UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE REGARD: A MISUNDERSTOOD WAY OF BEING

Ruth Sanford December 1984 Because the focus of this paper has meaning only within the context of the client-centered, person-centeredapproach to psychotherapy and other interpersonal relationships as it has evolved through the works of Dr. CarlRogers over the period of his professional life, it seems appropriate, at the outset, to review for or to acquaint thereader with the essential theoretical formulations of the approach, as summarized in brief form by Dr. Rogers in hismost recent publication on the subject (Ref. 6):

What do I mean by a client-centered, person-centered approach? For me it expresses the primarytheme of my whole professional life, as that theme has been clarified through experience, interaction withothers, and research. This theme has been utilized and found effective in many different areas, until thebroad label 'a person-centered approach' seems the most descriptive. The central hypothesis of thisapproach can be briefly stated. It is that the individual has within him or her self vast resources for self-understanding, for altering her or his self-concept, attitudes, and self-directed behavior--and that theseresources can be tapped if only a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided.There are three conditions which constitute this growth promoting climate, whether we are speaking ofthe relationship between therapist and client, parent and child, leader and group, teacher and student, oradministrator and staff. The conditions apply, in fact, in any situation in which the development of theperson is a goal. I have described these conditions at length in previous writings (Rogers, 1959, 1961). Ipresent here a brief summary from the point of view of psychotherapy, but the description applies to all ofthe foregoing relationships. The first element has to do with genuineness, realness, or congruence. Themore the therapist is him or herself in the relationship, putting up no professional front or personalfacade, the greater is the likelihood that the client will change and grow in a constructive manner. . . . Thesecond attitude of importance in creating a climate for change is acceptance, or caring or prizing--unconditional positive regard. It means that when the therapist is experiencing a positive, nonjudgmental,accepting attitude toward whatever the client is at that moment, therapeutic movement or change is morelikely. . . . The third facilitative aspect of the relationship is empathic understanding. This means that thetherapist senses 2 accurately the feelings and personal meanings that are being experienced by the clientand communicates this acceptant understanding to the client. (Ref. 6., pp. l, 2, 3)

The present inquiry into the meaning and use of the term, unconditional positive regard, has grown from a personalneed to respond in a thoughtful way to comments of professional people made frequently in discussions of the three"necessary and sufficient conditions" conducive to therapeutic growth. Many of these comments are typified by, "Yes, Ibelieve that realness and deep empathic listening are essential elements in creating a growthful climate, but I havemany questions about unconditional positive regard. What does it mean?" Or "Does it mean that I put aside my ownvalues and assume the attitude that anything goes?" or "I can't feel unconditional positive regard for everyone!" or"Positive regard for most people I can see, but unconditional?"

I carefully considered using the traditionally impersonal third person in the writing of this paper, but an impersonalstyle seems inappropriate to me as I invite others to join me in my own personal search into the meaning andapplication to significant relationships, including the relationship between client and therapist, of this term which hasbecome so central to the way of being known as the person-centered approach. My inquiry led me first to Client-

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centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory, published in 1951 (Ref. 1). In this work I found thefirst reference to the condition or attitude which later evolved into "unconditional positive regard." It is here that thepresent inquiry begins with an illustration of the therapeutic process between a client and a therapist who approachesthe relationship in a client-centered way (p. 144):

Characteristically the client changes from high level abstractions to more differentiated perceptions, fromwide generalizations to limited generalizations closely rooted in primary experiences. The client whocommences therapy with the stated feeling that he is a hopeless and useless person comes, during therapy,to experience himself as indeed useless at times, but at other times showing positive qualities, at still othertimes exhibiting negative aggression. He experiences himself as being quite variable in functioning--in short,as a person who is neither all black or all white, but an interesting collection of varying shades of gray. Hefinds it much easier, as has been indicated, to accept this more differentiated person. Or take the clientwhose expressed attitude in therapy, is that 'My mother is a bitch! I During therapy she begins to perceive indifferentiated fashion her varied experiences of her mother. Her mother rejected her in childhood, butoccasionally indulged her; her mother means well; she has a sense of humor; she is not well educated; shehas a violent and unreasonable temper; she wants very much to be proud of her daughter. The relationshipwith mother in childhood is examined and differentiated from the relationship with mother today. As thisprocess goes on, the overall generalization, 'Mother is a bitch and I can't possibly get on with her,' is-seen-tobe quite inadequate to fit the complex facts of primary experience. With almost every client this process canbe observed. He moves from generalizations which have been found unsatisfactory for guiding his life, to anexamination of the rich primary experiences upon which they are based, a movement which exposes thefalsity of many of his generalizations, and provides a basis for new and more adequate abstractions. He iscustomarily in the process of formulating these new guides for himself as therapy concludes. It is obviousthat this process does not just happen. It is facilitated by the special conditions of the therapeuticrelationship--the complete freedom to explore every portion of the perceptual field, and the completefreedom from threat to the self which the client-centered therapist in particular provides (emphasis added).

