Another New Publication: Elliott & Freire (2007)

Entry for Oct 29 2007:

Gene Gendlin founded Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice & Training, the house journal of the Division of Psychotherapy of the American Psychological Association. Since then it has had its ups and down, but recently it has been flourishing under the editorship of Charlie Gelso, a colleague of Clara Hill's at the University of Maryland. Last year, Charlie asked me to write a short piece for a special section of the journal marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Carl Rogers’ famous paper on the facilitative conditions. I wrote back to Charlie asking if there were any classical person-centred folks writing commentary pieces. The answer was no. Because this offended my sense of fairness, I invited my classical colleague Beth Freire to co-author the piece with me, with each of us presenting our own view of Rogers (1957) in a kind of dialogue. Charlie got a “twofer”, and Beth and I got the experience of collaborating on the paper, which turned out to be a very nice experience. As with Elliott & Greenberg (2007), the hardest part turned out to be working within the page limit, but we managed, and were very pleased with the result, cited below with the abstract.

Elliott, R., & Freire, E. (2007). Classical Person-Centered and Experiential Perspectives on Rogers (1957). Psychotherapy, 3, 285-288.

Abstract. Rogers (1957) foreshadows the later development of the person-centered approach in North America and elsewhere. In this paper, we present contrasting perspectives on the legacy of this key paper: First, from the perspective of classical person-centered therapy, Freire describes the context for this key paper within the wider frame of Rogers’ body of work and emphasizes its continuing importance and relevance. Second, Elliott offers a personal history from the point of view of a psychotherapy researcher and process-experiential therapist. These two perspectives represent two major and distinct views of Rogers’ legacy from within his direct intellectual and therapeutic descendents.