Person-Centred Counselling in Action

Description

This bestselling book maintains the accessibility and verve of previous editions while incorporating new developments in the person-centred approach. John McLeod joins authors Dave Mearns and Brian Thorne to contribute an exciting new chapter on research relevant to the person-centred field. Review: Trainee Counsellor - I chose this as a side text to help me learn Person-Centred Therapy. Very informative. Chapter one was used as chosen text by my college. Review: A wonderful, academic book - The present reviewer wishes to convey, in terms commensurate with the magnitude of the conceptual labyrinth herein encountered, that this volume constitutes an intellectual undertaking of such syntactic density and lexical grandiosity that one begins to suspect it was authored not for the facilitation of understanding, but for the perpetuation of perpetual interpretative struggle. Mearns and Thorne embark upon a discursive expedition of formidable verbosity, wherein the reader is assailed by a concatenation of terminological intricacies, phenomenological abstractions, and epistemological contortions so elaborate that comprehension itself becomes an act of existential endurance. The very notion of “actualising tendency” appears not as an accessible psychological construct, but as a metaphysical riddle encoded within an academic dialect of perplexing baroque complexity. In seeking to elucidate the humanistic ethos of Carl Rogers, the authors achieve something arguably more impressive: they transform the noble simplicity of empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard into an impenetrable linguistic labyrinth, their sentences extending with a serpentine like convolution. Yet, in a paradox of almost cosmic proportions, this same work simultaneously manifests a profundity so resonant, so luminously edifying, that one is compelled to acknowledge its peculiar genius. For within the ornate thickets of its academic exuberance lies a subtle alchemy: concepts that first appear as indecipherable theoretical monoliths gradually reveal themselves as intricately carved pillars of psychological insight. Indeed, once the reader acclimatises to the authors’ vertiginous syntactical altitude, an unexpected intellectual exhilaration emerges a sense that one has been ushered, however bewilderingly, into the cathedral-like vastness of person-centred thought. Thus, the very verbosity that threatens to obfuscate also elevates, transmuting the act of reading into an experience bordering on the transcendent, as though the text itself were conspiring to actualise the reader through sheer linguistic audacity. Moreover, there arises, through continued immersion in this leviathan of lexical luxuriance, a peculiar gratitude - the kind that dawns only when one realises that the struggle itself is the pedagogy. It becomes evident that Mearns and Thorne have not merely written a book; they have engineered an initiation rite, an intellectual pilgrimage through which the earnest reader must navigate semantic switchbacks and conceptual cul-de-sacs, only to arrive at a destination paradoxically familiar, as though the ideas were not learned but excavated from some dormant epistemic stratum within the self. The text, in its extravagant convolution, performs a silent therapeutic gesture: it invites the reader not merely to understand person-centred theory, but to endure it, thus embodying Rogers’ ethos through experiential bewilderment. In this exquisite and confounding way, the authors succeed in articulating, albeit via a linguistic rococo flourish ,the quiet profundity of human potential, leaving the reader both exhausted and strangely ennobled, as if having completed a marathon conducted entirely in metaphors. Highly recommended!