the center of the encounter, not the therapist's interpretations. The essence of the approach is that clients have within them all that they need in order to heal and grow. What they require is a therapist who is able to facilitate that growth in certain ways (Rogers, 1980).
The therapist was to embody certain facilitative attitudes. In order to do this, he held to three basic principles, or concepts, which included therapist congruence, therapist caring or acceptance, and the therapist's empathic understanding (Rogers, 1980). The Rogerian approach has often been characterized as involving unconditional positive regard for the client.
There have been attempts to look at the application of Roger's approach in real-life. Sue and Sue (1999) reported on some of those studies, noting that RogersÆ style can be clearly distinguished from Perls', for example, and that it is correlated with his theoretical orientation. RogersÆ style emphasizes attending skills, with Rogers using minimal encouragers 53 percent of the time, restatements 11 percent of the time, interpretation, reflection, and information each 7 percent of the time.
On the other hand, Perls had a more traditional view of human beings, although his techniques were much more radical. That made it seem as though Perls represented the more significant break with the past, although Rogers is really much more outside of the mainstream in his faith in human nature and positive ontology.
For Perls, the focus was on making people self-supporting, letting go of blame. The intent was to ensure that people acknowledged, and expressed, the whole of their personalities, becoming very sensate, emotional, and self-directed people. Perls did begin as a psychoanalyst, but became extremely antagonistic to Freud and psychoanalytic techniques, which he felt led toward inauthenticity and truncation of the human personality (Perls, 1969). His theory was very direct, confrontat...