Drawing from my own experience with a client whose perception of his mother at the beginning of therapy wassimilar to that of the woman client in the hypothetical case just quoted, I found that he moved, over the period of ayear, to acceptance of his mother as a person, with fewer conditions. He could say in essence, "I still hate it when shewhines, and I still feel like walking away from her when she tries to tell me what to do, but I know that she loves me inher own way and that she will never abandon me. I can live with that. Not that I want to live in the same house withher. But I can see that she's had a hard time herself, that she has her own problems and reasons for what she does--justthe way I have mine. When I visit her now, we sometimes even enjoy each other!"

From saying, "She's a bitch, I hate her and I can't stand to be around her ever again!" he moved a long way towardacceptance of her as a person, and of his own positive as well as negative feelings toward her. After a year in therapyhe was saying that he could hear her disparaging remarks as her own opinion spoken in hurt or anger without feelingworthless himself or taking them as evidence that she did not love him, or wished him harm. When he was able toaccept his own feelings, negative as well as positive, as the therapist had accepted them, he could also accept hismother as a person--imperfect as they both were--and experience warm feelings toward her.

The Quality of the Client-Therapist Relationship

It is important here to return to the hypothetical case cited earlier and to Dr. Rogers' comment following it:

It is obvious that this process does not just happen. It is facilitated by the special conditions of thetherapeutic relationship--the complete freedom to explore every portion of the perceptual field, and thecomplete, freedom from threat to the self which the client-centered therapist in particular provides.

Both of these clients were interacting with the therapist in verbal as well as in non-verbal ways, as the therapistcommunicated to the client complete acceptance of the client as he or she was at the moment. Sometimes in theexperience of every therapist, verbal communication is very slight or nonexistent, and the question arises, Is itpossible then to convey to the client the sense of unqualified acceptance? Dr. Rogers, in Chapter 4, "Process ofTherapy," poses the question in this way:

What are we to regard as essential to psychotherapy if success occurs in dealing with a child when therehave been no verbalized insights, little expression of attitudes towards the self, no certain expression ofdenied experience of self?

He answers his own question in part by referring to the experience of a counselor with Joan, a non-verbal, isolatedhigh school girl, in which the counselor concludes her report with, "What happened in those hours of silence? My faithin the capacity of the client was sorely tested. I am glad it did not waver."

At this point it seems important to accompany Dr. Rogers in his further inquiry:

Whatever happened here seems not to have happened as the result of verbal interchange. . . . How, thencan we formulate therapeutic process in terms of a relationship? One hypothesis is that the client movesfrom the experiencing of himself as an unworthy, unacceptable, and unlovable person to the realization thathe is accepted, respected, and loved in this limited relationship with the therapist. 'Loved' has here perhapsits deepest and most general meaning--that of being deeply understood and deeply accepted. In terms of thishypothesis we might speculate on the case of Joan. Feeling that she is a person who is unworthy of havingfriends, partly because she is so shy and uncommunicative, she enters a relationship with the counselor.Here she finds acceptance--or love, if you will--as much evident in her periods of silence and shyness as inthe times when she can talk. She discovers that she can be a silent person and still be liked, that she can beher shy self and still be accepted. Perhaps it is this which gives her more feeling of worth and changes herrelationship to others. By believing- herself lovable as a shy and withdrawn person, she finds that she isaccepted by others and that those characteristics tend to drop away.

