Existential vs. Person-Centred Counselling: A Critical Engagement

This comparison of person-centred counselling and existential counselling takes the form of a critical engagement with each approach, from the perspective of my own developing theoretical outlook and clinical practice, both of which are increasingly informed by elements of both traditions. In other words, it is not a dispassionate comparison of two therapeutic approaches, conducted by an unseen third party. Rather, it represents my own critical assessment of each; it is, in some sense, as much about me and my own developing outlook as it is about either approach per se.

Five years ago, I opened a book with the following statement:

One of my clearest memories of early childhood finds me sitting alone in my bedroom at twilight when I was about five, pondering a curious family of questions. Why does the universe exist? What if it didn't? What would be left over if it stopped existing? Wouldn't something still exist? What colour would it be? Even now, the questions elicit the same peculiar twisting sensation from my stomach. And now, as then, I find the basic mystery of why anything exists the most unfathomable of all.

By "opened a book", I mean, literally, that is how I opened the book. The quotation is from page 1 of Mulhauser (1998). Having experienced my own share of psychological challenges much like other people, I retain an abiding conviction that many of the challenges which carry the greatest psychological impact are not actually themselves psychological in nature, but existential. Those challenges are about finding meaning in existence or, more precisely, about creating meaning for ourselves within a universe which does not appear to come with an explanation, a reason, an answer to the question why?, or any obvious source of intrinsic meaning which could somehow do the creative work for us. It is for this reason that I believe counselling can be about more than incremental amelioration of psychopathology or 'disturbance'; it is for this reason that I have chosen existential counselling as a target of this critical engagement.[1]

Brief Overview of Existential Counselling

By way of introduction, I will briefly summarize the existential approach to counselling, providing a backdrop for the more serious discussion which follows. A somewhat more detailed explanation of the existential approach can be found on the page on Existential Counselling, while the page on Person-Centred Counselling offers more details on that approach.

Underlying Theory

Largely dispensing with psychological constructs and theories about personality, the existential approach characterizes human beings as creatures of continual change and transformation, living essentially finite lives in a context of personal strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and limitations created by their environment. With attention given to this entire context of the client's life, the existential approach is all about exploring meaning and value and learning to live authentically -- that is, in accordance with one's own ideals, priorities and values. Authentic living means being true to oneself and honest about one's own possibilities and limitations, continually creating one's own identity even in the face of deep uncertainty about everything in the future except for the eventual arrival of our own death. Authentic living means living deliberately, rather than by default.

Psychological health, from an existential perspective, is characterized by an ability to navigate the complexities of one's life, the world, and one's relationships with the world. Disturbance, on the other hand, is taken as the outcome of avoiding life's truths and of working under the shadow of other people's expectations and values. Self deception about these factors provides a powerful psychological defence mechanism. Existential counselling maintains that disturbance is an inevitable experience for virtually everyone; the question is not so much how to avoid it as it is how to face it with openness and a willingness to engage with life rather than a tendency to retreat, withdraw or refrain from responsibility.

Therapeutic Approach

The role of the existential therapist is really to facilitate the client's own encounter with himself, to work alongside him in the job of exploring and understanding better his values, assumptions and ideals. The therapist is concerned to engage seriously with what matters most to the client, to avoid imposing her own judgements, and to help the client to elucidate and elaborate on his own perspective, with an ultimate view to the client's being able to live life well and in his own way.

Existential counselling places great emphasis on the therapist's responsibility to be aware of -- and to question -- her own biases and prejudices. The therapist must be able to set aside as much as possible her pre-conceptions and to encounter the client's world with an open mind. The therapist brings a sort of deliberate naivete to the therapeutic relationship, with a goal of understanding the client's meaning rather than her own and recognizing the client's assumptions and underlying life themes with a clarity which the client may not yet be able to muster. The therapist will be sensitive to and help the client explore his weaknesses, limitations and responsibilities as well as his strengths, opportunities and freedoms. Above all, she will value the meaning which the client creates in his own emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and personal history.

