Peter F. Schmid

Psychotherapy is political or it is not psychotherapy: The person-centered approach as an essentially political venture

Reflecting on the state of the art of person-centered therapy (PCT), and drawing upon the original understanding of politics as the consequence of an image of the human being, this paper argues that a political understanding (as politics, policy, and polity) is essentially inherent in the person-centered approach. It discusses the policies of psychotherapeutic orientations and stresses the democratic and emancipatory stance of PCT. It concludes that we need a notification of dispute among the different approaches to the person in society and sketches a political way of being for therapists.1

Going beyond orthodoxy in an orthodox way? Remarks to Jobst Finke’s plea to extend person-centered therapy by pre-Rogerian means

ABSTRACT Finke wants to counterbalance what he regards as radical one-sidedness in person-centered therapy theory by promoting the need for diagnoses, interpretations, and techniques. And he tries to show that this is (at least implicitly) already implicated in Rogers’ own theory. In my rejoinder I try to show that Finke’s approach rests on an image of the human being, on an understanding of empathy and encounter different from Rogers’, which is, in fact, a step back to a theory before the Rogerian paradigm change.

The Challenge of Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia has challenged the person-centered approach since the Wisconsin Study in the 1960s. That project set out to prove that the core conditions were sufficient, not only for the population of Chicago neurotic clients (Coulson, 1987), but for those who had been labelled s b p h r e n i c . Although the study led to a d e d e d and interesting publication (Rogers, 1967), the data were incomplete and the results characterized by non-findings on the main hypotheses. That is not a purely negative conclusion because it has led us to look at other variables such as the motivation of a largely institutionalized population and the therapeutic context as well as the therapeutic relationship. However, it effectively marked the end of the clinical progression of client-centered therapy in the USA as Rogers and his colleagues subsequently directed their attention away from clinical settings and research to respond to the popular appeal of the approach and later towards political concerns. So, was schizophrenia a bridge too far for client-centered therapy? Or was the problem as much epistemological as anythmg else? How could a therapeutic approach that emphasized the idiographic and took a phenomenological perspective articulate with an illness model that required norm-based diagnosis and treatment protocols? This conflict has dogged personcentered and experiential therapies throughout the past forty years. In some parts of the world the suuggle has been engaged and PCE therapies have retained a presence in mainstream secondary mental health provision albeit a shaky presence as outlined in the last issue of PCEP (Hutschemaekers & van Kalmthout, 2006). In other parts of the world the conflict has proved too much and efforts have gone into developing services in the private sector or in primary health care where the medical model is not so symptom-centered and attends better to the whole person of the patient. Yet, this need not be the end of the story of PCE therapies in relation to chronic or severe forms of mental illness. PCE therapies emphasize listening to and revealing the experiencing and process of the individual patient, an approach that is potentially well-suited to clinical work among patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. In addition, a person-centered phenomenological approach is highly appropriate for the empirical investigation of the experiential processes that characterize living with and recovering from mental illnesses. This is the position taken by Jan van Blarikom in one of the papers in this issue the first of what is intended to be three papers on a person-centered approach to chronic mental illnesses. In his paper, Aperson-centeredapproach to schizophrenia, van Blarikom challenges us to relinquish our resistance to the description of schizophrenia as

The Carl Rogers Bibliography of English and German Sources Englisch- und deutschsprachige Carl Rogers Bibliografie Bibliografía de Carl Rogers en inglés y alemán

Abstract This bibliography lists all original publications of Carl Rogers together with all published German translations, from 1922 onwards. Following English, German and Spanish introductory remarks, the chronological part lists unpublished papers and interviews, and, separately, films. The alphabetical part consists of both name and title indexes. The bibliography is also available online at , where it will continuously be updated. Corrections and amendments are appreciated.

Bibliography of the Publications of Laura N. Rice

1974 Rice, L. N. (1974). The evocative hc t ion of the therapist. In D. A. Wder, & L. N. Rice (Eds.), Innovations in client-centeredtberupy (pp. 289-3 1 1). NewYork: Wdey. [Reprinted in S. Haugh, & T Merry (Eds.).(2001). Rogers’tberapeutic conditions: Evolution, tbeoy andpractice. Vohme 2: Emputby (pp. 112-130). Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.] Wder, D. A., & Rice, L. N. (Eds.).(1974). Innovatiom in client-centeredtberapy New York: Wiley.