Person-Centred Therapy

 Person-Centred Therapy
 Keith Tudor and Mike Worrall,
 Routledge
 ISBN 1583911243,
 £18.99

 STAR RATING: 3/5




This ambitious work aims for a comprehensive, in-depth review of the theory of person-centred therapy, writes Chris Neill.

Updating the theory of the US psychologist Carl Rogers, the book also draws on ideas from many other fields and disciplines.

As a practitioner working with people with learning difficulties, I appreciated how the book reaches for a deep understanding of the complexity of human motivation as the basis for therapeutic intervention. But I was also frustrated by its academic style and by the lack of clinical material to illustrate the text. At times absorbing and stimulating – I found the chapter on “alienation” particularly thought-provoking  – the book can also be laborious. The authors are rigorous in their critique of Rogers’ theory from within a person-centred frame of reference. But they failed to give “outside” perspectives due regard.

It is valuable for teachers or advanced research students, considerably less so for the student seeking a grounding in personcentred therapy and how it relates to other approaches.

Chris Neill is a psychotherapist at Respond, a charity working with victims and perpetrators of abuse who have learning difficulties