In the course of exploring the client's world, the therapist may appeal to a 4-part framework encompassing the client's existence in:

1. the physical dimension of the natural world, the body, health and illness;
2. the social dimension of public relationships;
3. the psychological or personal dimension, where we experience our relationship with ourselves as well as intimacy with others; and
4. the spiritual dimension of ideals, philosophy and ultimate meaning.

Crucially, however, this framework of four dimensions is not imposed on the client by the therapist; it simply informs the therapist's understanding of the client's world so that, for instance, if a client never mentioned intimate relationships, the therapist would become aware of a deficiency in her understanding of the client's personal dimension.

The existential approach seeks clarity and meaning in all these dimensions and thus, in a sense, it begins with a significantly broader view of human existence than approaches which focus on specific psychological mechanisms or which focus on the self as a meaningful entity, separable from its relations and interactions with the surrounding world.[2]

Theoretical Commitments and Underlying Assumptions

Authors differ in their views on the underlying assumptions of person-centred theory,[3] but the central features of Carl Rogers's own beliefs are well expressed in his major theoretical treatise (Rogers 1959), one of his main formulations of the core conditions (Rogers 1957), and the summary of the person-centred approach published very late in his life (Rogers 1986). In terms of existential counselling, several authors are available, but the most accessible resources to my knowledge are van Deurzen (2002a) and van Deurzen (2002b); van Deurzen-Smith (1997) offers some entry into the more philosophical underpinnings of the approach, including the work of several existential philosophers.

It is more than an interesting historical footnote that the philosopher probably most frequently mentioned by Rogers -- and always in very approving terms -- also contributes significantly to the thought underlying existential counselling: Soren Kierkegaard.[4] And authors like Rollo May and Paul Tillich strongly influenced the development of both US existential thought and the person-centred approach; as van Deurzen observes, there are "obvious existential elements" in the person-centred approach (van Deurzen 2000, pp. 331). My intent, however, is not to develop historical connections between the two traditions; nor is it to paint a complete theoretical picture of either. Rather, I will pick out some specific underlying assumptions and explore them in more detail.

Personality Theory and Disturbance

Rogers's major theoretical treatise sets out an over-arching view of personality development and of the creation and maintenance of psychological disturbance which informs essentially all of person-centred practice. Existential counselling, by contrast, eschews over-arching theories of personality, and it is significant that so, too, does virtually all of modern psychology. Psychologist Charles Legg, after observing that half a century ago, Carl Rogers was at the forefront of empirical research in psychology, notes that "Rogers' approach reflects the intellectual roots of psychology in 'modernism', the belief that it is possible to have all-encompassing theories of the physical and social world that would permit 'technological' fixes to a wide range of social problems" (Legg 1998, p. 3). He goes on:

Counselling's initial concern with comprehensive theories fitted with the intellectual ethos of its day but, since then, mainstream psychology has become more modest while counselling has retained its commitment to theories, thus staying rooted in the psychology of the 1940s and 1950s. By the middle of the twentieth century, academic psychologists had begun to lose faith in universal models as they collapsed under the weight of contradictory evidence and conceptual analysis. (Legg 1998, p. 3)

In this respect, psychology has moved on, while counselling has not. The empirical foundations of person-centred personality theory are virtually never discussed in the modern literature: even research on the core conditions as predictors of therapeutic outcome[5] virtually never addresses the underlying personality theory itself. In my view, were Rogers at the peak of his career today, he would appeal to current empirical research in psychology to overhaul radically the received wisdom of the person-centred mainstream. It is ironic that some followers of one of the last century's greatest empiricists have, in this respect, become just that -- followers -- and have shied away from thawing out the icy innards of frozen theory.

This does not mean that the person-centred approach is just wrong about personality theory. But it does mean, in my view, that person-centred personality theory should be taken only as a useful background heuristic and not by any means as the bedrock of the person-centred approach.

