SOURCE: Thorne, Brian. “Criticisms and Rebuttals.” In Carl Rogers, pp. 64-89. London: SAGE Publications, 1992.

[In the following essay, Thorne outlines major arguments against Rogers's methodology.]

CRITICISMS

Rogers had his critics from the very beginning and they have not grown less vociferous with the passage of the years. At the present time the standing of person-centred scholars and therapists within the world of academic psychology is not high: they tend to be patronized as naive enthusiasts from a former age or to suffer the greatest indignity of all—indifference. Certainly the person-centred viewpoint does not align itself easily with the spirit of the age. We live at a time when the pressure of life encourages swift answers to problems, the application of slick techniques and, above all, procedures which are demonstrably cost effective. In such a climate experts are sought after who can provide authoritative guidance and effect rapid change. Rogers, with his insistence on the uniqueness of individuals and with his unshakeable faith in the capacity of persons to find their own answers, is not a natural hero for the age. His profound distrust of the power-hungry ambitions of many in the helping professions makes him the natural enemy of those who would ply their therapeutic wares in the competitive market-place in order to convince prospective clients that the wonder cure has arrived and that they possess it.

If Rogers' standing in academia is currently at a low ebb, his influence on therapists throughout the world seems to be curiously persistent. Practitioners from many different therapeutic traditions acknowledge their indebtedness and in 1982 a survey of American therapists revealed him as, for them, the most influential figure in twentieth-century psychotherapy, surpassing even Freud (Kirschenbaum and Henderson, 1990a: xiii). In some sense it seems that he has become an idealized figure symbolizing a ‘purity’ of approach and a hopefulness about both people and therapy which somehow continues to inspire other practitioners even if they openly disagree with his theories and denigrate client-centred practice as altogether too utopian or too demanding in its claims on the therapist's commitment. It is a strange and confusing picture which has its origins in the criticisms thrown at the early pioneers, who were accused at one and the same time of ‘doing nothing’ in their ‘nondirective’ therapy and of encouraging a narcissistic ego inflation in their clients. Rogers was castigated throughout his career for being both ineffective and too effective.

POWER ISSUES

Rogers' ideas threaten those whose professional identity resides chiefly in their psychological knowledge and in their capacity to embody the role of ‘expert’. He consistently maintained that the therapist's competence derives not from his or her level of knowledge but from the ability to offer a particular kind of relationship in which the client can gradually move to a new self-concept and way of being. Rogers' persistent battles with the medical and psychiatric professions and the ambivalence he experienced from his fellow psychologists are powerful evidence of the fear he instilled in those who sensed that his theories and practice might undermine their authority and credibility. It is small wonder that they sought to discredit him and even to suggest that he was behaving irresponsibly in encouraging his clients to determine their own way forward. Profound issues of power are at stake in these conflicts and the accusations of superficiality or of irresponsibility are a scarcely veiled attempt to silence someone who calls into question the authority of psychological knowledge and the right of any therapist to diagnose mental conditions—let alone to prescribe courses of treatment. The radical belief that it is the client who knows what hurts and how to find healing throws a mighty spanner in the works for those who see it as their task to evaluate ‘conditions’ and to set up programmes to remedy problems and to alleviate pain. The tendency of those who feel threatened in this way is to accuse Rogers of misguided naivety and to ridicule him for daring to suppose (for example) that therapeutic relationships can be offered by those with no formal psychological education.

It would be utterly wrong, of course, to maintain that Rogers in reality saw the therapist as a non-expert. On the contrary, he believed that the highest level of expertise was required by anyone who was bold enough to offer psychological assistance to another human being. It was the precise nature of this expertise, however, which concerned him deeply; he saw it as residing not in the therapist's cognitive or even experiential knowledge but in his or her capacity to offer clients a relationship where growth could take place. He believed that such a capacity demanded dedicated commitment on the part of the therapist together with a willingness to develop a rigorous discipline of self-exploration which would ensure a high level of congruence, empathy and acceptance. To those critics who accuse Rogers of selling psychotherapy short and reducing it to the level of a mere loving relationship it should be pointed out that such a relationship, marked as it is by the involvement of the therapist's total responsiveness, is rare in the extreme and constitutes not a cheapening but an elevation of psychotherapy to an altogether different plane of experience.

HUMAN NATURE: CRITICISMS OF ROGERS' VIEWPOINT

Rogers' trust in the client is buttressed by and indeed dependent upon his beliefs about the essential nature of the human being and these beliefs have often come in for the severest criticism from the same people who feel their own power base threatened by the person-centred philosophy. Depending on your viewpoint, it is clearly naive to trust persons if you believe that they are by definition untrustworthy or behaviourally conditioned or corrupt or a mass of potentially destructive instinctual drives. Such beliefs and others equally denigratory of human personality are held by many of Rogers' critics in both the psychological and theological domains.

Rogers, as we have seen, makes clear assumptions about human nature and emphasizes that humans are growth oriented and will naturally progress towards the fulfillment of their innate potential if psychological conditions are favourable. By contrast, Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) portrays men and women as essentially ‘savage beasts’ whose aggressive tendencies and unpredictable sexuality can only be domesticated by the processes and structures of civilization. Freud was pessimistic about human nature and saw the instinctual drives as pushing individuals towards the selfish satisfaction of primitive needs or the relief of powerful tensions. This gloomy view is supported and reinforced by the strong emphasis which Freud placed on the unconscious with its powerfully destructive elements. The primary significance of the unconscious sources of human disturbance and unhappiness characterizes the analytical point of view in its many varieties—neo-Freudian and otherwise—and even when the unconscious is seen as the repository of many positive forces (as, for instance, in the work of Carl Jung) there often remains the predominant sense of a human nature which is essentially unpredictable, untrustworthy and in continual need of careful monitoring and control. Not surprisingly, therefore, many analytical theorists regard Rogers' view of human nature not only as naive but also as seriously misguided because it fails to do justice to the unconscious which, for the analytical practitioner, largely determines an individual's behaviour and perception of reality.

