From There and Back Again

This article describes my journey from being a radical, person-centered therapist in the 1960s to the present. In the 1960s, my colleagues and I saw therapy as a person-to-person encounter. Over the years I lost that notion and became corrupted by the idea that therapy is a process of intervening to make things happen in clients. In the 1990s, I found my way back to the idea of therapy as a meeting of persons because of a research review that showed that it was clients' investment and creativity that were primarily responsible for making therapy work and because of my experiences with clients. In the meantime, the field had aged and political developments within it, such as the empirically supported treatments movement, also influenced how I came to view myself. I conclude by giving my current view of therapy as a process in which I am not intervening but engaging in a person-to-person meeting, within which I am free to offer techniques and ideas from many different approaches if appropriate.