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Carl Rogers : One Of The Person-Centred Therapy

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Person-Centred Therapy is known as one of the 'Humanistic' approaches to therapy. Developed by Carl Rogers (1902-1987), it is rooted in the understanding that an individual knows what they need to be a happy, fully functioning human being capable of growth and change (Mearns & Thorne, 2013).
Person-Centred Therapy does not aim to find a speedy recovery, its asperation is to find a recovery that will last well after sessions have ended and endeavours to do this by focusing on the long-term development of the client (Mearns & Thorne, 2013).
When looking at the Person-Centred Approach to counselling, this cannot be done without exploring the important figures that paved the way for this approach, discussing its origins and evaluating how it helps to shape society in present times.
When Carl Rogers died in 1987, he left behind a legacy that has been invaluable to counsellors since its first introduction to the field of Psychology in 1940’s. He is known as the founder of the Person-Centred Approach, which, in its infancy, was originally called ‘Non-Directive Therapy’. This later evolved into client-centred therapy and finally Person-Centred Therapy as it is known today. When Rogers first began developing his theory, the most popular forms of psychology were psychoanalysis and behaviourism, popularised by psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and John Watson. Watson’s behaviourism was based on the idea that clients had been taught and conditioned to think and behave in a manner that led to dysfunction in later life. Consequently, it was seen as the job of the counsellor to alter the client’s behavioural patterns through reconditioning and possible exposure to the real or imagined fear to fix them. In psychoanalysis, Freud saw human beings as intrinsically and unavoidably linked to their childhood fixations and animal nature. Freud, in the opinion of Rogers, seemed to hold on to the idea that human beings as a species were forever under the heel of their destructive impulses and had no tangible hold on them.
This lack of choice did not sit well with Rogers, who disliked the idea of human beings being viewed as having no choice over how they acted or that they were inherently flawed or broken.
With the traditional

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