The behavioural tradition tends to regard all hypotheses about the inner workings of the human being as largely irrelevant. For the convinced behaviourist they must for ever remain hypotheses in so far as they can never be adequately researched and tested. Quite simply it is not possible to prove the existence of the Freudian unconscious or of Rogers' internal locus of evaluation any more than it is possible to prove the existence of God. In the circumstances the behaviourist opts to understand human beings in terms of genetic structure and, more significantly, of environmental variables. He rejects the notion that behaviour arises from some source within the human being and prefers instead to see an individual's behaviour, including his or her thoughts and feelings, as primarily determined by environmental history and the present circumstances of the person's life. In some ways the behaviourist can appreciate the force of Rogers' emphasis on the central importance for human development of the core conditions because this is to speak in terms of a reinforcing environment which determines the individual's behavioural direction. The behaviourist parts company with Rogers, however, once the emphasis changes to an endorsement of the subjective life of the individual and to the fundamental significance of the internal locus of evaluation. This essential conflict is revealed in the famous dialogue between Rogers and the doyen of behaviourists, B. F. Skinner, which took place in 1962 and which has only recently seen publication in Carl Rogers: Dialogues (Kirschenbaum and Henderson, 1990b). At one point in this dialogue Skinner remarks:

I always come back to the discovery that when I give up trying to account for something with an inner entity of some sort and try, very awkwardly at first, to deal with external entities which might be responsible for it, in the long run it comes out.

A few minutes later Rogers responds:

In your talking about the external causes of behaviour, you spoke as though for every external cause we can find, then you can drop a previous erroneous internal cause which you formerly posited. … Yet one lives a subjective life as well as being a sequence of cause and effect. It seems to me this has an importance which you don't always acknowledge.

(Kirschenbaum and Henderson, 1990b: 97-9)

The difference in theoretical standpoint could scarcely be clearer and the implications for therapeutic practice are enormous. For the behaviourist, Rogers' confidence in the individual's capacity to discover his or her own internal resources and wisdom is to fly in the face of the fact that we are all subject to external forces and conditions which must be controlled and manipulated so that we can be provided with opportunities for acquiring alternative behaviour to replace and extinguish the maladaptive patterns that spoil our lives.

Rogers' religious and theological critics are numerous, even if they are seldom united in their objections to his theories and practice. Most are agreed, however, that his understanding of human nature is at best defective and at worst erroneous. If, for the behaviourist, the notion of the internal locus of evaluation is an untestable hypothesis, for some theologians it smacks of a godless universe where the isolated conscious self becomes the sole judge of what the self should value and how it should behave. Rogers' human being is a creature without a sense of his or her creator and, as such, is woefully ill equipped for the challenges of life and for the encounter with death. Rogers' view of the individual is seen as selling human beings short by divorcing them from higher sources of wisdom and energy and from the religious and spiritual traditions that seek to give access to those sources. Critics of this persuasion see in Rogers' understanding of human nature a profoundly narcissistic tendency whereby the individual becomes the only arbiter and evaluator of his or her own conduct and experience. Without the concept of God or of a higher spiritual authority the individual is totally at the mercy of self-delusion and is likely to succumb to the cult of self-worship. One of the most virulent attacks on Rogers' view of human nature is contained in Paul Vitz's Psychology as Religion which has as its subtitle the very words ‘the cult of self-worship’ (Vitz, 1977). Vitz, a Christian professor of psychology, argues with great passion that humanistic psychologists in general and Rogers in particular have evolved a theory of human nature which inevitably leads to psychology itself becoming a religion in the form of a secular humanism based on worship of the self.

For many Christian apologists the inadequacy of Rogers' view of human nature resides not so much in its rejection of God as the source of all being but in its refusal to acknowledge the ravages of Original Sin. For these critics such blindness is as baffling as Rogers' apparent neglect of the unconscious is for the analyst. To the Christian, reared on the doctrinal tradition of the Fall—Redemption theology originating in St Augustine and alive and well today, it is inconceivable that anyone could be so wilfully obtuse as to regard human nature as essentially good and forward moving; such a perception of humanity is dangerous for it suggests that men and women have no need of redemption, that they do not require a saviour and that the death and resurrection of Christ are without meaning or significance. For such Christian critics Rogers' view of human nature strikes at the very heart of their understanding of the Christian gospel and, as such, ranks as a major heresy to be eradicated at the earliest opportunity. It is not only the understanding of human nature which is at stake, for Rogers' reluctance to acknowledge the fundamental defect in human beings and their built-in tendency to corruption brings into question the whole issue of evil in the world and in the cosmos. Nothing pleases the devil so much, such critics would argue, as the assumption that he does not exist.

CRITICISMS OF THERAPEUTIC PRACTICE

In 1957 Carl Rogers met in public dialogue with the famous Jewish scholar and philosopher, Martin Buber. Buber's great contribution to the understanding of human development lies in his conviction that men and women are essentially relational creatures. In his celebrated I and Thou (1937) he enshrined his major thesis that ‘life is meeting’ and that salvation lies in glorifying neither the individual nor the collective but in the open dialogue of relationship. That Buber should debate with Rogers was wholly appropriate, for Rogers is often portrayed as the therapist who more than any other stresses the quality of relating between therapist and client as the primary source of healing. The dialogue that took place between the two men is notable on many scores and is of particular relevance for our present purposes because it ended with Buber clearly unconvinced about the nature of the relationship which Rogers experienced with his clients (Kirschenbaum and Henderson, 1990b: 63). Indeed, in the closing minutes of the dialogue, Buber implies that the therapeutic relationship resulting from client-centred therapy may produce individuals rather than persons, and he roundly declares himself to be against individuals and for persons. An individual, he explains, ‘may become more and more an individual without making him more and more human. I have a lot of examples of man having become very very individual, very distinct of others, very developed in their such-and-such-ness without being at all what I would like to call a man.’ Buber arrives at this disturbing reservation about the therapeutic practice which Rogers has sought to explain and explore in their conversation because he is unconvinced about the reciprocity of the therapeutic relationship. ‘You are not equals and cannot be,’ he says at one point and in these concise words he throws doubt on two issues central to Rogers' viewpoint. In the first place, he questions the power base of the therapeutic relationship and secondly he raises grave reservations about the individual's process of becoming if that process is not firmly anchored in what he calls ‘real reciprocity’ (Kirschenbaum and Henderson, 1990b: 50-63).

Many of the criticisms which have been directed at Rogers' way of ‘doing therapy’ can be traced back to one or other of these central issues. The behaviour of the therapist, it is suggested, can create a situation where the client experiences confusion rather than empowerment, which then leads not to increasing autonomy but to a dependency on the therapist whose very acceptance and empathy leave the client without reference points of any kind. Furthermore, as the client becomes more in touch with powerful but repressed feelings he or she may develop a concept of self which, as it grows in strength and uniqueness, may feed a sense of alienation rather than of belongingness if the therapist is unable to safeguard the client's experience of connectedness.

