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18 MARCH 2009
NO 1414
Therapeutic relationship
I have been informed that what I am expected to do in speaking to this group is to assume that my topic is "This is Me." I feel various reactions to such an invitation, but one that I would like to mention is that I feel honored and flattered that any group wants, in a personal sense, to know who I am. I can assure you it is a unique and challenging sort of invitation, and I shall try to give to this honest question as honest an answer as I can.
So, who am I? I am a psychologist whose primary interest, for many years, has been in psychotherapy. What does that mean? I don't intend to bore you with a long account of my work, but I would like to take a few paragraphs from the preface to my book, Client-Centered Therapy, to indicate in a subjective way what it means to me. I was trying to give the reader some feeling for the subject matter of the volume, and I wrote as follows. "What is this book about? Let me try to give an answer which may, to some degree, convey the living experience that this book is intended to be.
"This book is about the suffering and
the hope, the anxiety and the satisfaction, with which each therapist's
counseling room is filled. It is about the uniqueness of the
relationship each therapist forms with each client, and equally about
the common elements which we discover in all these relationships. This
book is about the highly personal experiences of each one of us. It is
about a client in my office who sits there by the corner of the desk,
struggling to be himself, yet deathly afraid of being himself —
striving to see his experience as it is, wanting to be that experience,
and yet deeply fearful of the prospect. This book is about me, as I sit
there with that client, facing him, participating in that struggle as
deeply and sensitively as I am able. It is about me as I try to perceive
his experience, and the
meaning and the feeling and the taste and the flavor that it has for
him. It is about me as I bemoan my very human fallibility in
understanding that client, and the occasional failures to see life as it
appears to him, failures which fall like heavy objects across the
intricate, delicate web of growth which is taking place. It is about me
as I rejoice at the privilege of being a midwife to a new personality —
as I stand by with awe at the emergence of a self, a person, as I see a
birth process in which I have had an important and facilitating part. It
is about both the client and me as we regard with wonder the potent and
orderly forces which are evident in this whole experience, forces which
seem deeply rooted in the universe as a whole. The book is, I believe,
about life, as life vividly reveals itself in the therapeutic process —
with its blind power and its tremendous capacity for destruction, but
with its overbalancing thrust toward growth, if the opportunity for
growth is provided."
Perhaps that will give you some picture of what I do and the way I feel about it.
CARL R. ROGERS
Rogers, C.R. (1961) On becoming a person: A therapist's view of psychotherapy. London. Constable and Company. pp.4-5.
