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Client-Centered Therapy is a further elaboration and development of “non-directive” therapy by its principal exponent, Carl H. Rogers. At first Rogers was interested in the techniques and basic philosophy of counseling but it soon appeared that counseling became psychotherapy and that the same principles applied to both. In this book, Rogers attempts to integrate the various theories of personality with the client-centered approach and to demonstrate its operation in the fields of individual, group and child psychotherapy.
It is of interest that the development of this form of therapy has been in a direction similar to that which psychoanalysis has taken in recent years, with greater emphasis on constructive forces, with focus on the self, and with an altered concept of “transference.”
Originally, non-directive therapy was limited to the recognition, reflection and clarification of feelings by the therapist. Rogers came to feel that this was too narrow a concept and led all too often to passivity and laissez-faire. If the client is to acquire that feeling of self-worth essential for health, then the therapist must have the conviction that the client has the capacity and resources to come to grips with his difficulties without his direction if provided with the proper therapeutic climate. Such a climate can exist when the therapist believes in and lives by democratic values and has the capacity to empathize with the client—the capacity to see matters as the client. It is the capacity to see matters as the client sees them, with the client's eyes, that enables the therapist to accept without condemnation. This feeling for the client and the climate for acceptance it creates, enables further exploration of self and liberation of constructive forces.
Rogers attempts to describe what happens in therapy which is successful. He states that the movement is away from symptoms to talking about self, less focus on the past and more on the present, less talk about