The trust that the therapist places in the client leads to the attentive empathic listening which frequently characterizes much of client-centred therapy. When this is allied to a deep acceptance of the client there can be little doubt that for the vast majority of clients the therapist becomes unique in his or her experience. Nobody else in the client's life, it can safely be assumed, listens and accepts with such dedicated commitment and intensity. For the client this may be liberating and validating but it is also possible for the experience to be unnerving. The client is placed in a position where his or her words are accepted at face value and where the therapist apparently does not believe it necessary or even relevant to express an opinion about the rightness or wrongness of what is expressed. Harry Van Belle has suggested that for many clients this response may well seem mystifying in the extreme—precisely because it is so unlike their experience with other people in their lives (Van Belle, 1980: 148). They may conclude that the therapist sees them in a way that they cannot fathom and that, in this sense, the therapist is ‘up to something’ which is unknown to them. Van Belle comments that in such a situation the client may have no option but to trust the therapist totally on the assumption that the therapist at least knows what he or she is doing even if the client knows neither who he is nor what he should be doing! In an ironical way the therapist's trust in the client which finds expression in attentive listening, empathic understanding and deep acceptance leads not to the client trusting himself but to a total trust in the therapist. Far from empowering the client, Van Belle is suggesting that the therapist's response may induce a massive dependency which springs from the confusion at being received in so singular a fashion. This is another sign of the lack of reciprocity to which Buber draws attention in the dialogue and about which he clearly felt so uneasy. For Buber there is an imbalance in the relationship which deprives it of the creativity that is the hallmark of the true I—Thou dialogue, whereas for Van Belle it is the very operation of empathy and acceptance that can leave all the power with the therapist despite, perhaps, his sincere intention to empower the client.

These are serious criticisms for they strike at the heart of Rogers' beliefs. He attaches great importance to not interfering in the life of the client and to facilitating the process of the client's growth rather than directing it. He refrains from diagnosis and from interpretation in any traditional sense. Indeed, as Van Belle points out, such behaviours are regarded as antitherapeutic (Van Belle, 1980: 146). And yet the very absence of such feedback may serve to prolong and even exacerbate the power imbalance which it is Rogers' avowed aim to eradicate.

More serious still, perhaps, is the implication of Rogers' acceptance at face value of what clients say. Nye, amongst others, has questioned the adequacy of a therapeutic method that relies on data obtained simply by listening empathically to those who seek help (Nye, 1986: 150). He refers to the large body of psychological evidence which indicates that it is often very difficult for a person to be understood let alone to express adequately ‘real’ feelings or thoughts. When to this difficulty is added the possibility that conscious, let alone unconscious, distortions may be present in client statements then it becomes even more questionable whether a satisfactorily complete picture of individuals can be obtained simply by listening to them. The accusation can readily be levelled that Rogers' methodology is the inevitable outcome of his phenomenology and that both are equally naive.

Buber's uncomfortableness about the evolution of individuals rather than persons points to the most serious criticism of all as far as Rogers' view of therapeutic process is concerned for, if it has substance, the whole theoretical edifice of Rogers' work is endangered. Buber implies that it is possible for an individual to achieve an increasingly strong sense of his or her own unique identity without a corresponding awareness of others and without the development of the responsiveness which makes for social responsibility. Rogers, on the other hand, repeatedly affirmed his belief that men and women are essentially social creatures and that, given the opportunity to experience their own value, they will inevitably develop in a way which is socially constructive. Buber's scepticism about this optimistic viewpoint closely mirrors the Christian objection that Rogers fails to acknowledge humanity's basic tendency to evil. In terms of therapeutic process this theme is strongly revisited in an ‘Open Letter’ which Rollo May addressed to Rogers in 1982 through the pages of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. In this letter May refers to the Wisconsin experiment, which Rogers and his colleagues had conducted with schizophrenic patients twenty years earlier, and to his own experience of listening to tapes of the therapy conducted at that time. He comments:

After listening to the tapes you sent me, I reported that, while I felt the therapy was good on the whole, there was one glaring omission. This was that the client-centered therapists did not (or could not) deal with the angry, hostile, negative—that is, evil—feelings of the client.

Later in the same letter, he goes on to say:

The issue of evil—or rather the issue of not confronting evil—has profound, and to my mind, adverse effects on humanistic psychology. I believe it is the most important error in the humanistic movement.

(May, 1982: 10-21)

The combined criticisms of Buber and May cast doubt on the ‘realness’ of the therapeutic relationship in client-centred therapy in so far as it may lack genuine reciprocity, and on the capacity of client-centred therapists, because of their belief system, to acknowledge and confront the evil and destructive tendencies in their clients. The very mode of therapy, it is suggested, can encourage the development of a narcissistic individualism based on a misplaced self-love which evades the confrontation with the negative. In short, the process induced by client-centred therapy is not trustworthy. Van Belle, in his mainly sympathetic book on Rogers (Van Belle, 1980), adds further fuel to the critical fire by calling into question not only the validity of the therapeutic process as Rogers describes it but also the emphasis in Rogers' work as a whole on process and changingness.

Van Belle notes that in Rogers' concept of the fully functioning person it is the quality of changingness which merits the highest accolade; indeed for Rogers the fully functioning person is the ‘epitome of man as a process’. Van Belle is troubled by this notion and sees in it the danger that men and women could be tied to a life of excessive change and could thereby lose all sense of a solid identity. Once more there seems to be the lurking danger of confusion, disorientation and a lack of anchorage. Van Belle is equally unhappy about Rogers' conviction that the process of therapy itself will follow an inevitable path. He questions whether the client's open expression of feelings and their empathic and acceptant reception by the therapist will automatically be followed by insight and cognitive clarification and he is equally uncertain whether this phase will be followed by the client's capacity to act upon his insights. Van Belle's doubt about the inevitability of the therapeutic process is great enough for him to question Rogers' fundamental belief that the therapist has only to be the facilitator, the companion of the client, for the process to occur. In the closing pages of his book Van Belle goes so far as to reject the notion of therapy as a facilitative event and with it the belief that the therapeutic process can occur spontaneously in the client once the core conditions have been established. He argues that the process, if it is to occur, needs the aid of the therapist's intervention every step of the way and that therapy must be a co-operative activity. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Van Belle, after painstakingly exploring Rogers' theoretical beliefs and clinical practice with consummate accuracy and sensitivity, proceeds in the final quarter of his book partially to demolish the elegant edifice which he has illuminated (Van Belle, 1980: 145-55).

