Chapter 5 Notes
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Carl Rogers
o PhD in clinical psychology
o Demonstrates openness to change
o Child guidance clinic; worked with lower-class children/moms
o The Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child
o 5 year study
o World figure in humanistic therapy
o Changed idea of “client-centered” to “person-centered” approach
Theory of Personality
o Actualization
o Actualizing tendency as “the inherent tendency of the organism to develop all its
capacities in ways which serve to maintain or enhance the organism”
 Physiological needs
 Personal (growth) needs
 Expanding our effectiveness (moving from control by external forces to control
from within)
o Organismic Valuing: allows us to value positively those experiences perceived as
maintaining or enhancing our lives and to value negatively those experiences that would
negate our growth.
 Born with actualizing forces that motivate us
 Born with valuing processes that regulate us
o Actively differentiate: to see the difference between experiences that are part of our
own body and functioning and those that belong to others.
o Self-concept: our perceptions of what is character of “I” or “me,” our perceptions of our
relationships to others and to the world, and the values attached to these perceptions
o Positive Regard: the need to be prized, to be accepted, to be loved
 Most potent need of the developing person; addictive
o Self-Regard: individuals learn to regard themselves in the same way as they experience
regard from other people, liking or disliking themselves as a total configuration for a
particular behavior
 Some behaviors regarded positively but not satisifying
 Others regarded negatively but not unsatisfying (e.g. masturbating)
o Conditions of worth: when individuals begin to act in accordance with the introjected or
internalized values of others
 Transformed from guided by his/her own values to controlled by the values of
other people
o My Own Take: Rogers took on a humanistic approach that insists that in order for a
person to “grow”, they need an environment that provides them with genuineness
(openness and self-disclosure), acceptance (seen with unconditional positive regard),
and empathy (being listened to and understood). Without these, relationships and
healthy personalities will not develop as they should.
 We behave as we do because of the way we perceive our situation
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Self-actualize as fulfilling one’s potential and achieving the highest level of
“human-beingness” we can
++ ignores factors that influence behavior, client not consciously aware of and failed to report
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Theory of Psychopathology
o “the core of psychological maladjustment is the incongruity between the person’s total
experience and what is accurately symbolized as part of the self-concept”
o “Psychopathology reflects a divided personality, with the tensions, defenses, and
inadequate functioning that accompany a lack of wholeness.”
o At a very early age, we begin to distort or to deny some of the values we experience
and to perceive them only in terms of their value to others.
o Subception: the ability of the organism to discriminate stimuli at a level below what is
required for conscious recognition
o organism can use perceptual distortions, such as rationalizations, projections, and
denial, to keep from becoming aware of experiences, such as anger, which would
violate conditions of worth.
o All human beings are threatened by some experiences incongruent with their selfconcepts
o we all use some defenses or symptoms to preserve our self-regard and to prevent
undue anxiety.
o Defenses result in an inaccurate perception of reality due to distortion and selective
omission of information.
o Goal of psychotherapy: to increase the congruence between self and experience
through a process of integration
o Rogers conceptualizes the reintegration of self and experience as emerging from the
therapeutic relationship,
Therapeutic Relationship
o Six conditions necessary for a relationship to result in constructive personality change:
 1. RELATIONSHIP
 2. VULNERABILITY;
 3. GENUINENESS; therapists are freely and deeply themselves, with the actual
experiences of the therapists being accurately represented in their awareness of
themselves.
**Rogers (1957, 1959) originally believed that within this condition there was
no necessity for therapists to disclose their genuine experiences to clients
overtly; it seemed necessary only that therapists not deceive clients or
themselves
 4. UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD; When clients perceive positive regard,
existing conditions of worth are weakened or dissolved and are replaced by a
stronger positive self-regard.
 5. ACCURATE EMPATHY; through empathy we sense the client’s private world as
if it were our own, without our own anger, fear, or confusion getting bound up
in the experience.
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6. PERCEPTION OF GENUINENESS; the client perceives the acceptance and
understanding of the therapist
Therapeutic Processes
o Client-centered therapy: a process of expanding consciousness or awareness through
the therapist bringing about more effective information processing in clients.
o Consciousness raising
 Therapist as the reflector, client as direct flow of therapy
 The client-centered therapist is instead able to sensitively and exquisitely
capture the essence of the client’s expressions
 Part of the person-centered therapist’s work is to help clients reallocate their
attention so that they can make greater use of the richness in their feelings.
 Person-centered therapists are relatively controlling of the process of therapy,
but not its content.
 Therapists help clients effectively process information by using symbols or
words that are active, vivid, and poignant.
 to explain that as clients become aware of more vital, enhancing, and
actualizing modes of expressing themselves, their experiences become more
vital, more enhancing, and more actualizing.
o Catharsis
 The therapist’s continual focus on “You feel…”helps clients to become more
aware of feelings but also to release, express, and own their most powerful
feelings.
