Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [393]
Client-centered therapy: This, the most important of the humanistic therapies, was the creation of Carl Rogers, who, born and raised on a midwestern farm, started out to become a minister. He switched to psychology and was trained in psychoanalysis but after some years concluded that it was unproductive, and made another major switch to a very different form of therapy of his own devising. A chronically optimistic man, Rogers felt that therapy should focus on present problems, not past causative factors. He also believed that people are naturally good and can solve their own problems once they accept that they are in charge of their fate, and he translated these views into a technique in which the therapist echoes or reflects what the client—Rogers rejected the term “patient”—says. This is supposed to convey a sense of respect of the client and “faith or belief in the capacity of the individual to deal with his psychological situation and with himself.”98 Here is a sample of the process from a session (abridged here) with a depressed twenty-year-old woman:
CLIENT: It’s an effort for me to walk down the street sometimes. It’s a crazy thing, really.
THERAPIST: Even just little things—just ordinary things, give you a lot of trouble.
C: M-hm, that’s right. And I don’t seem to be able to conquer it. I mean it just—every day seems to be over and over again the same little things that shouldn’t matter.
T: So, instead of making progress, [you find that] things don’t really get any better at all.
C: I sort of persecute myself in a sort of way—sort of self-condemnation all the way through.
T: So that you—condemn yourself and don’t think much of yourself and that’s gradually getting worse.
C: That’s right. I don’t even like to attempt things. I feel like I am going to fail.
T: You feel that you’re whipped before you start in.99
This may sound like a parody of therapy, but Rogers deeply believed that by his method he created “a facilitative climate in which [the client] can explore her feelings in the way that she desires and move toward the goals that she wishes to achieve.”100 Most dynamically oriented therapists were unimpressed with Rogers’s method, but in the 1950s and 1960s client-centered therapy was widely adopted and practiced by those psychologists and other psychotherapists who had not had training in dealing with unconscious processes.101 Thereafter its influence waned; today it is the preferred technique of only a few clinical psychologists and other psychotherapists, although its humane philosophy is said to affect the way many therapists treat their clients.102
Gestalt therapy: Quite unlike Rogers’s method, though sharing its philosophy of human health and self-direction, this is the technique developed by Frederick (Fritz) Perls, a psychiatrist. He called it Gestalt therapy, although, as noted earlier, it has little in common with Gestalt psychology. Perls’s aim was to make patients aware of feelings, desires, and impulses they had “disowned” but that were actually part of them, and to get them to recognize those they think are a genuine part of themselves but were actually borrowed or adopted from others.103
Perls’s technique for achieving this was vigorously confrontational and often harsh, and included a variety of “experiments,” “games,” and “gimmicks” designed to provoke, challenge, and force the patient to acknowledge the truth about his or her feelings.