It would be impossible to consider criticisms of Rogers' therapeutic practice without drawing attention to one issue that has continually attracted debate and not infrequently led to heated differences of opinion. For analytical practitioners the concept of the transference is central to the understanding of therapeutic process and the ‘working through’ of the transference is often seen as fundamental to the successful outcome of therapy. In such ‘working through’ clients have the chance to re-experience earlier relationships as they ‘transfer’ past emotions on to the therapist. In doing this they may experience the therapist by turn as positive, demanding, even rejecting and, as the process develops, the therapist must take great care to guard against countertransference, which is an inappropriate emotional reaction to the client, and to remain objective in the face of what can at times be a bewildering array of emotions. Because of Rogers' inadequate attention to unconscious forces, as the analyst sees it, the whole transference—countertransference dynamic is missing from client-centred therapy, at least in any overt way. The analytical criticism, however, revolves around the belief that transference takes place whether the therapist acknowledges this or not and that Rogers, by his failure to give due respect to this unconscious dimension, is in danger of attributing to the relationship which he forms with his clients a quality of present reality that cannot be sustained. Rogers himself was never tempted into lengthy dispute about this contentious issue but because the concept of transference is so widespread and still seems to have such a powerful grip on the therapeutic professions and even on many members of the public, it cannot be ignored in a survey of critical responses to Rogers' way of ‘doing therapy’.

THE CASE OF JEFFREY MASSON

In 1989, in his book Against Therapy, Jeffrey Masson, former analyst and projects director of the Sigmund Freud archives, launched an extraordinary attack on the very foundations of modern psychotherapy. His disenchantment with psychoanalysis had set in much earlier with his attack in The Assault on Truth (1984) on Freud's suppression of the seduction theory but the 1989 book casts its net of condemnation much wider. Masson's thesis is that abuse of one kind or another is built into the very fabric of psychotherapy because it is of the nature of psychotherapy to distort another person's reality. Much of Masson's book is taken up with a devastating exploration of various figures in the history of analysis and he reserves his most violent attack for the discredited John Rosen, the initiator of so-called ‘direct psychoanalysis’. There is a chapter on sex and battering in psychotherapy where Masson assembles overwhelming evidence of physical and sexual abuse of a most extreme kind. Immediately following this chapter Masson turns his attention to a therapist who, by universal recognition, he acknowledges to be ‘kind, compassionate, helpful’. This is Carl Rogers, who comes under Masson's condemnatory searchlight to be shown as a benevolent despot whose practice is built on the same bedrock as that of the manifest abusers Masson has already exposed so ruthlessly.

Masson seeks to demonstrate that there can be no real genuineness in the relationships offered by a client-centred therapist because it is only the artificiality of the therapy situation which enables the therapist to ‘play out’ the core conditions for brief periods of time. Nobody, Masson argues, could ever in ‘real life’ do the things Rogers prescribes that the therapist should do. ‘If the therapist manages to do so in a session, if he appears to be all-accepting and all-understanding, this is merely artifice; it is not reality.’ Masson goes on to accuse Rogers of complete indifference to the glaring injustices suffered by many clients as a result of societal and other forces. In a powerful analysis of Rogers' Wisconsin research project on hospitalized schizophrenics he shows Rogers to have been callously indifferent to the abusive practices of psychiatry and condemns him for having closed his eyes to the evident injustices and humiliations which many of the patients endured. Indeed, he berates Rogers for having colluded with the hospital administration in order to further his own professional interests and that of the research project. In a final section, Masson turns his attention to the practice of empathic responsiveness and to Rogers' determination not to make interpretations of his clients' statements. He praises Rogers for his genuine desire not to intrude on the thought processes of his clients but concludes that this is simply not possible: ‘There is no way out of this dilemma. It is in the nature of therapy to distort another person's reality’ (Masson, 1989: 229-47).

Masson's attack on Rogers must be seen in the context of his impassioned onslaught on the whole practice and profession of psychotherapy but in its specific criticisms it reverberates with other opinions rehearsed in this chapter. His cynical view of the artificial nature of the therapeutic relationship is a much more extreme expression of the doubts expressed by Buber. The lack of attention to the realities of social injustice and the abuse of medical power is further ammunition for the behaviourist point of view which sees Rogers as seriously deficient in his evaluation of external forces. The impossibility of offering an empathic understanding which does not distort the client's reality belongs to the same category of criticism as Van Belle's questioning of the empowerment of clients through empathy and acceptance. The force of Masson's attack lies, however, in his acknowledgement of Rogers' benevolence. The benevolent despot is seen as a figure who is just as sinister as his malevolent counterpart, for he exercises power covertly. In Rogers' case, Masson would argue that the abuse of power is concealed by the claim that the very reverse is happening. The therapist who professes to be relinquishing power so that his client may be empowered is, in reality, intervening in the life of another person with powerful and manipulative intent.

RESEARCH CRITIQUE

In their introduction to Client-Centered Therapy and the Person-Centered Approach (Levant and Shlien, 1984), the editors point to the troubling situation in the area of research into client-centred therapy. They show that until the mid-1970s there was considerable support for Rogers' hypotheses regarding the necessary and sufficient conditions for psychotherapy or at least for the clear connection of the facilitative conditions with therapeutic outcome. This favourable conclusion was, however, much in dispute by the end of the 1970s as researchers from traditions other than the client-centred conducted studies and as other workers exposed faulty research design in previous studies. Levant and Shlien conclude that as far as client-centred therapy is concerned neither research methodology nor outcome evaluation have much to be proud of. This gloomy summary somewhat undermines the previous security expressed by many client-centred therapists as a result of the knowledge that their approach was one of the best researched in the whole field of psychotherapy.

Later in the book, however, Neill Watson in a detailed review of a large number of research studies presents a further reflection. He concludes that in his review he located no studies that adequately tested Rogers' hypotheses. Most particularly, he draws attention to the fact that a large number of studies have used judge ratings of the therapist-provided conditions to the total neglect of client perceptions of the relationship, which are essential to a test of the hypotheses. Where studies have explored client perceptions of the relationship they have typically not included all the hypothesized conditions and have therefore failed to take account of the fact that Rogers' propositions address a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Watson ends his review: ‘After twenty-five years of research on Rogers' hypotheses, there is not yet research of the rigor required for drawing conclusions about the validity of this important theory’ (Watson, 1984: 40).

It is intriguing, to say the least, that Watson's review reveals the difficulty that researchers have apparently experienced in giving the primary to the client's perception of what is going on in the therapeutic process. The reliance on ‘expert’ external judges makes nonsense of Rogers' hypotheses and yet it appears that such research has been carried out in good faith, sometimes at Rogers' own instigation, without awareness of its irrelevance to the testing of the hypotheses. Those who criticize the research on client-centred therapy for its inadequacy or inconclusiveness are justified, but it is worth recalling again that towards the end of his life Rogers was increasingly aware of the need for new research paradigms if the phenomenological world of the client was to become the cornerstone of research in the same way that it is central to the therapeutic endeavour of the client-centred therapist.

