The purpose of this current paper is to go on a journey of exploration into how a Person Centred

therapist can enable their clients to grow into self actualised healthy people by facilitating the right
conditions for growth in the here and now of the therapeutic process. We will look at core values
and beliefs of Person centred therapy, the setting and circumstances that promote a client’s mature
development and adequate functioning and the skills a PC therapist ought to have to facilitate the
latter circumstances and develop rapport with the client.

Furthermore we will explore how a client can benefit from a Psychodynamic and Analytical
approach in understanding their past and the underlying issues and reasons for their distress and
unwanted behaviours and how to move away from these predicaments and develop a better self for
the future. We will delve into psychodynamic theoretical concepts and the techniques employed
that bring about beneficial changes in a client’s personality and life, with an emphasis on the future
and the process of individuation, a concept coined by Carl Gustav Jung.

The earliest ideas of Person Centred Therapy were introduced by humanistic psychologist Carl
Rogers in the early 1940s who adopted and promoted a non- directive style of therapy focused on
the relationship between counsellor and client, a relationship where the former removes judgment
and evaluation so that the latter may feel completely accepted and thus move towards being
oneself, that self which one truly is. On his ideas a foundation has been laid of fundamental tenets of
Person Centred Therapy whereas every individual is seen as having a constantly unfolding unique
personality with a self actualising tendency which is always in a state of becoming and striving
towards growth and betterment. Individuals’ behaviour is seen as motivational or expressive with a
capacity to draw on an internal frame of reference to determine a moral sense and to ascribe
meaning and direction to their life.

Rogers describes people as constantly changing and evolving, ‘they are in flux, and seem more
content to continue in this flowing current... The characteristic movement, I have said, is for the client
to permit himself freely to be the changing, fluid, process which he is’ (C. Rogers, 1961, p. 181) and in
order for people to reach this self actualised real self the therapist must facilitate certain conditions.

One of the central dimensions and most important aspects of the therapeutic relationship in PCT
and any form of therapy really is empathy, which involves a renunciation from the therapist of their
own frame of reference and adopting that of the client so that they can experience the world as the
client does from the inside. Empathy is an important process as it enables the therapist to
understand the client’s feelings and make the appropriate remarks that fit in just right with the
client’s mood without doubting what the client means.

A second condition is the experience by the PC counsellor of feelings of unconditional positive regard
towards their client which ‘involves an acceptance of and a caring for the client as a separate person,
with permission for him to have his own feelings and experiences and to find his own meaning in
them’ (C. Rogers, 1961, p. 283). This attitude of acceptance should be manifested towards all clients
regardless of what they say and how they behave as it fosters feelings of worth and self acceptance
within themselves.

The state of being congruent refers to a matching of experience with awareness .When the therapist
is fully and accurately aware of what they are experiencing in each moment of their relationship with
the client, when what they are feeling inside is reflective of how they are behaving they experience a
state of congruency. ‘I have found that the more I can be genuine in the relationship, the more
helpful it will be. This means that I need to be aware of my own feelings, in so far as possible, rather
than presenting an outward facade of one attitude, while actually holding another attitude at a
deeper or unconscious level.’ (C. Rogers , 1961, p.33).

A therapist can be empathetic, congruent and have unconditional positive regard for his clients but
without the right skills they may not be able to effectively communicate with their clients. Some of
the main communications skills which are of monumental significance in a Person centred
therapeutic relationship are active listening , paraphrasing, reflection and summarising and by
making use of these skills the therapist creates a “safe” space for the client where they feel
understood and can make more sense of their own experience. By actively listening to the client the
therapist has the capacity to hear in detail what the client is saying, how they are saying it and also
that which is left unsaid. Paraphrasing what the client is saying, sometimes using their own words
and phraseology brings focus on a particular aspect of the client’s narrative and enables them to pay
attention to a specific area providing them with an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and
implications of what they are saying and move forward with the exploration of their difficulty.
Reflecting back what the client is saying without adding anything new can help the client make
greater meaning of their experience and move forward with their narrative. Summaries condense or
crystallise the essence of what the client is saying and feeling and sums up the emerging main
themes of the client’s narrative. The technique of summarising can be employed when the client is
experiencing emotional distress as it may help them focus and prioritise scattered thoughts and
feelings and move the therapeutic process forward; to review the work done up to that point or to
bring a session to a close, by drawing together the main threads that were discussed.

