- •Introduction
- •Actualizing Tendency
- •Self, Ideal Self, and Self-Actualization
- •Congruence and Incongruence
- •Psychological Adjustment and Maladjustment
- •Experience and Openness to Experience
- •Positive Regard and Unconditional Positive Regard
- •Conditions of Worth
- •Locus of Evaluation
- •Organismic Valuing Process
- •Internal and External Frame of Reference
- •Empathy
- •Postulated Characteristics of the Human Infant
- •I. Nondirective Psychotherapy (1940–1950)
- •II. Client-Centered Therapy (1951–1960)
- •Basic Therapeutic Hypothesis
- •III. On Becoming a Person (1961–1970)
- •IV. A Period of Expansion in Practice (1970–1977)
- •V. Rogers’s Last Years (1977–1987)
- •VI. The Person-Centered Approach After Rogers (1987–present)
- •Varieties of person-centered therapy
- •Classical Client-Centered Psychotherapy
- •Therapeutic Illustration
- •Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy
- •Therapeutic Illustration
- •Emotion-Focused (Process-Experiential) Psychotherapy
- •Therapeutic Illustration
- •Psychological Contact
- •Therapeutic Illustration
- •Person-Centered Expressive Arts Psychotherapy
- •Existential Influences on Person-Centered Psychotherapy
- •Integrative approaches to person-centered therapy
- •Role of Therapist
- •Being Present
- •Promoting Client Freedom
- •Being Accepting, Unconditional in Regard, and Affirming
- •Being Authentic, Genuine, Transparent
- •Being Empathic
- •The Varieties of Empathy
- •Role of the Client
- •Overview
- •Initial Phase of Therapy First Session
- •First Few Months
- •Second Phase of Therapy
- •Signs of Progress and Ongoing Conflicts
- •Third Phase of Therapy
- •Update and Current Status
- •Therapeutic Illustration
- •Analysis and Reflections on Sabina’s Course of Psychotherapy
- •Empathy
- •Unconditional Positive Regard
- •Congruence
- •Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy
- •Emotionally Focused Psychotherapy (eft)
- •Emotion-Focused Therapy for Couples
- •Competency 1: Self-Awareness of One’s Own Assumptions, Values, and Biases
- •Competency 2: Understanding the Worldview of the Culturally Different Client
- •Competency 3: Developing Appropriate Intervention Strategies and Techniques
- •Empathy
- •Unconditional Positive Regard
- •Congruence
- •Client Perception of Core Therapist Conditions
- •Psychological Contact
- •Client Incongruence or Anxiety
- •One Size Can’t Fit All
- •Equivalence of the Effectiveness of Psychotherapy
- •Optimal Conditions for Constructive Therapeutic Change
Therapeutic Illustration
Prouty (1994) describes the application of contact reflections in resolving a psychotic episode with a woman diagnosed as schizophrenic. A mental health paraprofessional (referred to as “the therapist” in the example) took a group of seven halfway house residents, including the woman with schizophrenia, on a community visit. She was seated in the rear seat of the van. The therapist comments: “As I looked in the rear-view mirror, I observed the client crouched down into the seat with one arm outstretched over her head. Her face was filled with terror, and her voice began to escalate in screams. I pulled the van off the road and asked the volunteer to take the other patients out of the van. I sat next to the client, sharing the seat. The client’s eyes were closed, and she was wincing with fear.”
Client: (In a rising voice) It’s pulling me in.
Therapist (WWR): It’s pulling me in.
(Client continues to slip further down into the seat, with her left arm outstretched, eyes still closed.)
Therapist (BR): Your body is slipping down into the seat. Your arm is in the air.
Therapist (SR): We are in the van. You are sitting next to me.
(This exchange is repeated a few times.)
Therapist (FR): Something is frightening you. You are screaming.
Client: (screaming) It’s sucking me in!
Therapist (WWR): It’s sucking you in.
Therapist (SR/BR): We are in the van, Carol. You are sitting next to me. Your arm is in the air.
Client: (beginning to sob very hard, arms dropped to lap) It was the vacuum cleaner.
Therapist (WWR): It was the vacuum cleaner.
Client: (making direct eye contact) She did it with the vacuum cleaner. (Continuing in a normal tone of voice) I thought it was gone. She used to turn on the vacuum cleaner when I was bad and put the hose right on my arm. I thought it sucked it in (Less sobbing. It should be noted that daily, this patient would kiss her arm up to her elbow and stroke it continually).
Therapist (BR): Your arm is still here. It didn’t get into the vacuum cleaner.
(Client smiled and was held by the therapist.)
Later that afternoon, a professional psychotherapy session was held, and the client began to delve into her feelings about punishment received as a child. It should be noted that medications were not needed to resolve the crisis.
Contact Functions. Contact functions are designed to increase the client’s awareness of and connection to the world, the self, and others. These “ego functions” are intended to develop or restore reality, affective and communicative contact necessary for therapy to take place. Contact functions include reality contact (awareness of people, places, things, and events), affective contact (awareness of moods, feelings, and emotions), and communicative contact (symbolization of one’s reality and affect to others). Contact functions are basic types of awareness and abilities in most people but need to be developed and cultivated in people who are severely impaired. A primary role of the therapist is to help to facilitate development of these functions.
Contact Behaviors. Contact behaviors represent clients’ emerging behaviors that result from the facilitation of contact functions through therapist contact reflection. They are tangible and measurable behaviors communicated through either words or emotional expression and include the client’s verbalization of tangible reality (persons, places, things, and events) and expression of affects (moods, feelings, and emotions).
Pre-therapy is a powerful means to enable clients to make meaningful contact and engage effectively with the therapist. Therapists incorporating pre-therapy processes have been able to engage with people who previously seemed unreachable. Not only do therapists realize that “there is someone in there” but that person is more sentient than previously believed, can be understood, and has something meaningful to say. In sum, pre-therapy constitutes a creative and needed approach to working with a variety of severely impaired persons.