SUMMARY OF CRITICISMS

Many of the criticisms which have been levelled against Rogers and his work have their origin in what his critics see as his grossly inflated trust in and regard for the individual. Such a view threatens those whose professional identity is closely bound up with the importance of their psychological expertise and knowledge in the healing of others: Rogers reinforced such anxiety by his deep ambivalence towards institutions of all kinds, by his own distrust of authority and by his conviction that nothing of significance could ever be taught. The only learning that significantly influences behaviour, he believed, is self-discovered learning.

His view of human nature has proved unacceptable to a wide variety of critics. For the analysts and for many Christian commentators he not only has too optimistic a perception of human potential but also greatly underrates the forces of the unconscious and of evil. For the behaviourists his belief in the subjective core of the human personality is an unprovable hypothesis which blinds him to the overriding influence of environmental conditions and behavioural reinforcements. For all these critics, Rogers' notion of the internalized locus of evaluation as a kind of innate mechanism which is trustworthy remains unconvincing and unpersuasive.

Rogers' therapeutic practice has been criticized on many scores but among the more serious criticisms is the doubt cast on the effectiveness of the relationships created by client-centred therapists to develop a socially responsive attitude in clients. It has also been argued, by Van Belle, that the belief in the core conditions as facilitating client autonomy may be misplaced and that the experience of intensive empathy and acceptance may actually engender a deep dependency on the therapist. Van Belle has cast doubt, too, on the notion of therapy as simply facilitative and has questioned the inevitability of the therapeutic process as Rogers describes it. The validity of the therapeutic relationship in client-centred therapy is deeply suspect in the eyes of many analytical practitioners, who see Rogers' neglect of transference processes as an omission with far-reaching consequences.

Jeffrey Masson's ferocious attack on psychotherapy in general and on Rogers as the seductive example of the benevolent despot draws together in accentuated and radical form many of the threads of opposition discernible in other writers. The force of Masson's critique lies in its contention that Rogers' very benevolence obscures the essential abuse of power which characterizes his therapeutic practice.

The considerable body of research into client-centred therapy has been shown by recent reviews to be seriously flawed in many respects. The proud boast that Rogers was wont to make that client-centred therapy was well supported by empirical research (much of it instigated by himself and his associates) is now shown to be less than convincing. Indeed, it would seem that, as yet, Rogers' own hypotheses as he originally formulated them, remain untested.

REBUTTALS

CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE

The market-place mentality and the desire for quick solutions at financially affordable prices are aspects of only one dimension of contemporary western society, albeit an overtly dominant one. Nor does the search for experts and instant gurus reflect the whole picture. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that we are living at a time when disenchantment with political systems of all kinds is widespread and where materialism, both economically and philosophically, is showing signs of incipient collapse. The re-emergence of political conservatism and even of pockets of fundamentalist Christianity both in America and Europe are a somewhat desperate if determined attempt to put the clock back to an era where authority structures were for the most part unquestioned and unchallenged. It is not necessary to be a social analyst to observe that in most western cultures the movement towards greater personal consciousness is well-nigh universal.

Recent events in the former Soviet Union mark an increasing acceleration of this astonishing process. In Britain the development of counselling and therapy during the past decade indicates an important sea-change: it is now culturally acceptable to seek help for emotional and psychological concerns. In such a changing context Rogers and his ideas find a ready audience: his validation of subjective experience and his emphasis on the facilitative relationship appeal greatly to a generation which has little faith in dogmatic rigidity of any kind and which often pines for intimacy and meaning in personal relationships. It may be that Rogers and client-centred therapy are looked at askance in academia and in some professional circles but in countless self-help groups, in counselling skills courses in colleges, churches and evening institutes, in human relations programmes within educational and institutional settings, it will more often than not be the work of Rogers which underpins the enterprise. Rogers' confidence in the individual person and his commitment to the development of personal power draw a ready response from those innumerable individuals who find in his work a path to greater self-awareness and deeper relationship. Rogers may be out of tune with the technological market-place and its frenetic search for psychological magic but he is assuredly a principal source of inspiration for those who are already disenchanted with mechanistic views of reality and sense that new paradigms must soon be embraced if society is to move away from the brink of disaster.

HUMAN NATURE

To those critics who accused him of having too optimistic a view of human nature, Rogers always gave essentially the same answer. He pointed to his own experience as a therapist and called upon the evidence. Thus it is that in an article in 1957 he writes:

My views of man's most basic characteristics have been formed by my experience in psychotherapy. They include certain observations as to what man is not, as well as some description of what, in my experience, he is. Let me state these very briefly. …

I do not discover man to be well characterized in his basic nature by such terms as fundamentally hostile, antisocial, destructive, evil.

I do not discover man to be, in his basic nature, completely without a nature, a tabula rasa on which anything may be written, nor malleable putty which can be shaped in any form.

I do not discover man to be essentially a perfect being, sadly warped and corrupted by society.

In my experience I have discovered man to have characteristics which seem inherent in his species, and the terms which have at different times seemed to me descriptive of these characteristics are such terms as positive, forward-moving, constructive, realistic, trustworthy.

(Rogers, 1957b: 200)

In 1982 in a response to Rollo May's ‘Open Letter’—and equally pertinent to the attack by the Christian critic, Paul Vitz—he wrote:

When you speak of the narcissism that has been fostered by humanistic psychology and how many individuals are ‘lost in self love’, I feel like speaking up and saying ‘That's not true!’ … In the groups with which I've had contact, the truth is quite the contrary. Such groups lead to social action of a realistic nature. Individuals who come in as social fanatics become much more socially realistic, but they still want to take action. People who have not been very aware of social issues become more aware and, again, opt for realistic actions on those issues. We have had plenty of evidence of this in our encounter groups and workshops. Irrational anger and violence are sometimes defused, but action of a more realistic sort increases.

(Rogers, 1982: 85)

The issue of self-love is addressed again in Rogers' review of the book The Self and the Dramas of History by the theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr which appeared in 1956. Once more Rogers draws on his therapeutic experience, this time to refute Niebuhr's notion of Original Sin.

It is in his [Niebuhr's] conception of the basic deficiency of the individual self that I find my experience utterly at variance. He is quite clear that the ‘original sin’ is self love, pretension, claiming too much, grasping after self-realization. I read such words and try to imagine the experience out of which they have grown. I have dealt with maladjusted and troubled individuals, in the intimate personal relationship of psychotherapy, for more than a quarter of a century. This has not been perhaps a group fully representative of the whole community, but neither has it been unrepresentative. And, if I were to search for the central core of difficulty in people as I have come to know them, it is that in the great majority of cases they despise themselves, regard themselves as worthless and unlovable. … I could not differ more deeply from the notion that self love is the fundamental and pervasive ‘sin’.