One thread running through these references is complete acceptance of the client without the threat of judgmentand rejection. In the words of Joan's counselor, although her faith in the capacity of the client for self-understandingand change was severely tested by hours of silence, she did not waver in her trust in Joan--and in the verbal and non-verbal ways in which she communicated her trust. The other thread is love, respect and deep understanding, alsocommunicated to the client so as to be perceived by the client. Oliver Bown in this same chapter (p. 160) states veryclearly his conviction that love is the most expressive term for this element in the relationship, although he is awarethat it is easily misunderstood in this society. In his words, "If a client is hostile toward me and I can see nothing in themoment except hostility I am quite sure that I will react in a defensive way to the hostility. If, on the other hand, I cansee this hostility as an understandable component of the person's defense against feeling the need for closeness topeople, I can then react with love toward this person, who also wants love, but who at the moment must pretend notto."

On the one hand the therapist would be responding to hostility, perceived hostility or an act of hostility, on the otherhand to a person who needs and wants to love and be loved, in spite of present, apparent denial. The therapist, then, isresponding to a person rather than to an act that repels or threatens him. His response stems from his belief that theclient is a trustworthy person capable of and desiring positive growth. There is trust that, as the therapeuticrelationship continues, the therapist can expose more tender and caring parts of himself without fearing "that theywould be trampled on, misused or perhaps ridiculed," and that in experiencing the trust and love or caring the clientbecomes more able to establish similar, less limited, relationships with others in her life.

Acceptance, or love as it is used here, is not dependent on the other's conformity to preconceived conditions existingin the therapist. It is not placing critical interpretations upon the client's behavior or saying, in effect, "I am acceptingyou if you behave in a friendly way to me or conform to my values." Again I return to the text of the chapter, "TheProcess of Therapy":

It is our experience in therapy which has brought us to giving this proposition central place. The therapistbecomes very much aware that the forward-moving tendency of the human organism is the basis uponwhich he relies most deeply and fundamentally. It is evident not only in the general tendency of clients tomove in the direction of growth when factors in the situation are clear, but is most dramatically shown invery serious cases where the individual is on the brink of psychosis or suicide. Here the therapist is verykeenly aware that the only force upon which he can basically rely is the organic tendency toward growthand enhancement. (Ref. 1)

The Coining of a New Term

I have chosen to explore the term which is the subject of this paper by beginning with the concept as expressed inthe originator's early work (1951), as acceptance, respect, understanding, love.

Qualifying modifiers included deeply, completely or deep, complete. In the five other references cited in this paperpublished in 1957, 1959, 1961, 1980 and "in press," these elements have been put together in the term "unconditionalpositive regard," and included in Ref. 2 as one of the three "necessary and sufficient conditions" for creating apsychological climate conducive to positive therapeutic growth. What appeared earlier as love or respect or completeacceptance evolved into unconditional positive regard. It is possible that Oliver Bown's awareness of risk ofmisunderstanding played a large part in replacing the word "love". The creation, then, of the new term, fresh andunclouded by a variety of meanings attached to it by the society in general, was undoubtedly a wise choice in keepingwith Dr. Rogers' lifetime search for the simplest and most accurate terms to express his meaning.

Eight years later (Ref. 3) unconditional positive regard is included in "A. Conditions of the Therapeutic Process" (p.213):

For therapy to occur it is necessary that these conditions exist:

1. That two persons are in contact.

2. That the first person, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, vulnerable, oranxious.

3. That the second person, whom we shall term the therapist, is congruent, in the relationship.

4. That the therapist is experiencing unconditional positive regard toward the client.

5. That the therapist is experiencing an empathic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference.

6. That the client perceives, at least to a minimal degree, the positive regard of the therapist for him, and the understanding of the therapist. The process often commences with only these minimal conditions, and it ishypothesized that it never commences without these conditions being met."

For the purpose of stressing the importance of communicative aspects in the process, a qualifying statement is addedas an alternative to item 6, "That the communication to the client of the therapist's empathic understanding andunconditional positive regard is, at least to a minimal degree, achieved."

Each "Other," a Unique Person

As I experience more and more the one-to-one relationship in therapy and in group situations in which participantsare seeking personal growth and a deeper understanding of the person-centered approach in their personal lives andin their professional work, I am affirmed in my conviction that this way of being cannot be-viewed as a technique or astrategy to be applied in different ways with persons who come with different needs or anxieties. I find, if I am to bereal and to have within myself an unconditional positive regard for whoever that person is and how he/she is feelingat the moment, if I am to be able to hear the experiencing of the other at the moment, I cannot be aware of categoriesof behavior or "presenting problems". For this reason, I find diagnoses of this nature at least irrelevant and at worstdestructive of the therapeutic or growth process. For this reason I experience an increasing impatience withprescriptions in professional journals for how to "treat" the divorced or bereaved or alcoholic or deviant or otherspecialized client. Not only do I find this specialized approach unhelpful, but to work against the realness of therelationship, and to be manipulative in its very nature.