A client will often seek therapy for a problem that seems to be stemming from present difficulties
in their life but more often than not it will resurface that their difficulty to cope with life at present is
connected to things that happened in their past. In order to move into the future and self actualise
the client might first need to explore what in their past still has an influence on their present
circumstances and how their past is affecting their beliefs and behaviours toward themselves and
the world around them, or in other words their reality.

To help a client gain a better understanding of how their past is affecting their present life a
therapist can adopt a psychodynamic perspective and view the client’s difficulties in the light of
conscious and unconscious, internal conflicts, defence mechanisms, complexes, stage fixation,
transference and counter transference.

These concepts have been formulated and developed by Sigmund Freud who revolutionised
psychology with his psychoanalytical theory at the end of the 19 th century. He believed that the mind
has both a Conscious, the part of our mind which we are aware of and accept, and an Unconscious
which is a part of our mind over which we do not have conscious control that determines, in part,
how we think and behave. Freud believed that this hidden part of ourselves builds up over the years
through repression which can be defined as a pushing down into the unconscious, events and
feelings that cause so much anxiety and tension that our conscious mind cannot deal with them. In
order to cope with anxiety and negative thoughts and emotions people comes up with many
strategies which Freud has named defence mechanisms aimed at protecting the conscious mind
from these painful thoughts. There are many known defence mechanisms to date, some of the most
commonly employed ones are : denial – not accepting the painful reality; displacement: redirecting
one’s negative emotions from an object or person to a less threatening one; projection: believing
that the feelings one has toward someone else are actually held by the other person and directed at
oneself ; reaction formation: expressing the opposite of how one truly feels; regression: returning to
an earlier, comforting form of behaviour; rationalisation: coming up with a beneficial result of an
undesirable occurrence; intellectualisation: undertaking an academic, unemotional study of the
topic that generated pain to begin with; sublimation: channelling ones negative emotions towards a
productive goal etc. These are only a few of the many existing defence mechanisms proposed by
Freud and his predecessors and the therapeutic value of knowing how they operate lays in the fact
that by making them known to the client and with the support of the therapist they can
subsequently look at which ones they utilise, what is it that triggers them being employed and what
are the emotions which are being avoided. This can lead to a better understanding of the client’s
pattern behaviour and an insight into how these behaviours where instilled to begin with leading to
more controlled, genuine reactions in the future.

Freud also believed that personality consists of three parts: The ID, the EGO and the SUPEREGO. The
ID resides in the unconscious and contains instincts and psychic energy, where instincts are divided
in the Life instinct or Eros which is most evidenced as a desire for sex and the Death Instinct or
Thanatos seen in aggression. These instincts, Freud posits, are driven by a psychic energy which he
called Libido. The ID is propelled by the pleasure principle and seeks immediate gratifications, its
needs are urgent, immediate and unrestrained, seeking expression and pleasure and one may
observe suck behaviour in babies who demand to be fed and attended to immediately.

The EGO, which is to be found part in the conscious and part in the unconscious mind, is the next
personality part to develop and it is guided by the reality principle with the purpose to negotiate
between the desired of the ID and the limitations of the environment. The last part of the
personality to develop is the superego and like the ego, the superego operates on both the
conscious and unconscious level. Around the age of five, children begin to develop a conscience and
to think in terms of what is right and wrong and this sense of conscience, according to Freud, are
their superego .The ego acts as a mediator between the id and the superego, balancing the
instinctual desires with real life.

Awareness of these concepts can help a client understand where their internal conflicts stem from
and balance their instinctual needs, fulfilling their pleasure principle without being overpowered by
a dominant super ego.

