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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-centered approach to psychotherapy and other interpersonal relationships as it has evolved through the works of Dr. Carl Rogers over the period of his professional life, it seems appropriate, at the outset, to review for or to acquaint the reader with the essential theoretical formulations of the approach, as summarized in brief form by Dr. Rogers in his most recent publication on the subject (Ref. 6):

What do I mean by a client-centered, person-centered approach? For me it expresses the primary theme of my whole professional life, as that theme has been clarified through experience, interaction with others, and research. This theme has been utilized and found effective in many different areas, until the broad label 'a person-centered approach' seems the most descriptive. The central hypothesis of this approach 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 these resources 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 of the relationship between therapist and client, parent and child, leader and group, teacher and student, or administrator and staff. The conditions apply, in fact, in any situation in which the development of the person is a goal. I have described these conditions at length in previous writings (Rogers, 1959, 1961). I present here a brief summary from the point of view of psychotherapy, but the description applies to all of the foregoing relationships. The first element has to do with genuineness, realness, or congruence. The more the therapist is him or herself in the relationship, putting up no professional front or personal facade, the greater is the likelihood that the client will change and grow in a constructive manner. . . . The second 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 more likely. . . . The third facilitative aspect of the relationship is empathic understanding. This means that the therapist senses 2 accurately the feelings and personal meanings that are being experienced by the client and 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 personal need 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, I believe that realness and deep empathic listening are essential elements in creating a growthful climate, but I have many questions about unconditional positive regard. What does it mean?" Or "Does it mean that I put aside my own values 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 impersonal style seems inappropriate to me as I invite others to join me in my own personal search into the meaning and application to significant relationships, including the relationship between client and therapist, of this term which has become so central to the way of being known as the person-centered approach. My inquiry led me first to Client-centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory, published in 1951 (Ref. 1). In this work I found the first reference to the condition or attitude which later evolved into "unconditional positive regard." It is here that the present inquiry begins with an illustration of the therapeutic process between a client and a therapist who approaches the relationship in a client-centered way (p. 144):

Characteristically the client changes from high level abstractions to more differentiated perceptions, from wide generalizations to limited generalizations closely rooted in primary experiences. The client who commences 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 other times 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. He finds it much easier, as has been indicated, to accept this more differentiated person. Or take the client whose expressed attitude in therapy, is that 'My mother is a bitch! I During therapy she begins to perceive in differentiated fashion her varied experiences of her mother. Her mother rejected her in childhood, but occasionally indulged her; her mother means well; she has a sense of humor; she is not well educated; she has a violent and unreasonable temper; she wants very much to be proud of her daughter. The relationship with mother in childhood is examined and differentiated from the relationship with mother today. As this process goes on, the overall generalization, 'Mother is a bitch and I can't possibly get on with her,' is-seen-to be quite inadequate to fit the complex facts of primary experience. With almost every client this process can be observed. He moves from generalizations which have been found unsatisfactory for guiding his life, to an examination of the rich primary experiences upon which they are based, a movement which exposes the falsity of many of his generalizations, and provides a basis for new and more adequate abstractions. He is customarily in the process of formulating these new guides for himself as therapy concludes. It is obvious that this process does not just happen. It is facilitated by the special conditions of the therapeutic relationship--the complete freedom to explore every portion of the perceptual field, and the complete freedom 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 was similar to that of the woman client in the hypothetical case just quoted, I found that he moved, over the period of a year, to acceptance of his mother as a person, with fewer conditions. He could say in essence, "I still hate it when she whines, 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 in her own way and that she will never abandon me. I can live with that. Not that I want to live in the same house with her. But I can see that she's had a hard time herself, that she has her own problems and reasons for what she does--just the 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 toward acceptance of her as a person, and of his own positive as well as negative feelings toward her. After a year in therapy he was saying that he could hear her disparaging remarks as her own opinion spoken in hurt or anger without feeling worthless himself or taking them as evidence that she did not love him, or wished him harm. When he was able to accept his own feelings, negative as well as positive, as the therapist had accepted them, he could also accept his mother 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 the therapeutic relationship--the complete freedom to explore every portion of the perceptual field, and the complete, 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 therapist communicated to the client complete acceptance of the client as he or she was at the moment. Sometimes in the experience of every therapist, verbal communication is very slight or nonexistent, and the question arises, Is it possible then to convey to the client the sense of unqualified acceptance? Dr. Rogers, in Chapter 4, "Process of Therapy," poses the question in this way:

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

He answers his own question in part by referring to the experience of a counselor with Joan, a non-verbal, isolated high school girl, in which the counselor concludes her report with, "What happened in those hours of silence? My faith in 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, then can we formulate therapeutic process in terms of a relationship? One hypothesis is that the client moves from the experiencing of himself as an unworthy, unacceptable, and unlovable person to the realization that he is accepted, respected, and loved in this limited relationship with the therapist. 'Loved' has here perhaps its deepest and most general meaning--that of being deeply understood and deeply accepted. In terms of this hypothesis we might speculate on the case of Joan. Feeling that she is a person who is unworthy of having friends, 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 in the times when she can talk. She discovers that she can be a silent person and still be liked, that she can be her shy self and still be accepted. Perhaps it is this which gives her more feeling of worth and changes her relationship to others. By believing- herself lovable as a shy and withdrawn person, she finds that she is accepted 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 judgment and rejection. In the words of Joan's counselor, although her faith in the capacity of the client for self-understanding and 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, also communicated to the client so as to be perceived by the client. Oliver Bown in this same chapter (p. 160) states very clearly his conviction that love is the most expressive term for this element in the relationship, although he is aware that it is easily misunderstood in this society. In his words, "If a client is hostile toward me and I can see nothing in the moment except hostility I am quite sure that I will react in a defensive way to the hostility. If, on the other hand, I can see this hostility as an understandable component of the person's defense against feeling the need for closeness to people, I can then react with love toward this person, who also wants love, but who at the moment must pretend not to."

On the one hand the therapist would be responding to hostility, perceived hostility or an act of hostility, on the other hand to a person who needs and wants to love and be loved, in spite of present, apparent denial. The therapist, then, is responding to a person rather than to an act that repels or threatens him. His response stems from his belief that the client is a trustworthy person capable of and desiring positive growth. There is trust that, as the therapeutic relationship continues, the therapist can expose more tender and caring parts of himself without fearing "that they would be trampled on, misused or perhaps ridiculed," and that in experiencing the trust and love or caring the client becomes 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 existing in the therapist. It is not placing critical interpretations upon the client's behavior or saying, in effect, "I am accepting you if you behave in a friendly way to me or conform to my values." Again I return to the text of the chapter, "The Process of Therapy":

It is our experience in therapy which has brought us to giving this proposition central place. The therapist becomes very much aware that the forward-moving tendency of the human organism is the basis upon which he relies most deeply and fundamentally. It is evident not only in the general tendency of clients to move in the direction of growth when factors in the situation are clear, but is most dramatically shown in very serious cases where the individual is on the brink of psychosis or suicide. Here the therapist is very keenly aware that the only force upon which he can basically rely is the organic tendency toward growth and 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 in the 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 paper published in 1957, 1959, 1961, 1980 and "in press," these elements have been put together in the term "unconditional positive regard," and included in Ref. 2 as one of the three "necessary and sufficient conditions" for creating a psychological climate conducive to positive therapeutic growth. What appeared earlier as love or respect or complete acceptance evolved into unconditional positive regard. It is possible that Oliver Bown's awareness of risk of misunderstanding played a large part in replacing the word "love". The creation, then, of the new term, fresh and unclouded by a variety of meanings attached to it by the society in general, was undoubtedly a wise choice in keeping with 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, or anxious.