The client, in the process of client-centered therapy, moves to a more open expression of his/her feelings andawareness of incongruity between experiencing of self in that situation and his concept of self. He/she also becomesincreasingly aware of the threat of such incongruence. Being able to let in the experience of threat to his concept of selfcan take place only because unconditional positive regard of the therapist has been communicated to him/her'. Only asthe need for defensiveness or the felt need for defensiveness decreases in.- this safe relationship can the client begin tofeel self regard without conditions--or unconditional positive self regard. Perhaps more accurately, to the degree thatthe felt need for defensiveness or self-protectiveness decreases, the fewer conditions the client places on his own senseof self-worth. And to the degree that the client perceives from the therapist unconditional positive regard is it possiblefor this shift or movement to take place. Evidence in support of this process is cited in studies by Snyder, Seeman,Lipkin, Raskin, Kessler and others. For more complete findings the reader is referred to Ref. 3, pages 217-219. Theimportance of positive regard in self-concept is clearly stated in C and D, pages 223 and 224:

As the awareness of self emerges, the individual develops a ' need for positive regard. This need isuniversal in human beings, and in the individual, is pervasive and persistent. Whether it is an inherent orlearned need is irrelevant to the theory.

The need and satisfaction of the need is seen as reciprocal in a relationship with significant other or others.Development of the need for self-regard and development of conditions for worth or of unconditionality are basicallyimportant to the development of personality. Dr. Rogers continues:

Hypothetically, if an individual should experience only unconditional positive regard, then no conditionsof worth would develop, self-regard would be unconditional, the needs for positive regard and positive self-regard would never be at variance with the organismic evaluation, and the individual would continue to befully functioning. This chain of events is hypothetically possible, and hence important theoretically, thoughit does not appear to occur in actuality.

Reciprocity: A Basic Human Need and Its Fulfillment

Reciprocity in the experiencing of unconditional positive regard has been briefly mentioned and frequently impliedin this paper--reciprocity in the experiencing of it in the therapeutic relationship as well as in other significantrelationships. In the therapeutic relationship the communication of it is not so clearly defined as reciprocal, nor foundto be expressed reciprocally. Because of the nature of the process itself, the therapist, in helping to create a climate forgrowth, is active in communicating to the client her own experiencing of unconditional positive regard.

Nowhere, in my search, has the intricate, delicate and durable organismic fabric become more clear to my visionthan in Ref. 4, pp. 51-55, as Dr. Rogers poses and answers from his own experience the question, "How Can I Create aHelping Relationship?"

1. Can I be in some way which will be perceived by the other person as trustworthy, as dependable orconsistent in some deep sense? Both research and experience indicate that this is very important.

2. Can I be expressive enough as a person that what I am will be communicated unambiguously? I believe thatmy failures to achieve a helping relationship can be traced to unsatisfactory answers to these two questions. When Iam experiencing an attitude of annoyance toward another person but am unaware of it, then my communicationcontains contradictory messages. When as a parent or therapist or a teacher or an administrator I fail to listen to whatis going on in me, fail because of my own defensiveness to sense my own feelings, then this kind of failure seems toresult…if I can be sensitively aware of and acceptant toward my own feelings then the likelihood is great that therelationship will be a helpful one.

3. Can I let myself experience positive attitudes toward this other person? It is not easy. I find in myself, andfeel I often see in others, a certain amount of fear of these feelings. We are afraid that if we let ourselves freelyexperience these positive feelings toward another we may be trapped by them.

4. Can I be strong enough as a person to be separate from the other? Can I be a sturdy respecter of my ownfeelings, my own needs, as well as his? . . . Is my inner self hardy enough to realize that I am not destroyed by hisanger, taken over by his need for dependence nor enslaved by his love, but that I exist separate from him with feelingsand rights of my own? When I can freely feel this strength of being a separate person, then I find that I can go muchmore deeply in understanding and accepting him because I am not fearful of losing myself.

5. Can I permit him to be what he is--honest or deceitful, infantile or adult, despairing or over-confident. Can Igive him the freedom to be?…In this connection I think of the interesting small study by Farson which found that theless well-adjusted and less competent counselor tends to induce conformity to himself, to have clients who modelthemselves after him.