Certainly the existential approach escapes the criticisms above levelled at person-centred theory, but it does so only at the cost of avoiding the engagement in the first place: there is no personality theory to question! What does it have to offer instead, and what does it have to say about disturbance? The most important point for present purposes is that whereas the 'self-concept" occupies a central theoretical niche for the person-centred approach, the existential approach focuses on the relationships a person has both with himself and with the world around him. While the person-centred approach focuses on the development of the self under more or less hospitable conditions (correlating, roughly, with the relative availability of positive regard), the existential approach focuses on the individual's relationships.[6] When the individual does not manage to navigate those relationships effectively -- or when the truths embodied in those relationships are avoided -- disturbance occurs. Effective navigation means being open to whatever life brings, both good and bad. This recognition and determination to integrate diametrically opposed poles runs throughout existential thought and in this context leads van Deurzen to comment:

It is only in facing both positive and negative poles of existence that we generate the necessary power to move ahead. Thus well-being is not the naive enjoyment of a state of total balance given to one by Mother Nature and perfect parents. It can only be negotiated gradually by coming to terms with life, the world and oneself. (van Deurzen 2002b, 184)

Here van Deurzen's allusion to "life, the world and oneself" also serves as a reminder that for the existential approach, disturbance may not be just about impaired openness to current experience; it may be about existence, meaning and temporality. The existential counsellor readily acknowledges that someone might be relatively free of the kinds of distortions, denials, conditions of worth and other hallmarks of disturbance which populate person-centred theory and yet still experience existential angst. One might enjoy relatively healthy psychological functioning with respect to present experience and yet fail to apprehend one's own life's meaning. In the person-centred framework, the (usually unstated) assumption seems to be that once a person has overcome their psychological challenges, such difficulties automatically disappear.

Locus of Evaluation, Authenticity and the Fully-Functioning Person

The existential analogue of the person-centred notion of being fully-functioning is authenticity, and both approaches place significant emphasis on the internalization of the individual's locus of evaluation in achieving authenticity[7] (although existential thought does not use the actual term 'locus of evaluation'). As van Deurzen (2002a, p. xi) suggests, "the fundamental objective of the approach is to enable people to rediscover their own values, beliefs and their life's purpose". She reinforces this emphasis on the client's own direction-setting:

It is crucial for the therapist to remember that nobody can determine what another person's commitment ought to be. Two people in similar circumstances might feel moved in opposite directions. Suggesting positive action to a client will be likely to forestall her own exploration of her present situation and it will thus set her back rather than move her on. (van Deurzen 2002a, 185)

This emphasis on keeping the client at the centre of the counselling task and on promoting the development of what the person-centred approach calls the client's own internal locus of evaluation permeates existential thinking. The locus of evaluation is just as directly connected with authenticity for the existential approach as it is for the person centred-approach: "This is what authentic living is all about: becoming increasingly capable of following the direction that one's conscience indicates as the right direction and thus becoming the author of one's own destiny" (van Deurzen 2002a, p. 43).[8]

While the two approaches' views of authentic living are also broadly in keeping with one another, the most notable difference centres on time. Although Rogers refers to the client's "increasing use of all his organic equipment to sense, as accurately as possible, the existential situation within and without" (Rogers 1961, p. 191), there is little explicitly temporal about his view of full functioning. Emphasizing the importance of experience in the moment, the temporal context characteristic of the existential approach -- a context of continual change and transformation and ultimate death -- makes no appearance in Rogers's explication of full functioning. To be sure, Rogers is very clear that the fully-functioning person is in a state of change, but that state is deliberately stripped of temporal context: "he lives more completely in this moment, but learns that this is the soundest living for all time" (Rogers 1961, p. 192).

This focus on the 'moment-within-change' is akin to taking the first derivative of a function, like noting the instantaneous velocity of a moving object. It reflects the state-dominated view of cognitive functioning and of computation shared by Rogers's contemporaries in the cognitive sciences, a view partly displaced from cognitive science in subsequent decades by the reintegration of dynamical systems theory. (See Mulhauser 1998, pp. 109-117 for a treatment of this topic specifically with regard to the notion of 'mental states'.) In my view, this now largely outmoded absence of temporal context marks a significant weakness of the person-centred approach.