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 is hypothesized 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 added as an alternative to item 6, "That the communication to the client of the therapist's empathic understanding and unconditional 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 participants are seeking personal growth and a deeper understanding of the person-centered approach in their personal lives and in their professional work, I am affirmed in my conviction that this way of being cannot be-viewed as a technique or a strategy to be applied in different ways with persons who come with different needs or anxieties. I find, if I am to be real and to have within myself an unconditional positive regard for whoever that person is and how he/she is feeling at the moment, if I am to be able to hear the experiencing of the other at the moment, I cannot be aware of categories of behavior or "presenting problems". For this reason, I find diagnoses of this nature at least irrelevant and at worst destructive of the therapeutic or growth process. For this reason I experience an increasing impatience with prescriptions in professional journals for how to "treat" the divorced or bereaved or alcoholic or deviant or other specialized client. Not only do I find this specialized approach unhelpful, but to work against the realness of the relationship, 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 and awareness of incongruity between experiencing of self in that situation and his concept of self. He/she also becomes increasingly aware of the threat of such incongruence. Being able to let in the experience of threat to his concept of self can take place only because unconditional positive regard of the therapist has been communicated to him/her'. Only as the need for defensiveness or the felt need for defensiveness decreases in.- this safe relationship can the client begin to feel self regard without conditions--or unconditional positive self regard. Perhaps more accurately, to the degree that the felt need for defensiveness or self-protectiveness decreases, the fewer conditions the client places on his own sense of self-worth. And to the degree that the client perceives from the therapist unconditional positive regard is it possible for 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. The importance 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 is universal in human beings, and in the individual, is pervasive and persistent. Whether it is an inherent or learned 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 basically important to the development of personality. Dr. Rogers continues:

Hypothetically, if an individual should experience only unconditional positive regard, then no conditions of 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 be fully functioning. This chain of events is hypothetically possible, and hence important theoretically, though it 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 implied in this paper--reciprocity in the experiencing of it in the therapeutic relationship as well as in other significant relationships. In the therapeutic relationship the communication of it is not so clearly defined as reciprocal, nor found to be expressed reciprocally. Because of the nature of the process itself, the therapist, in helping to create a climate for growth, 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 vision than in Ref. 4, pp. 51-55, as Dr. Rogers poses and answers from his own experience the question, "How Can I Create a Helping Relationship?"

1. Can I be in some way which will be perceived by the other person as trustworthy, as dependable or consistent 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 that my failures to achieve a helping relationship can be traced to unsatisfactory answers to these two questions. When I am experiencing an attitude of annoyance toward another person but am unaware of it, then my communication contains contradictory messages. When as a parent or therapist or a teacher or an administrator I fail to listen to what is going on in me, fail because of my own defensiveness to sense my own feelings, then this kind of failure seems to result�if I can be sensitively aware of and acceptant toward my own feelings then the likelihood is great that the relationship 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, and feel I often see in others, a certain amount of fear of these feelings. We are afraid that if we let ourselves freely experience 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 own feelings, my own needs, as well as his? . . . Is my inner self hardy enough to realize that I am not destroyed by his anger, taken over by his need for dependence nor enslaved by his love, but that I exist separate from him with feelings and rights of my own? When I can freely feel this strength of being a separate person, then I find that I can go much more 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 I give him the freedom to be?�In this connection I think of the interesting small study by Farson which found that the less well-adjusted and less competent counselor tends to induce conformity to himself, to have clients who model themselves 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 students or staff members in a group in which I am involved. There is a strong temptation to set students "straight" or to point out 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's failure. 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 his past and by my past?

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

This has been an extensive, though incomplete, quotation which seems for me a tying together and rounding out of the various aspects of unconditional positive regard and the way of being in any significant relationship which enhances the persons involved--both or all. It relates unconditional positive regard to empathic understanding and to realness. It again places it close to the heart of a person-centered way of being in relationship to oneself and to others--including but 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 for myself, limited as I am in my thoughtful exploration of this aspect of the subject. "In one's significant relationships" is helpful 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 slight or no definable impact on my life and awareness are much less significant for me. At one end of the continuum are my family, friends, clients, colleagues, and those with whom I have more brief though fairly close contact. At the other end are persons I meet casually or more remotely, like the salespersons, servicepersons, journalists, politicians, and the like.