6. Can I step into his private world so completely that I lose all desire to evaluate or judge it?

For myself I find it easier to feel this kind of understanding and communicate it to individual clients than to studentsor staff members in a group in which I am involved. There is a strong temptation to set students "straight" or to pointout to a staff member the errors in his thinking.

[In the service of brevity I have become highly selective as I pass on to question 9 (p. 54):]

9. Can I free him from the threat of external evaluation? 'That's good; that's naughty. That's worth an A; that'sfailure. That's good counseling; that's poor counseling.'

10. Can I meet this other individual as a person who is in the process of becoming or will I be bound by hispast and by my past?

In quoting Buber, Dr. Rogers here uses the phrase, "confirming the other." "Confirming means accepting the wholepotentiality of the other." (P. 55)

This has been an extensive, though incomplete, quotation which seems for me a tying together and rounding out of thevarious aspects of unconditional positive regard and the way of being in any significant relationship which enhancesthe persons involved--both or all. It relates unconditional positive regard to empathic understanding and to realness. Itagain places it close to the heart of a person-centered way of being in relationship to oneself and to others--includingbut not exclusive to the therapeutic relationship (Ref. 5).

Return to a Persistent Question: Significant Relationships

For me there remains the question, "Can one have unconditional positive regard for everyone?" I can speak only formyself, limited as I am in my thoughtful exploration of this aspect of the subject. "In one's significant relationships" ishelpful to me as I try to define the place in my "larger" relationships which this condition or characteristic implies.

Some relationships are of great significance to me; some relationships with persons remote from me or having slightor no definable impact on my life and awareness are much less significant for me. At one end of the continuum are myfamily, friends, clients, colleagues, and those with whom I have more brief though fairly close contact. At the other endare persons I meet casually or more remotely, like the salespersons, servicepersons, journalists, politicians, and thelike.

It is clear to me that close to the very core of my intimate and significant relationships dwells unconditional positive

regard as an integral part of my way of being. But all of these less significant, more peripheral and even distantrelationships? The further I go in my search the more I am aware that the attitude seeps in to touch in some way myfeeling about persons in my city, my town, or the broader arena of community life. I wonder how a commissioner,mayor, delegate to the UN. has come to a decision, how she/he feels, what the pressures are.

Or, as I read of the events in South Africa as reported in the papers, I am re-experiencing how the black members ofa group with which I met in Johannesburg felt as they faced white participants in the apartheid government. I hearagain the feelings of the white members, their fear, their anger, their confusion. I feel fear and anger and I hate theinjustices, I feel the pain of their hopelessness and striving. Having experienced meeting with them I am better able todifferentiate between the person and the act, to feeling caring for a person even as, on this level and national levels Imust speak my convictions. I can do no less and be the person I am.

Even as I speak out on an issue that has become very important to me, I am thinking of women and men withvarious shades of skin color, of life experience, convictions of their own growing from their unique life experiencesand each one feeling, as. I feel, "I must speak my own convictions if I am willing to take the risk." I am, then, looking atpersons., not acts or words alone, not at labels or classes or classifications. When I can say, "I want to hear what theyare thinking and feeling, the reasons for their choices--even when I am feeling anger or am diametrically opposed totheir beliefs as they have expressed them in words or action-I am, in essence, saying that these individual humanbeings are worth listening to, that their reality is as real for each of them as mine is for me, I am experiencing positiveregard. If I have the experience of genuinely caring for them as persons my regard becomes unconditional. Thechannel for communication and understanding is then open.

The men and women to whom I refer are real. I met with them in a group in Johannesburg, South Africa; with themand from them I learned again the meaning of positive regard and the power of unconditionality in the resolution ofconflict and misunderstanding. The encounter was brief and open within a climate created by experiencedfacilitators.

More than other group experiences, that afternoon in Johannesburg gave me the opportunity to venture beyondfamiliar territory in my search for an answer to my question, "Is it possible for me to have positive regard for everyoneand if not, what limitations do I impose?" That day in 1982 has made it possible for me to venture further, to movetoward the far end of the continuum.