The Actualizing Tendency

The question of the fundamental nature of human beings carries deep significance, whatever theoretical approach one considers. Van Deurzen's description captures one facet of the distinction between the two approaches very nicely:

Humanistic approaches perceive human beings as basically positive creatures who develop constructively, given the right conditions. The existential position is that people may evolve in any direction, good or bad, and that only reflection on what constitutes good and bad makes it possible to exercise one's choice in the matter. (van Deurzen 2002a, pp. 50-51)

Superficially appealing analogies about potatoes[9] or even about biological systems in general have unfortunately served to stifle rather than to stimulate serious engagement with Rogers's view of the actualizing tendency, captured but understated in van Deurzen's first sentence above. The problem with potato analogies is that potatoes don't have minds. It is one thing to extrapolate from the tendency of potatoes to fulfil their biological and physiological potential to the tendency of mammals and even human beings to fulfil their biological and physiological potential.[10] But it is an altogether different matter to extrapolate from the biological and physiological tendencies of potatoes to the psychological tendencies of human beings. Psychological disturbance is entirely consistent with the fulfilment of physiological potential; in other words, it is entirely conceivable that a human being could fulfil physiological potential even while undergoing deleterious psychological change.

Indeed, to the extent that biological analogies derive their ultimate authority from evolutionary theory, it is even worse than this: not only is there scant evidence to suggest that selective pressures for ontogenetic psychological fulfilment exist at all, but there are good prima facie reasons for believing selective pressures will have favoured the deployment of a range of psychological defence mechanisms which promote immediate functioning even while compromising longer term psychological health! Rogers himself acknowledges (Rogers 1959) that mechanisms such as denial and distortion may serve a specific (beneficial) purpose. Evolution cares only whether an organism is expediently-served now, not whether expedient functioning now is going to lead to negative psychological consequences later.

But perhaps most interesting of all is a very simple observation which this discussion prompts. Namely, one may read Rogers's view as implying that if one is making bad, self-defeating choices, then this is a sign of disturbance (or, at the least, a sign that the actualizing tendency is not being expressed). Again, the existential approach does not support this implication, allowing that one may be functioning relatively well from the standpoint of psychological health yet still be making bad choices. One obvious alternative interpretation of Rogers is simply that the actualizing tendency does not necessarily carry a positive psychological bias, only a bias toward the full expression of biological potential. Neither horn of this apparent dilemma seems immediately palatable to the person-centred theorist: either Rogers views inexpert living as tantamount to psychopathology, or the actualizing tendency does not carry anything like the positive psychological bias his followers so often attribute to it.

It is a pity to me that the subtle shades of meaning surrounding Rogers's notion of the actualizing tendency receive comparatively little attention within the person-centred literature. Either this bit of "theory" is central to one's actual practice of counselling, or it is not. If it is central, then it deserves careful attention and exploration. If it is not central, then I wonder what is?

Therapeutic Practice

The relationship between these two approaches to counselling becomes more complex when seen the through the eyes of practical application.

The Role of Expertise and Skills

Van Deurzen apparently has no qualms about positioning the existential counsellor as an expert: "From the outset the therapeutic relationship will be strictly defined as a professional one, where the practitioner is the expert, consulted and employed by the client" (van Deurzen 2002a, p. 34). Elsewhere, she indicates that "existential therapists are required to be wise and capable of profound and wide-ranging understanding of what it means to be human" (van Deurzen 2002b, p. 198). The notion that the therapist should lay claim to wisdom is unpalatable to me (and I think I can hear Carl Rogers turning in his grave).

It appears to me that this view of the therapist does not follow naturally from other parts of the theoretical apparatus of existential counselling, but is instead bolted on as an additional requirement. I.e., nothing in the rest of the existential approach appears to demand the therapist be wise, only that the therapist must be capable of facilitating the client's own exploration of what matters to him. We can reasonably infer that the therapist requires certain skills of philosophical reflection and must have the psychological capacity to follow the client's explorations throughout the whole realm of human experience, from emotion to intellect. But the having of such skills does not seem to me to imply that the therapist is actually wise (any more than being relatively free of psychological disturbance implies that one grasps the meaning of life).

