Theory and Practice of Contemporary Psychotherapies

Carl Rogers and the Person-Centered Approach Video Transcript

Speaker 1: Rogers argued and demonstrated that the client has within himself the ability and tendency to understand his needs and problems to gain insight, to reorganize his personality and to take constructive action. "What clients need," said Rogers, "is not the judgment, interpretation, advice or direction of experts, but supportive counselors and therapists to help them rediscover and trust their inner experiencing." Rogers was also the first to make cinematic recordings of counseling and psychotherapy.

Speaker 2: I'm frightened because I kind of feel that they're having to be sure that it isn't cancer, and that really frightens me terribly. I think it's when I let that thought come to me. Well, maybe it is and what if it is …? That's when I felt so dreadfully alone.

Rogers: It is though if it's really something like that, then you just feel so alone.

Speaker 1: Recognizing the ever widening applicability of the client-centered, student-centered, group-centered approach, Rogers and his colleagues at Center for Studies of the Person increasingly used a broader term, person-centered to describe their work. In the 1970s and 80s, he experimented with a person-centered approach to resolving inter-group and international conflicts through workshops and filmed encounter groups with multi-cultural populations, such as Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland and Blacks and Whites in South Africa.