What was really eye-opening for me was in the latter stages of the book, when Rogers talks about how person-centred therapy should be taught.

Equally admirable is Rogers' claim that the therapist must involve himself personally in the therapeutic process.If I had some of the bricks for an edifice of a person-centred way of being, I think this provides the mortar.

The words "perceived experiential" exposure here is meant to imply that the experience is not truly the individual's, but an assimilation of outside social assessments of the individual or phenomena the individual may find him or herself experiencing. In Client Centered Therapy, the practitioner has the disconcerting attitude of a non-judgmental, person-less mirror. Client-Centred Therapy crystallises the great progress that has been made in the development the techniques and basic philogopy of counselling. What I missed in this book was a more elaborate discussion on the actual techniques of clarification, reflection, restatement, resonance that are used in therapy.

Prachtig boek over client gerichte therapie inzichten zijn dat je alle attitudes van de ander kunt accepteren en zien vanuit een onconditionele aanvaarding. Has a wonderful psychological depth that is told in often intertwining factual and fictional terms to illustrate larger points or the overall themes of chapters or sub chapters. I'm not going to go through it line-by-line, but there a series of fantastic chapters outlining the depth of PCT in the genuine, clear, and positive language which we're all used to with Dr Rogers' writing. He was cautious to submit his model of therapy to the scientific method and, when available, he defended his ideas with academic studies. Having those snippets of Rogers' thoughts was useful, but I felt a duty to read from cover-to-cover the foundational work of the person-centred approach if I was serious in training to be a counsellor.

He came to reject the idea that the therapist ought to be a source of authority, a moral reference, a problem solver for the patient; rather, he saw the therapist as one who can assist the client in his exploration and resolution of his inner contradictions.It is once they accept all manners of gradient in assessing situations and see themselves as the assessors and judges of all things good and bad with no one thing actually possessing "good" or "bad" elements free from relative assessment that the client moves toward a more self-aware level of relation to the world around them. I think a *casual* reader would probably prefer to start with his other work, but anyone learning about or working in PCT itself really needs to read and understand this psychological classic.