Person-centred approaches, of course, are typically taken to abhor expertise of all kinds. In my view, there is significant internal inconsistency in this attitude, and if this were another article, I would love to address that topic, but instead I would like to focus on what person-centred theory doesn't say about the role of expertise. My concern centres on what person-centred theory doesn't say about the actual therapeutic quality of what the therapist delivers to the client in the form of congruent responses. Much attention is paid to congruence, as one of Rogers's core conditions, but very little is paid to what is actually said when being congruent. That is, attention centres on the form of the response -- is it congruent? -- and not on the content of that response. The received wisdom seems to be that if the therapist just does a good job of being congruent, and if the therapist is herself accepting and empathic and relatively free of psychological disturbance (or at least self-aware about her areas of psychological disturbance), then it won't really matter so much what she actually says.

The problem for the person-centred approach is that in many areas, it is possible empirically to categorize responses as being generally more facilitative or generally less facilitative (e.g., in the case of sexual abuse, see Draucker 2000). Yet both types of responses might well come from congruent, sensitive, empathic, relatively well-adjusted therapists! One can imagine two different therapists, each of whom does a good job of delivering the core conditions, yet who differ in their responses to a given client in a way which makes a therapeutic difference. One obvious potential differentiator between the two then becomes the knowledge which each possesses about the likelihood that a given response will be facilitative. It is difficult to conceive of how a more knowledgeable counsellor could be less helpful to a client, ceteris paribus. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of how a more knowledgeable counsellor could fail to be more helpful, ceteris paribus. If that is true, then it suggest that the person-centred rejection of expertise rests upon an unjustified assumption that increasing knowledge somehow implies impairment of a therapist's ability to deliver the core conditions -- that the ignorant therapist is somehow apt to be more empathic, congruent, or accepting (i.e., that the ceteris paribus rider is necessarily false).

So it seems that while at least one author has unnecessarily laden the existential approach with a requirement that its therapists be wise, the person-centred approach has faltered in taking its rejection of expertise to an extreme that may actually be counter-productive to clients.

In my own experience with clients interested in exploring questions of meaning, I have found that my philosophical background has enabled me to keep up, to understand more quickly, and thus to be more present and available to the client than I believe I would have been without that background. It was simply familiarity with some of the ways of thinking, intuiting, and finding meaning in emotion which clients employed which I believe helped me to make more facilitative responses than I otherwise might have. There has been no question of applying philosophical 'expertise' -- and certainly not 'wisdom'! Rather, fluency in the patterns of thought and meaning explored by clients has simply made me a better person-centred counsellor for those clients.

The Client's Frame of Reference

Questions of how closely one should adopt the client's frame of reference attract subtle discussion within the existential approach. This subtlety may be of some use to person-centred practitioners, some of whom uncritically adopt the notion that it is necessary to take up the client's frame of reference without apparently considering whether there could be anything more to the story (much like adopting congruence without complementary consideration of the therapeutic quality of congruent responses).

As van Deurzen describes:

The therapist's aim is to be able to consider the client's issues and dilemmas from a fundamentally open stance. She never assumes that she knows or understands the client's point of view completely. She will need to elicit clarification of many concepts that the client seems to take for granted and on which she appears to expect agreement with the therapist. When the client realizes that the practitioner does not automatically assume understanding, agreement or disagreement, she becomes free to investigate her own assumptions more carefully. (van Deurzen 2002a, p. 98)

In other words, the therapist does not operate uncritically from within the client's frame of reference, automatically adopting, even temporarily, all of the client's own assumptions. Obviously the existential counsellor still makes every attempt to understand exactly what the client means; but the counsellor does not automatically operate from within that position herself. Crucially, while Rogers himself has written eloquently about adopting the client's frame of reference, this notion is not implicit in the core conditions: I can see no reason whatsoever why it should be necessary to adopt the client's frame of reference oneself in order to demonstrate to the client acceptance, congruence, and most relevantly, empathy. It may make it easier to do so, for those who have difficulty holding within their minds and bodies two frames of reference simultaneously, but it should by no means be taken as a person-centred requirement![11]

In my own practice, I fairly frequently experience exchanges like the following, where I find myself responding to a client's seemingly rhetorical question in a fashion which proves facilitative:[12]

Client A: Of course he would say that, wouldn't he, because it was my fault, wasn't it?

