Client-Centered Therapy by Carl Rogers Free Essay Example, 1500 words

There are a number of important conditions that enable the therapeutic process to occur. One core condition for personality change is that the client is experiencing incongruency (Rogers 1989). This is a Rogerian term indicating that the person s ideal self and their actual self are in disproportion. The therapist then intervenes as a means of bringing the person into self-realization with their personal version of their self being integrated with the external and social version of the self. Through the successful realization of these personality elements, the patient then develops congruency. While the client-centered approach is phenomenological it also stresses that the therapist has already attained congruency. This may seem to indicate that there is an objective sense of self that the therapist teaches the patient, but it can also be understood more along Eastern philosophic lines, where it s not the objective realization of self that is conveyed but rather than the process by which the self is actualized and adjusted to its own individual phenomenological reality. For the therapist, the goal is to create the proper atmosphere for these transformations to occur. We will write a custom essay sample on Client-Centered Therapy by Carl Rogers or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/page The non-directive process abandons previously held conceptions regarding the therapist that instructs or 'directs' the client along a specific path. In these regards, the therapist acts more as a guide than a sage.