Alice Miller, the Swiss analyst-teacher, in her book, For Your Own Good (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1983) tooka step far out into my unknown as she examined the most extreme point on the continuum which I have envisioned.Briefly, her thesis as stated in the chapter, "Adolph Hitler's Childhood: From Hidden to Manifest Horror," is that eventhe worst criminal of all time was not born a criminal; that empathizing with a child's unhappy beginnings does notimply exoneration of the cruel acts he later commits, and finally, the fact that a situation is ubiquitous does not absolveus from examining it. "On the contrary," she continues, "we must examine it for the very reason that it is or can be thefate of each and every one of us." Dr. Miller, after an extensive and scholarly study of the life of Adolph Hitlerbeginning with his parents and continuing through his birth, infancy, early childhood and adulthood, raises a thought-provoking question. If one person, parent, servant, friend or teacher had listened to his pain, anger, frustration andaccepted him and his anger before it was turned in upon himself, where in time it burned out of control, would it havebecome the fiery cauldron of rage and hate that destroyed millions and himself? It may be my heightened awarenesson the subject that I hear so clearly, but I believe I hear in that question a plea for what Carl Rogers has described asunconditional positive regard, particularly as it relates to the rearing and nurturing of children. I hear in it a strongstatement of the effectiveness, socially and even politically, of meeting the pervasive and persistent need of humanbeings for unconditional positive regard, somewhere, sometime, from someone, and the terrible consequences of whatappears to be complete lack of response to that need. Alice Miller has forced me to look with clear eyes at what I havelearned from Carl Rogers about regard for the person by right of our being human, and to listen to that person deeplybefore I build a wall of the stuff of my own arrogance against another's reality.

Summary

This paper is a personal inquiry into

1) the evolution, meaning and application of unconditional positive regard as found in the work of Dr. Carl Rogers and

2) an exploration of its meaning for me as I accept it as a central and integral part of my way of being with myself andothers. Unconditional positive regard, as it is described and discussed, is a term which evolves in the work of Dr.Rogers over a period of many years from the earlier concept described as deep or complete acceptance, understanding,respect or love felt by a therapist for a client within the limits of the therapeutic relationship. The concept hasbroadened in recent years to include a wide range of relationships and is referred to as the person-centered approachto interpersonal relationships.

1. Unconditional positive regard is a basic human need--pervasive and persistent.

2. An individual, in order to experience and express unconditional positive regard, must first have experienced it fromanother significant person.

3. It exists as unconditional positive regard for self and for others.

4. Dr. Rogers hypothesizes that it is one of three essential elements in the creation of a psychological climate, by atherapist, in which a client can experience positive growth toward becoming a fully functioning person.

5. It is effective, as well, in any interpersonal relationship in which growth and the fostering of an intimate orsignificant relationship is the intent.

6. It is my present opinion that unconditional positive regard is an attitude varying along a continuum from intimateand long-term relationships to remote and brief contacts.

7. There is strong support for the belief that its presence or absence can have far-reaching social and political impact indiplomacy and negotiations as well as a marked -positive, or negative and destructive, influence on personalrelationships.

8. As a result of this inquiry I have become firm in the opinion that unconditional positive regard, once it has reachedinto intimate and significant relationships in one's personal life, also impinges upon and finally pervades the attitudeone holds in response to others along the continuum. Absence or presence of this way of relating to others determinesthe tone or tenor of that person's life and its impact.

A Personal Note

If I am to enter into the full meaning of this, my strong opinion, I need to bring it back to my own livingexperience. When I can look beyond the act which I deplore to the creator of the act as a unique person,human and flawed as I am, and still trust my own deep experience; when I can be firm in my convictionsand leave room for the other's, I am learning to live unconditional positive regard in a wide range ofrelationships. Hypotheses and opinions are tentative, but it is at the times when I am thus open to my realself, to others and to new experience that I feel best about myself and others, feel most effective as a personand as a responsible resident of this planet.

References

1. Rogers, Carl R. Client-centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1951 (paperback edition 1965).

2. Rogers, Carl R. "The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change," Journal of ConsultingPsychology, 21, 1957, 95-103.

3. Rogers, Carl R. "A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships, as Developed in the Client-centered Framework," S. Koch (ed.), Psychology: A Study of Science, Vol. III, Formulations of the Person and the SocialContext. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959 (pages 184-256).

4. Rogers, Carl R. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

5. Rogers, Carl R. A Way of Being. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

6. Rogers, Carl R. "Client-centered Approach to Therapy," in I. L. Kutash and A. Wolf (eds.), Psychotherapist's Casebook:Theory and Technique in Practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (in press).

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