“Evaluate the claim that Person-Centred Therapy offers the therapist all that he/she will need to treat clients”

The humanistic movement was established as a way to expand and improve upon the two other schools of thought; behaviourism and psychoanalysis, which had, up until the first half of the 20th century dominated psychology. An American theorist called Abraham Maslow began to research creativity in humans through art and science. He first introduced his concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation”. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is most often displayed as a pyramid. The lowest levels of the pyramid are made up of the most basic needs, for example food and shelter, while the more complex needs are …show more content…

Often there is conflict between the growth of the self and the needs of significant others around the person. The organismic, or real, self lies within each person and, though it may become buried beneath the self-concept, Rogers believed that it could always be accessed, given appropriate conditions. It is based upon the premise that we are experts on ourselves and that our real self becomes distorted by our early experiences of life, when we may receive messages from significant adults which appear to conflict with how we are feeling. An example of this would be the child who falls down, hurts his/her knee and begins to cry. The message the child hears from their parent/carer is, ‘Don’t cry. It doesn’t hurt that much. Big boys/girls don’t cry’. Rogers believed that we have a need for positive regard from others, which is a learned need, developed in early infancy. If a relationship is warm, genuine and fully accepting, Rogers contended that the person could once again find their real self and begin to move towards their full potential. Conditions of worth are the judgements put on us by both ourselves and others. If these judgements are made by important and powerful people, we tend to absorb them into our consciousness. Conditions of worth are usually established by parents and other significant adults. This can lead us to believe that we must fulfil these expectations to be valued by others.