa, Europe, and Russia. Rogers's work for peace led to his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 (Kirschenbaum, 2007).

Basic Concepts

The Person.

The animating vision of the client-centered approach asserts that clients are persons. However, institutional structures and oppressive cultural and social practices may limit and sometimes deny our personhood. This claim of the sovereignty of personhood distinguishes client-centered therapy from approaches based on the medical model that dominates the current thinking about "mental illness" (Sanders, 2017). Personhood is an ethical claim signifying that human beings should not be used as means to others' ends. All human beings are irreducible "ends" in themselves, inherently deserving dignity and respect without qualification. This position stands in stark contrast to psychological practices that gave rise to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments of the 1930s (Reverby, 2013), a 40-year study in which African American participants were deliberately injected with syphilis, or the discredited "reparative therapy" that purports to "cure" nonheteronormative sexual orientations (Bright, 2004). Client-centered therapists trust their clients as sovereign human beings who can and should be the architects of their own lives. Client-centered therapy unseats clinicians as experts on our lives, recognizing instead our self-authority as active agents of personal and social change (Rogers, 1951).

Psychological theories are never value-free, scientifically objective statements about reality even if they purport to be (Rorty, 1989). Theories are instead vehicles for values, whether these values are explicit or implicit, Theories differ in terms of whether they advocate for humanistic, emancipatory aims or the social control of human behavior. Rogers's ethical vision of the person is expressed in scientific language by his axiomatic concept of the actualizing tendency (Rogers, 1959b). Rogers's theory posits that organisms are motivated to maintain and enhance themselves. This tendency is inherent in the design of all living organisms. It may be diminished and thwarted by impoverishment,