Client-Centered Therapy

The theory and practice of client-centered therapy (CCT), formulated by Carl Rogers (1902–1987), continues to have a pervasive impact on the professions of counseling and psychotherapy. Most helping professionals, regardless of their specific theoretical orientation, share Rogers’s belief that therapists should be genuine, accepting, and empathic. Many have, however, argued that Rogers’s “nondirective” interpersonal style is necessary but not sufficient and should be integrated with therapeutic techniques and procedures from other “directive” therapies. Although CCT practice ranges across a continuum of nondirective and directive interventions, Rogers’s core conditions of the therapeutic relationship continue to underpin CCT. This entry discusses these issues and concludes with a comparison of CCT with other empirically supported therapies based on meta-analyses of outcome research studies across a diverse range of ...