(Rogers, 1956: 4)

Rogers' own experience of human beings constantly leaves him baffled by the propositions of theologians and psychologists alike. In the 1957 article referred to above he confesses himself bewildered by the statement of the Freudian, Karl Menninger, that he perceives man as ‘innately evil’ or ‘innately destructive’. Rogers asks himself how it could be that Menninger and he, working with such similar purposes in intimate therapeutic relationships, could come to view people so differently. He even goes so far as to advance hypotheses as to the reasons for the wide discrepancy between the Freudian view of man's nature and his own. Interestingly, he suggests that because Freud relied on self-analysis he was deprived of the warmly acceptant relationship which is necessary if apparently destructive and negative aspects of the self are ever to be accepted fully as having meaning and a constructive part to play.

Rogers' deep and lasting trust in human nature did not blind him to the reality of evil behaviour. In his discussion of Niebuhr's book he refutes the notion that he is an optimist. ‘It disturbs me,’ he writes, ‘to be thought of as an optimist. My whole professional experience has been with the dark and often sordid side of life, and I know, better than most, the incredibly destructive behaviour of which man is capable. Yet that same professional experience has forced upon me the realization that man, when you know him deeply, in his worst and most troubled states, is not evil or demonic’ (Rogers, 1958: 17). In his reply to Rollo May he writes in similar vein:

In my experience, every person has the capacity for evil behaviour. I, and others, have had murderous and cruel impulses, desires to hurt, feelings of anger and rage, desires to impose our wills on others. … Whether I, or any one, will translate these impulses into behaviour depends, it seems to me, on two elements: social conditioning and voluntary choice. … I believe that, theoretically at least, every evil behaviour is brought about by varying degrees of these elements.

(Rogers, 1982: 88)

There is evidence that Rogers was not wholly satisfied with his own arguments in favour of man's essential trustworthiness despite the almost overwhelmingly positive data from his therapeutic experience. In the response to Rollo May he admits that he finds ‘a shocking puzzle’ in the famous experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo which demonstrated, in the first case, that 60 per cent of people were willing to turn up electric current to a voltage which they knew would kill others and, in the second, that randomly assigned ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’ were rapidly caught up in violent destructiveness which became life threatening. Furthermore, in 1981 he contributed a leading article to the first number of the short-lived ‘international notebook’, Journey, in which he wrote:

We are often asked, how do we account for evil or the dark side of human nature, the shadow side? How do we explain irrational violence and the rising crime rate etc? My own feeling is that we have an answer to this question, but I am not sure that it is an adequate answer.

(Rogers, 1981: 1)

Adequate answer or not, Rogers did not deviate from his belief in the positive and trustworthy basis of human nature and continued through the years to give the primacy to his own experience as a therapist. He seems to have been ignorant of theological traditions that might well have buttressed his own deeply held convictions. His family background together with the attacks made upon him by Christian writers steeped in the Augustinian notion of Original Sin meant that to the end of his life he saw Christianity as essentially hostile to human nature and caught up in guilt-inducing judgementalism. In recent years, however, the more ancient spiritual tradition of original righteousness and original blessing is being rediscovered in the Christian church and with it the hopefulness for human evolution which is characteristic of Rogers' viewpoint. Such hopefulness is not to be confused with optimism for, like Rogers, theologians of this tradition are too much in touch with the pain and tragedy of human existence for that (for example Allchin, 1988). Nonetheless the doctrines of original righteousness and deification proclaim a humanity that is made in God's image and that men and women are partakers of the divine nature and are made for union with God. Such doctrines have inspired those Christians down the ages who have seen the glory of men and women as lying in their capacity to realize their divine potential through their relationship both with God and with each other. Theologians of this school of thought would agree with Rogers that, far from being caught up in the grandiosity of self-love, most human beings are trapped by feelings of worthlessness and self-contempt. It is only by recognizing and escaping from the deeply damaging effects of such self-denigration that they come into their divine inheritance. In brief, such a theology enshrines belief in a God who is unconditionally accepting and bears no resemblance to the judgmental figure of Rogers' youth and the theological tradition which he came so much to detest. The ‘creation-centred’ tradition, as it is often known, offers a view of the divine nature and of the evolving cosmos which is wholly supportive of Rogers' understanding of human beings and of their capacity for growth once they have internalized the liberating truth that they are unconditionally accepted.

Rogers' admission that he was not convinced that his answer to the problem of evil was an adequate one together with his response to Rollo May that evil behaviour springs from varying degrees of ‘social conditioning and voluntary choice’ together constitute a humble but powerful response to both the behavioural and analytical viewpoints. It is the essence of the phenomenological position, when carried to its logical conclusion, that the human organism is unknowable in scientific terms. Because of the primacy given to subjectivity, each individual, according to Rogers, lives in a private world of experience which he or she alone has the capacity to understand. Not even the most empathic and sensitive therapist can fully understand another person. Rogers' tentativeness and deep respect for mystery makes it impossible for him to accept either the determinism of behaviouristic psychology or the complex theories of the unconscious advanced by the analytical schools. In response to the behaviourists he acknowledges the power of social conditioning and indeed much of his own understanding of human development is based on the adverse effects of the conditions of worth imposed by others. At the same time, however, it is impossible for him to deny the reality and the importance of human choice. From his experience in therapy he has observed individuals struggling to develop and wrestling with decisions which ultimately they have made. To this extent he has seen people being the architects of their own lives. Once more it is his experience of intimate relating to others which compels him to reject the absolutism of the behavioural position.

The same experience prevents him from embracing any of the maps of the unconscious, for it is clear that we are all to some extent influenced by forces outside our awareness. Far from pleading guilty to the charge that he ignores the unconscious, Rogers would assuredly claim that his respect for the unconscious compels him to refrain from adopting any map of this essentially unknowable terrain which might lead him to impose his view or interpretation upon his client. In short, Rogers accepts both the reality of social conditioning and of the unconscious but refrains from elevating either to a position where they threaten to deprive individuals of the freedom to trust their own subjective experience and the mystery of their own natures.

THERAPEUTIC PRACTICE

Many of the criticisms of Rogers' therapeutic practice, as we have seen, revolve around the unreality of the relationship which is created between therapist and client. Buber complained about the lack of true reciprocity and was unconvinced by Rogers' contention that a meeting or dialogue can take place purely within the experiential world of the client. For Buber the life-giving ‘I-Thou’ relationship is only possible when both frames of reference are experienced simultaneously. Egocentricity is thereby transcended as both partners in a relationship experience themselves in the other person's skin without losing contact with their own realities. May accuses Rogers and his colleagues of failing to cope effectively with negative feelings in their clients, Van Belle questions the efficacy of empathy and acceptance in encouraging client autonomy while Masson dismisses the whole therapeutic enterprise as grotesquely inauthentic and inevitably manipulative.

