Person-Centered Therapy

A form of psychotherapy developed by Carl Rogers that trusts clients’ capacity for growth. The therapist fosters change through empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard rather than directing treatment.

Unconditional Positive Regard: An accepting, nonjudgmental attitude toward another person, including when their actions or feelings are difficult. Rogers proposed this acceptance as a core condition that helps clients explore experience without fear of rejection.
Carl Rogers: An American psychologist who founded person-centered psychotherapy and helped establish humanistic psychology. Rogers developed the approach through clinical practice, research, and successive revisions of his theory.
Person-Centered Experiential Therapy: A family of experiential psychotherapies that combines person-centered principles with focused emotional processing. These therapies retain Rogers’s relational conditions while adding structured ways to work with emotion.
Psychoanalysis: A family of therapies and theories that explore unconscious conflict, early relationships, and defenses. Unlike classical psychoanalysis, person-centered therapy does not make interpretation of unconscious conflict its central method.
Empathy: The capacity to understand another person’s experience while recognizing it as distinct from one’s own. Accurate empathic understanding helps the therapist communicate the client’s perspective without taking control.
Client-Centered Therapy: The name Rogers used for his psychotherapy approach before adopting the broader term person-centered. This earlier name marks the approach’s focus on the client’s agency and experience.
Motivational Interviewing: A collaborative counseling method that strengthens a person’s own motivation and commitment to change. It shares an empathic, autonomy-supporting stance, while using more explicit guidance toward behavior change.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A structured psychotherapy that targets patterns of thought and behavior associated with distress. It contrasts with person-centered therapy’s limited use of prescribed techniques and emphasis on the therapeutic relationship.
Congruence (psychology): A state of consistency between a person’s inner experience and outward expression. Rogers treated therapist genuineness as a condition for a trustworthy relationship.
Counseling and Psychotherapy (Rogers book): Carl Rogers’s 1942 book presenting a nondirective approach to counseling and psychotherapy. The book introduced Rogers’s early method and challenged therapist-led interpretation.

Linked from 11 pages