Carl Rogers & the Practice of Psychotherapy

The entire professional career of Carl Rogers was devoted to enhancing human communication. In his work, he strove to understand and promote human relationships and was an active professional from the mid1920s until his death in 1987. As a psychologist, Rogers accomplished an extraordinary number of things. He pioneered a major new approach to psychotherapy, known as the clientcentered, or personcentered approach. Rogers was the first person to record and publish complete cases of psychotherapy, and he carried out and encouraged more scientific research on counseling and psychotherapy than anyone previously. He was actively responsible for the spread of professional counseling and psychotherapy beyond psychiatry and psychoanalysis to all the helping professions  psychology, social work, education, ministry, and lay therapy (Lopez, 1987). Rogers was also a leader in the development and dissemination of group therapy, known today as the encounter group, and was a leader in the

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the approach is that it is constantly growing, changing, and developing. Indeed, it was never intended to be a fixed, or rigid, school of thought. The changes that take place within its structure emerge as a result of the increasing experience of group therapists, both within and without the group context. Rogers himself never intended to establish any particular school of psychotherapy. Instead, it was his purpose to identify the essential elements of any counseling theory. However, since some of Rogers' ideas departed rather drastically from those of his peers and the more "conventional approaches to therapy," the ideas of clientcentered therapy were often regarded as a separate school of therapy (Rogers in Arieti, ed., 1966, 1835). The clientcentered point of view has a number of distinguishing characteristics. These include developing hypothesis that certain attitudes in the therapist constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic effectiveness; the developing concept of the therapist's function as being immediately present to his client, relying on his momenttomoment felt experience in the relationship; the continuing focus on the phenomenal world of the client; a developing theory that the th
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Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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