Rogers in his reply to May makes an admission which has considerable relevance to this discussion. Commenting on May's judgement that client-centred therapists fail to accept and respond to negative feelings in general he says: ‘I think that to some extent this was definitely true of me in the distant past.’ He goes on to describe the changes in himself over the years and refers to both films and published transcripts which demonstrate his growing ability to handle negative and hostile reactions. He concludes: ‘I believe I have learned to be acceptant of anger toward me and toward others’ (Rogers, 1982: 86).

It can be seen from these brief comments that Rogers himself believed that his therapeutic style had changed over time, and this is supported by researchers who have studied his work in the years since his death (for example Van Balen, 1990; Temaner Broadley, 1991). Although these studies show no change in Rogers' dedication to discovering the perceptual world of the client, they do indicate a shift in his willingness to give a more personal expression of himself in his interaction with his clients.

Van Balen in his study sees the dialogue with Buber as having a decisive influence on Rogers' practice and quotes Rogers himself, writing in 1974, in support of this thesis:

This recognition of the significance of what Buber terms the I-Thou relationship is the reason why, in client-centred therapy, there has come to be a greater use of the self of the therapist, of the therapist's feelings, a greater stress on genuineness, but all of this without imposing the views, values or interpretations of the therapist on the client.

(Rogers, 1974b: 11)

Van Balen and others are also agreed that the ‘Wisconsin project’ with schizophrenic patients, despite May's reservations, actually gave rise to an increased emphasis on the therapist's use of his own thoughts and feelings in order to establish contact with persons who might themselves be very uncommunicative or even completely silent. It seems that this project together with the intensive group experiences in which Rogers was later to participate gradually led him to the point where he could state unequivocally that genuineness or congruence was the most basic of the conditions that foster therapeutic growth.

This movement towards greater authenticity and appropriate self-revelation is, I believe, the most powerful reply to those who accuse Rogers of creating one-sided relationships which are essentially manipulative or which encourage an unanchored narcissism. Through his increasing emphasis on the congruence of the therapist Rogers acknowledges that self-revelation, without imposition, can help to bring about the reciprocity of relationship which engenders mutual respect and avoids the dangers of confused dependence which Van Belle sees as a possible outcome of undiluted acceptance and empathy. There is a particular irony in the notion that the Wisconsin project played a crucial part in this move towards what Van Balen has called ‘authenticity as an independent pole of interaction’, for one of the other commonly held criticisms of client-centred therapy is that it is useful for articulate neurotics but of little value in the treatment of mentally ill individuals. It would seem that Rogers in his work with the Wisconsin patients not only demonstrated the validity of client-centred therapy with those suffering from so-called psychosis but also gave a new impetus to the practice of his approach. Increasingly ‘being open to the other’ became a significant goal for both therapist and client and was seen to be related to the client's achievement of self-acceptance as a consequence of feeling accepted. Perhaps acceptance of this life-transforming kind can only be experienced at the hands of a person whose own reality and vulnerability are readily accessible: an acceptant, empathic mirror or alter ego is not enough.

Jeffrey Masson's depiction of Rogers as a man indifferent to the abuses of the psychiatric system and blind to political realities scarcely seems just in the light of Rogers' lifelong struggle with the psychiatric ‘establishment’ and his deep and energetic commitment to world peace in his final years. Most people, after all, would have been content to relax into a well-merited retirement. Masson's basic premiss that it is the nature of therapy to distort another person's reality is more difficult to refute for unless a therapist is a perfect mirror—and hence a frustrating bore for his or her clients—there must be a sense in which the therapist interacts with the client's reality and to that extent changes or modifies it. Masson's argument is that this is what we do all the time in our social relationships and that it is therefore dishonest and deceitful for Rogers to suggest that he does not. I am not sure that Rogers ever claims to be so totally non-intrusive but it is certainly the case that in many of his writings he presents the therapist as solely the facilitator of the client's process which, once the core conditions have been established, unfolds spontaneously and inevitably. When Van Belle argues that this concept of facilitation is an erroneous analysis of the therapist's role he seems to be joining with Masson in accusing Rogers of a certain level of self-deception. Such criticism loses some of its force, however, if we believe all human life to be essentially relational. In this sense—and here again Buber's position is relevant—we need the other for our own completion. My reality needs the other's response if it is to be complete, and distortion comes not through the response in itself which is essential to the integrity of my reality but through a lack of respect for and understanding of my inner world. To accept Masson's critique of therapy as a distorting activity is tantamount to writing off all human relationships as destructive of the individual's subjective reality. Masson, it seems, would prefer us to be isolated creatures who steer clear of human interaction in the interests of preserving our perceptual purity. This seems conducive to madness because it is a denial of our need for relationship if we are to establish a sense of self.

Van Belle's rejection of facilitation in favour of co-operation as the essential task of the therapist is one with which I have considerable sympathy. I also believe it to be in keeping with the behaviour of the later Rogers for whom the capacity to be congruent assumes increasing importance. Barbara Temaner Brodley, in her recent study of Rogers' verbal behaviour in therapy sessions, states of his latest period (1977-86) that Rogers' responses from his own point of view increased from 4 to 16 per cent over the previous period (1944-64). Interestingly most of the increase appears in the categories of therapist's comments, interpretations and explanations. She notes, too, that Rogers in these closing years was slightly more inclined to voice agreement with his clients and to pose leading questions (Temaner Brodley, 1991: 13). It appears that Rogers through his manifest behaviour had come close to accepting the validity of Van Belle's point of view that the therapeutic process requires the active participation of the therapist all the way. Therapy is a co-operative event achieved by the client and the therapist working together (Van Belle, 1980: 150).

In 1984 John Shlien, one of Rogers' earliest students and an Emeritus Professor at Harvard, published a startling paper entitled ‘A countertheory of transference’. It begins with the provocative statement: ‘Transference is a fiction, invented and maintained by the therapist to protect himself from the consequences of his own behaviour’ (Shlien, 1984: 153). The paper caused considerable debate and some three years later an edition of the Person-Centered Review was largely devoted to responses and reactions to Shlien's ideas from a number of eminent therapists of different therapeutic traditions. Rogers contributed to this symposium but by the time it was published in May 1987 he had died, at the age of 85. There is something poignant about the fact that the issue of transference should have been the subject of Rogers' last theoretical paper for, despite the controversial nature of the subject, he had not previously chosen to enter into combat on the issue.

