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Client-centered therapy is often caricatured as a therapist sitting, nodding, and smiling.

Carl Rogers saw the ability of people to listen to each other as fundamental to human relationships.

Empathy, genuineness, and unconditional regard are vital for therapeutic change.

Carl Rogers is probably one of the most well-known names in psychology of all time. His work is still often featured in introductory textbooks, even though he died almost 40 years ago in 1987. He is best remembered for developing client-centered therapy in the 1940s and 1950s. At the time, it was a radical new way of doing therapy because it turned the world of therapy on its head.

Therapy was no longer something that the therapist did to a patient; it was about creating a relationship that freed the client to be an active agent for their own change. This was a truly innovative approach that went against the grain of previous psychoanalytic or behavioral therapies, and to this day, it is an idea that permeates the helping professions.

Few therapists or psychologists today will not be influenced by Rogers and his idea that it was not so much what the therapist did to a client, but the way in which they related to a client. Specifically, he is remembered for proposing that empathy, genuineness, and unconditional regard are three of the conditions that are........

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