Historical Development of Person Centred Counselling

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Person centred counselling was developed by Carl Ransom Rogers, an American psychologist and counsellor. His theory of the self is considered to be humanistic and phenomenological (psychology) and is based directly on the personality theory of Combs and Snygg (1949). Rogers wrote 16 books and more than 200 articles and he received many honours including the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association. Carl was born in 1902 in a suburb of Chicago and was the fourth of six children. His parents were devout Christians. When he was 12 his family moved to a farm 30 miles west of Chicago where he spent his adolescence. He became a rather isolated and disciplined person and acquired a knowledge and an appreciation for the scientific method in a practical world. His first career choice was agriculture followed by history and then religion. When he was 20 he was selected to go to China for 6 months for an international Christian conference and he says that his new experiences so broadened his thinking that he began to doubt some of his basic religious views. He graduated and got married to his childhood sweetheart against his parents’ wishes. He decided not to follow a career in religious work and switched to a clinical psychology programme and received his Ph.D in 1931. While completing his doctoral work, he engaged in child study and he first started working as a psychologist in New York with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. At this clinic he learned about Otto Rank’s theory and therapy techniques which started him on the road to developing his client centred approach. Other influencers included Kurt Goldstein, Friedrich Nietzsche and Alfred Adler. He disliked the way psychology, at that time, seemed to treat people as objects for study rather than as individuals deserving of understanding and

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