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 distant relationships? The further I go in my search the more I am aware that the attitude seeps in to touch in some way my feeling 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 of a group with which I met in Johannesburg felt as they faced white participants in the apartheid government. I hear again the feelings of the white members, their fear, their anger, their confusion. I feel fear and anger and I hate the injustices, I feel the pain of their hopelessness and striving. Having experienced meeting with them I am better able to differentiate between the person and the act, to feeling caring for a person even as, on this level and national levels I must 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 with various shades of skin color, of life experience, convictions of their own growing from their unique life experiences and each one feeling, as. I feel, "I must speak my own convictions if I am willing to take the risk." I am, then, looking at persons., not acts or words alone, not at labels or classes or classifications. When I can say, "I want to hear what they are thinking and feeling, the reasons for their choices--even when I am feeling anger or am diametrically opposed to their beliefs as they have expressed them in words or action-I am, in essence, saying that these individual human beings are worth listening to, that their reality is as real for each of them as mine is for me, I am experiencing positive regard. If I have the experience of genuinely caring for them as persons my regard becomes unconditional. The channel 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 them and from them I learned again the meaning of positive regard and the power of unconditionality in the resolution of conflict and misunderstanding. The encounter was brief and open within a climate created by experienced facilitators.

More than other group experiences, that afternoon in Johannesburg gave me the opportunity to venture beyond familiar territory in my search for an answer to my question, "Is it possible for me to have positive regard for everyone and if not, what limitations do I impose?" That day in 1982 has made it possible for me to venture further, to move toward 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) took a 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 even the worst criminal of all time was not born a criminal; that empathizing with a child's unhappy beginnings does not imply exoneration of the cruel acts he later commits, and finally, the fact that a situation is ubiquitous does not absolve us from examining it. "On the contrary," she continues, "we must examine it for the very reason that it is or can be the fate of each and every one of us." Dr. Miller, after an extensive and scholarly study of the life of Adolph Hitler beginning 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 and accepted him and his anger before it was turned in upon himself, where in time it burned out of control, would it have become the fiery cauldron of rage and hate that destroyed millions and himself? It may be my heightened awareness on the subject that I hear so clearly, but I believe I hear in that question a plea for what Carl Rogers has described as unconditional positive regard, particularly as it relates to the rearing and nurturing of children. I hear in it a strong statement of the effectiveness, socially and even politically, of meeting the pervasive and persistent need of human beings for unconditional positive regard, somewhere, sometime, from someone, and the terrible consequences of what appears to be complete lack of response to that need. Alice Miller has forced me to look with clear eyes at what I have learned from Carl Rogers about regard for the person by right of our being human, and to listen to that person deeply before 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 and others. 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 has broadened in recent years to include a wide range of relationships and is referred to as the person-centered approach to 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 from another 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 a therapist, 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 or significant relationship is the intent.

6. It is my present opinion that unconditional positive regard is an attitude varying along a continuum from intimate and 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 in diplomacy and negotiations as well as a marked -positive, or negative and destructive, influence on personal relationships.

8. As a result of this inquiry I have become firm in the opinion that unconditional positive regard, once it has reached into intimate and significant relationships in one's personal life, also impinges upon and finally pervades the attitude one holds in response to others along the continuum. Absence or presence of this way of relating to others determines the 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 living experience. 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 convictions and leave room for the other's, I am learning to live unconditional positive regard in a wide range of relationships. Hypotheses and opinions are tentative, but it is at the times when I am thus open to my real self, to others and to new experience that I feel best about myself and others, feel most effective as a person and 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 Consulting Psychology, 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 Social Context. 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).