Humanistic Psychology: The Person Centered Approach

The Person-centred approach is based on the theory and developed work of Doctor Carl Rogers (1902-1987), and is a non-directive counselling approach. Carl Rodgers was a humanist psychologist and the humanist approach in relation to psychology focuses on the whole person and the uniqueness of each individual. Humanistic psychology rejected other perspectives such as the behaviourist and the psychodynamic, and regarded them as dehumanizing. Humanist psychology expanded its influence throughout 1970s and 1980s and its impact can be understood in three areas: it offered a new set of values for understanding human nature and human condition, offered an expanded explanation of inquiry in the study of human behaviour and lastly it offered more methods
For example, for many service users these explanations or ideas may be unrealistic, and may prove difficult to put into practice. This is because Rodgers mainly talks about a person who is able to self-actualize or who is fully functioning, and in social work this doesn’t represent the majority of service users. Even though we explained that it could assist and generate new ideas for social workers, the explanation provided by Rodgers does not explain much about people who are unable to self-actualize and therefore it could be considered quite difficult for social workers when trying to help service users. For example, an individual who has schizophrenia, is unable to self-actualize due to their illness, and therefore in Rodgers eyes is not considered a fully functioning person. Where is the information in this approach that allows us to understand individuals, who are unable to self-actualize or who is considered not a fully functioning person and the reasons for this? Also, using this example of an individual who has schizophrenia, the main concept of person-centred approach is that the client is the best expert on themselves and is best able to heal themselves, in this instance this would not be not suitable and other approaches may be effective. I.e. medical approach. Therefore, there is restrictions with this approach in terms of social work, as due to it be client led; it is up to the client to
Firstly, we need to consider that not all problems can be solved on the basis of just focusing on the individual. For example, child neglect is a problem that would have to focus on a variety of things, not just the individual as it can be a result of various things, i.e. poverty, mental health issues or lack of support. This is a limitation to this approach, because it could be suggested to ignore important information of people problems, as its main focus is on the individual as so this may take away other areas of that person's life. There are also limitations, with the core conditions of the approach. For example, it’s very difficult for social workers to maintain all conditions in certain situations. It is suggested that unconditional positive regard is an extremely demanding attitude to develop especially in social work settings. For example, in a child abuse case, it would be very difficult for a social worker to maintain unconditional positive regard with the service user, as the social worker would not be able to accept the service user’s actions and positive regard would have to be withdrawn due to the consequences and severity of the case. This is a further imitation in social work practice as it shows it can be strenuous to develop these conditions and so is time consuming to try and do so and this is not useful in social work practice as time is