In the Review article, Rogers begins by welcoming Shlien's paper as competent, timely and important. He also declares himself to be in agreement with its major thesis and is particularly delighted that it should have come from the pen of a man who was ‘an enthusiastic student of Freudian analysis’ before he became a client-centred practitioner. Here Rogers is relishing the opportunity to express his support for Shlien and it is not surprising that what follows contains much scarcely concealed hostility towards analytical orthodoxy. After first discussing client feelings that are an understandable response to the therapist's attitudes and behaviour, Rogers embarks upon his discussion of client reactions which are ‘the emotions that have little or no relationship to the therapist's behaviour’. Such emotions he describes as truly ‘transferred’ from their real origin to the therapist and he labels them projections which may be positive feelings of love, sexual desire and the like or negative feelings of hatred, contempt, fear, distrust. He continues: ‘Their true object may be a parent or other significant person in the client's life. Or, and this is less often recognised, they may be negative attitudes towards the self, which the client cannot bear to face.’ The paragraph which follows is a clear expression of Rogers' view on how such feelings should be handled in a therapeutic relationship, and merits quoting in full:

From a client-centered point of view, it is not necessary in responding to and dealing with these feelings, to determine whether they are therapist caused or are projections. The distinction is of theoretical interest, but is not a practical problem. In the therapeutic interaction all of these attitudes—positive or negative, ‘transference’ feelings, or therapist-caused reactions—are best dealt with in the same way. If the therapist is sensitively understanding and genuinely acceptant and nonjudgmental, therapy will move forward through these feelings. There is absolutely no need to make a special case of attitudes that are transferred to the therapist and no need for the therapist to permit the dependence that is so often a part of other forms of therapy, particularly psychoanalysis. It is entirely possible to accept dependent feelings without permitting the client to change the therapist's role.

(Rogers, 1987: 183-4)

There then follows a case example previously published in Client-Centered Therapy in 1951 and the article concludes with some observations about psychoanalysis which show Rogers at his most militant and aggressive. Having once more made the point that all feelings directed towards the therapist should be dealt with by the creation of a therapeutic relationship characterized by the core conditions, he continues:

To deal with transference feelings as a very special part of therapy, making their handling the very core of therapy, is to my mind a grave mistake. Such an approach fosters dependence and lengthens therapy. It creates a whole new problem, the only purpose of which appears to be the intellectual satisfaction of the therapist—showing the elaborateness of his or her expertise. I deplore it.

Even then Rogers has not finished and it seems as if his anger must find further expression. He challenges the analysts to present their data and provide evidence for their belief that the ‘transference neurosis’ is so important to successful therapy. Where, he asks, are the recorded interviews which would prove the point? The article ends with a challenge which, one suspects, Rogers knew was unlikely to be accepted. ‘Why the reluctance to make known what actually happens in the therapist's dealings with this core of the analytic process? … The questions cannot be finally answered until psychoanalysts are willing to open their work to professional scrutiny’ (Rogers, 1987: 187-8).

RESEARCH

It is difficult to accept that the formidable amount of research undertaken on client-centred therapy has been utterly in vain. Whilst it appears true that Rogers' original hypotheses remain untested because of faulty research design and a failure to explore the hypotheses as a complete package, there remains considerable support for the more modest assertion that the qualities of acceptance, empathy and congruence are at least connected with therapeutic effectiveness. Evidence for the potency of the facilitative conditions also comes from research in hundreds of classrooms both in the USA (Aspy and Roebuck, 1983) and in Germany (Tausch, 1978). Clearly, we still await the necessary conditions for evaluating client-centred therapy and it remains to be seen whether the eventual breakthrough will come through the more rigorous application of the ‘objective’ methods of yesteryear or through the development of new research paradigms more in harmony with the spirit of the phenomenological view of reality (Mearns and McLeod, 1984). What is certain is that researchers are once more wrestling with the complexity of the task in an attempt to revive Rogers' earlier commitment to a coherent integration of theory, practice and research.

CONCLUSION

Many people find in Rogers' writings a clear articulation of what they themselves have felt and thought confusedly for many years. Such people—and I count myself among them—respond instantly to a person who conveys powerfully what it involves to struggle towards self-acceptance and to discover a respect for one's own experience. Rogers' theoretical formulations also offer a way of relating to oneself and to others which is compelling in so far as it encourages honesty, openness, understanding and acceptant responsiveness. Rogers offers a way of being which is attractive and even seductive, for it gives absolute primacy to subjective reality and yet places this supreme value within the context of a mode of relating which promises a high level of intimacy.

Rogers' critics are for the most part resistant to such seduction. They are less inclined to attribute such overriding importance to subjective reality and doubt the capacity of human beings—even well-intentioned therapists—to embody the core conditions to the extent that Rogers advocates. They detect within Rogers' concern for the autonomy of the individual an ambiguity about the nature of the relationship which is being offered in therapy. At times the apparently self-effacing behaviour of the therapist suggests that, once the core conditions have been established, he or she only has to provide a particular psychological environment and the therapeutic process in the client will unfold spontaneously and inevitably. At other times Rogers appears to acknowledge the centrality of the therapist's own congruence and his or her willingness to be involved in a reciprocal exchange as long as there is no intention of imposing on the client's reality.

There was initially, I believe, a genuine confusion at the heart of Rogers' thinking and his critics in one way or another tend to sniff this out. Rogers never seemed to be absolutely sure whether men and women are essentially relational beings or not. His tendency to employ images culled from agriculture and his emphasis on the actualizing tendency and the wisdom of the organism can lead to a highly positive view of the human being but one which is strangely non-relational except that the evolution of the species is seen to be part of a universal formative tendency. Because of this central confusion Rogers' critics—rightly in my view—question the nature of the relationship between therapist and client and raise doubts about Rogers' view of therapy as essentially the facilitation of inherent growth processes. Rogers' constant emphasis upon process and changingness and his apparent preference for affective as opposed to cognitive experience have led some of his critics to accuse him of, at one and the same time, affirming the uniqueness of persons and denying them any continuing or stable identity.

For my own part, I acknowledge the inconsistencies and, at times, the logical contradictions in Rogers' point of view. I am reassured, however, by my powerful memories of the man himself. In my own relationship with him, I never for one moment feared that we would be lost in an infinite process of becoming. On the contrary, I recall many an encounter from which I gained a heightened sense of my own identity and a powerful impression of Rogers' complex but integrated personality. In practice, there was never for one moment any doubt that we were both unique and that our uniqueness was characterized by the fact that we were relational beings. Rogers' keen interest in everything around him and his capacity for drawing pleasure from his social environment provided ample evidence that he was well aware of the ways in which our social context can support personal development as well as impede it. For a man dedicated to the understanding of the subjective world of others he was wonderfully at home in the mundane world of eating, drinking and catching the next post.