Another important aspect of psychodynamic theory is transference, where clients redirect strong
emotions felt toward people with whom they had troubling relationships in their past, often their
parents, unto their therapist. By analysing the dynamic of the relationship and presenting it to the
client, the latter can reach a deep insight on how they relate to other people and the reasons behind
their behaviour.

Carl Gustav Jung is one of Freud’s disciples and although initially he was a member of the
Psychoanalytical movement he eventually removed himself from the latter and formed his own
theories and psychological school of thought: The Analytical model of the human psyche. Jung
agreed with Freud on the existence of Libido as a life force and the existence of a Conscious and
Unconscious mind however, in his view the Unconscious mind is both personal and collective. Jung
believed that an individual’s personal unconscious contains the painful or threatening memories and
thoughts the person does not wish to confront and contrasted it with the collective unconscious
which is passed down through the species and, according to Jung, explains certain similarities we see
between cultures. The collective unconscious contains archetypes that Jung defined as universal
concepts we all share as part of the human species. Some of the most important Archetypes
identified by Jung are Persona and the Shadow.

The persona, a term borrowed from Ancient Greek which literally translates as mask, is that facet of
our personality that we show to others, the person we wish to be seen as, the social facet of our
personality. If the persona archetype is not well developed in a person they might be seen as
awkward and lacking social grace whereas at the other extreme too rigid a persona may mean a
complete denial of one’s own personality and identification with that which one wants to be rather
than that which one truly is.

The shadow is ‘the inferior being in ourselves, the one who wants to do all the things that we do not
allow ourselves to do, who is everything that we are not... the primitive, uncontrolled, and animal
part of ourselves’ ( F .Fordham, 1966, p. 49). All the desires we are ashamed of, all the emotions and
wants which are incompatible with the ideals set by society, Jung says, are repressed and denied
creating thus the shadow. He believes that it is useless to try to deny the shadow and the individual
has to find a way to live with their “dark side”. ‘To accept the shadow involves considerable moral
effort and often the giving up of cherished ideals, but only because the ideals where raised too high
or based upon an illusion.

‘Trying to live as better and nobler people than we are involves us in endless hypocrisy and deceit,
and imposes such a strain on us that we often collapse and become worse than we need have been’
(F .Fordham, 1966, p. 51).

When a person becomes acquainted and reconciled with the sides of their personality they have
initially not acknowledged and repressed the process of individuation happens which is a person’s
attempt at integration, at becoming a whole.

‘The individuation process is sometimes described as a psychological journey; it can be a tortuous and
slippery path...in this journey the traveller must first meet with his shadow, and learn to live with this
formidable and often terrifying aspect of himself: there is no wholeness without a recognition of the
opposites’ (F .Fordham, 1966, p. 51).

Another major contribution to Psychology was Jung’s idea of I Introverted and Extroverted
personality types. The extraverted type is seen as sociable, motivated by outside factors and
influenced by the environment or is characterised by an outward flowing of libido as Jung might say.

At the opposite end libido flows inwardly and the introverted person concentrates their attention
upon subjective factors, the predominating influence being inner necessity rather than the external
world.

Today a person is seen as having the potential to be either introverted or extraverted, with perhaps
a tendency towards one of the dispositions rather than being exclusively one or another. Knowledge
of a client’s personality type can help them understand the reasons why they may be unhappy in
their work or relationship, as an example if someone used to have a job which did not involve
interacting with people much and a social aspect has been added to the job itself, they may
experience emotional distress and not know why whereas if a therapist would make known the
concept of introverted and extraverted personality types the client may acquire beneficial insight
which can help them take a decision without feeling guilt or other distressing emotions .

Each client will present themselves to therapy with their unique life story and personality, wishing
more often than not to overcome a difficulty and gain mental and physical well being. In this current
paper we have shown how the Person Centred therapeutic model can help a client understand their
current life situation by facilitating a safe environment where they can feel heard and accepted,
what in their past may have contributed to their difficulties and how they can move forward into a
self actualised , individuated , whole person.

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