Person-Centred Therapy in Focus by Wilkins Paul;

Author:Wilkins, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1001343
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Limited
Published: 2002-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

To offer this client unconditional positive regard, I had to do two main things. One was to recognise what it was about his way of being which aroused my prejudices (for example, with respect to the military) and to deal with them. Sometimes the recognition is enough – ‘Ah, that’s where that is coming from!’ Sometimes supervision or personal therapy is a way of resolving or setting aside such issues. The second was to ‘listen’ to the person. The first is a necessary precursor to the second. In this case, I remember quite suddenly having the sense that I was dealing with someone deeply wounded who was driven by pain to lash out – and it seemed to me that there was something essentially childlike about this person. I do not find it particularly difficult to accept someone in that state.

Masson is not alone in questioning the achievability of unconditional positive regard. Even Rogers stated that to hold someone in unconditional positive regard is ‘sometimes very difficult’ (Rogers, quoted in Hobbs 1987: 20). Writing from within the person-centred approach, albeit towards the experiential psychotherapy end of the continuum, Lietaer (1984) examines the controversy which surrounds unconditional positive regard, stating (p. 41): ‘unconditional positive regard is probably one of the most questioned concepts in client-centered therapy’. He considers that unconditionality has its problems (1984: 41). These Lietaer lists as:

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