Danny Wedding

covert sensitization procedures.

At the same time, Rogers foregrounds the client’s phenomenology—reality as uniquely perceived—at the level of analysis where “I am like no other person.”

the person as a self-determining and self-righting agent—is heretical.

Rogers’s theory posits that psychological maladjustment results from incongruence between a person’s concept of self and her organismic experiencing

Clients take more risks in order to fulfill the inner guidance of the organism as opposed to conform-ing to outside demands; in fact, clients in client-centered therapy experience deeper, increasingly existential living (Rogers, 1961).

ogers’s psychological therapy involves encountering the client on her own terms, and trying to see the world from her perspective. As Brodley has stated, the only reality relevant to the person’s development and healing is reality as perceived by the client herself. In this sense, within the context of therapy, the theory of personality and motivation as formulated by Carl R. Rogers (1959) is as irrelevant as any other biopsychosocial or psychiatric theory! In other words, the therapist is not aiming at convincing the client that he possesses an actualizing tendency or even that his experiences are worthy of respect. In the grand gamble regarding success or failure in therapy, Rogers puts his bets on the client’s actual experiencing of the core conditions as a path to a more nuanced, self-differentiating, accepting, and authoritative experience of the organism—hence, a more congruent self.