Something many therapeutic school often attribute as important, but not always take as seriously as Rogers and his contemporaries themselves. He was cautious to submit his model of therapy to the scientific method and, when available, he defended his ideas with academic studies. My own visual interpretation of this point is the following: at birth we start with a blank slate, a cube of granite. Some of the information in the book, and especially some of the studies mentioned, are now outdated, but the larger questions remain the same: who benefits from therapy and how does that work?

This is also where he lays out the "6 core conditions" and outlines his own theory of personality development and therapeutic change. 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the client-therapist relationship from a top-down affair to a together-forward undertaking; yes, some of the ideas are outdated and the presented science does not hold up to today's standards; it is the therapeutic paradigm shift that makes this worth your time. In my own journey I have found this to be the best approach and empowers the client to make their own path through therapy, rather than be given homework and exercises or have an analyst try to piece together the parts to come to a conclusion for you. The way I understand it, Client Centered Therapy is about providing a warm, accepting echo chamber to the client. Maybe this approximation is only my own but I found Rogers' view to be similar to that of Zen Buddhism.It is the role of the therapist to reflect (and accept) the expressions of the client with the emotional obfuscation removed. This book has been on my in progress list for a year, as I've been dipping in and out of it while reading other books. I love Carl Rogers' ideas, though, and I find it really validating to read about his work with clients. x,xi) This quotation is reminiscent of Socrates who once considered himself a midwife to men concerning their souls and self-knowledge.

This book is a mature presentation of the non-directive and related points of view in counselling and therapy. If I had some of the bricks for an edifice of a person-centred way of being, I think this provides the mortar.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. That being said, there are some areas where the reader can apprehend that vagaries will be rife and grasping difficult. These guidelines for personal and social conduct can make it easier for a person to determine where they fit in to everything without much thought or effort.

His Client Centered theory was not a top-down theory of the mind, rather a bottom-up set of ideas abstracted out of countless experiences in the therapy office. Second, the idea of taking money from clients for the kind of minimalist non-directive therapy they advocated seemed unethical.

Prachtig boek over client gerichte therapie inzichten zijn dat je alle attitudes van de ander kunt accepteren en zien vanuit een onconditionele aanvaarding. While I had liked his Freedom to Learn, I found CCT to be very boring after the first sections on at least two accounts. This is what eventually leads to the easing of tensions that grew from inconsistencies in experience and self-concept. When his ideas were unproven, he had the intellectual honesty to highlight the potential weak spots of his theory.