 Emotional and personal meaning components
o Therapeutic Content
 Intrapersonal conflicts
 Anxiety and defenses
 Self esteem
 Responsibility
 Interpersonal conflicts
 Intimacy and sexuality
 Communication
 Hostility
 Control
 Individuo-Social Conflicts
 Adjustment versus transcendence
 Impulse Control
 Heteronomy: control by others and the environment
 Autonomy: inner control
Practicalities of Person-Centered Therapy
o Self-authority
A major Alternative and Extension: Motivational interviewing
o Motivational Interviewing (MI): a person-centered, directive approach that enhances
intrinsic motivation to change by helping clients explore and resolve ambivalence
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Expands by incorporating therapist goals about desirable changes and by
providing specific methods to move the patient toward behavior change
o Four Principles of Motivational Interviewing:
 Express empathy
 Develop Discrepancy
 Roll with resistance
 Support self-efficacy
o Counterresistance: responding with confrontation or arguments
o Motivational discrepancy: Resistance is deflected to encourage open exploration
between present behaviors and desired goals
o Four Skills used in MI to foster client safety, acceptance, and change (OARS):
 Open questions
 Affirmation
 Reflective listening
 Summaries
o MI has three applications:
 Early on or as a prelude to treatment
 Used as a stand-alone brief intervention
 With other treatments
o Dissemination: spreading the evidence-based treatment to professionals and the public
o Implementation: practitioners using the treatment and thereby altering their clinical
behavior
o MI successful disseminated through systematic training
Effectiveness of Person-Centered Therapies
o Process Research: concerns the interactions between client and therapist
o The Facilitative Conditions
 Empathy, genuineness, and positive regard
 Related in some way but not as great as once thought
o Person-Centered Therapy
 Allegiance effect: the tendency of the investigators to favor their own preferred
treatment in conducting studies
 Effective for adults, just as or a tad less effective than alternative therapies
 For children and adolescents, better than no therapy at all but probably not as
efficacious than cognitive-behavioral treatments
o Motivational Interviewing
 Clients can go a long way in a short time when provided with facilitative
conditions, an accepting therapist, and considerable autonomy
 Demonstrates large effects with small interventions
 MI may need to be combined with another evidence-based treatment in order
to produce durable effects over time
Criticisms of Person-Centered Therapies
o From a Cognitive-Behavioral Perspective
 Flaws:
 1. Omitting an untreated control group
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2. Failing to control for placebo effects
3. Neglecting the actual behavior and functioning of clients in favor of
ratings of their subjective experiences
 Exposure, behavior, and cognitive therapies are as effective/ more
 Therapist’s interpersonal behavior is rarely sufficient to conquer behavioral
disorders
 Absence of contingencies leads to an extinction of talking about troubles
From a Psychoanalytic Perspective
 What person-centered therapy actually provides is a transference relationship
that has all the elements of an idealized maternal love.
 Robers made his responses to clients highly conditional on the clients’
expressing feelings
 Such pretense of unconditional love through empathy and encourage clients to
believe that only a therapist could really love them
From a cultural perspective
 Niavete and ineffectiveness
 Selfhood, individuation, and self-actualization is culture specific
 Reflects and reinforces individualism (western culture; not applied
across all cultures
 Seperateness and autonomy vs interdependence and connectedness
 Feminism
From an Integrative Perspective
 Too far; what may be necessary conditions for therapy to proceed are also
sufficient conditions for therapy to succeed
 Overemphasis of relationship creates idea that is powerful enough to overcome
 All clients suffer from the same essential problem of conditions of worth;
identical treatments.
Mrs. C
o Conditions of worth centered on her being clean, germ-free, asexual, nd meek
o Obsessed with clean and disease-free
o Severe flu ; pinworm epidemic threatened her self-regard by confronting her not being
clean/careful enough
o Subception: not really love her children when they were sick or dirty
o Threatened by doubts about the kind of mother she was if she could not really lover her
children when they needed her most
o Internalized that love is contingent cleanliness; love is too scarce to waste on the dirty
or diseased
o Disorganized; little self-regard maintained by washing and avoiding germs
o Mrs. C as a tragic prototype of a culture enamored with social values
o Therapist holds high regard when she washes and when she doesn’t
o Therapist does not demand that she give up her one remaining source of esteem
o 1st, experience positive regard of those who care whether she washes or not, obsessed
or not
 Then she is positively regarded not contingent on obsession
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o Caring is fundamental issue
Future Directions
o Rogers’s lasting influences include the centrality of accurate empathy, the importance
of the person of the therapist, the primacy of the relationship over technique, and the
healing power of the therapeutic relationship.
o Missing interventions incorporated can help the relationship and the technique
o Therapy as human relationship, than as a a technical enterprise
o “Open new vistas, bring new insights, challenge our hypotheses, enrich our theory,
expand our knowledge, and involve us more deeply in an understanding of the
phenomena of human change.”