Counsellor: I don't know. Was it your fault?

Client A: Well, yeah! I mean, I don't know. Well, I guess maybe not...

Or alternatively:

Client B: Needless to say, it feels weird not to be looking after him, because that's what's expected, isn't it --for a wife to look after her ill husband?

Counsellor: Is it?

Client B: Well, yes, that's what people assume. It's just that they don't understand the situation. It isn't normal. I think that's what bothers me: they just don't understand. Sometimes I don't even want people to know about it, because I know they won't understand, and they"ll judge me.

This sort of exchange ordinarily takes place only within the context of a long string of client expressions with which I directly express empathy, so clients are well aware that I am capable of actively grasping their own point of view and that I am not merely challenging them gratuitously. In this context, my questions can be understood in the spirit they are intended: genuine open-mindedness. Naturally, I do not wish to imply that any person-centred therapist might not make exactly the same kinds of replies, and I can think of many reasons for asking the questions apart from open-mindedness, such as a desire for clarification. Nonetheless, these brief exchanges illustrate the potential value, within a context of overall understanding, of refraining from adopting client assumptions unquestioned. And they differ noticeably from the sort of direct empathic response one might make, for example empathizing with client A's feeling of being at fault or with client B's feeling of weirdness.

Van Deurzen provides another example illustrating the existential approach's broad perspective, contrasted with wholly in-the-moment empathy and its reinforcing side effects:

Take, for instance, a client who starts out complaining about the constraints imposed by her family life. ...She may be ready to file for divorce because her feelings of extreme dissatisfaction tell her that she cannot bear this any longer. ...One could implicitly encourage her to go ahead with divorce proceedings simply by consistent (and probably quite genuine) empathy. ...Detaching oneself from the situation rather than evaluating it from the client's position clearly reveals how one-sided and erroneous such an approach would be. (van Deurzen 2002a, pp. 51-52)

Of course, from a person-centred perspective, one could reply that a congruent counsellor might remind the client of the repercussions of her contemplated course of action; i.e., a good person-centred therapist wouldn't just offer empathy. The difference is that existential counselling makes this type of feedback an explicit consideration, rather than merely hoping the counsellor will have some good sense!

Self-Awareness

Both existential and person-centred approaches emphasize the therapist's self-awareness about assumptions and judgements. In the existential context, for instance:

The existential approach assumes the importance of the client's capacity for making well-informed choices about her own life and her attitudes towards it. This places great emphasis on the need for the practitioner to be acutely aware of her professional and personal assumptions. (van Deurzen 2002a, p. 2)

What fascinates me, however, is that existential practice is entirely symmetric in emphasizing self-awareness for the client as well, whereas person-centred practice is asymmetric: trainee counsellors are inculcated with messages to self-question and to value self-awareness, but the importance of acquiring self-awareness is not explicitly promoted to the client. In a sense, existential counselling is a little like person-centred counselling training.[13] This curious asymmetry may yield different underlying messages delivered to clients. The existential message is something along the lines of, "the two of us, you and me, we are involved in the very same undertaking, coming to grips with the vagaries of life and meaning and death, although today we shall focus entirely on your undertaking and not mine". The person-centred message is something along the lines of, "the two of us, you and me, we are involved in very different undertakings, and what matters is just that I will be here with you to understand and accept you and to reflect congruently on your undertaking and not mine".

There seems to me a further difference in terms of the nature of self-awareness itself. In particular, my experience of person-centred counselling training suggests that the primary region onto which the light of self-awareness is directed is present emotion. The other two areas of feeling (divided by psychologists into emotion, mood, and desire) receive significantly less explicit attention, while broader questions about life, professional values and ideals, critical evaluations of particular aspects of counselling theory, and so forth receive less still. (When such topics are addressed, I sometimes get the impression they are judged as 'all in the head' and are somehow less important than present emotions.) My own personal experience of person-centred training is that 'self-awareness' is narrow 'part-of-self-awareness', and it clashes significantly with my own view of what it means to be self-aware. A frequent refrain of person-centred training is to embrace the 'whole person', but my own experience suggests the person-centred approach sometimes comes up short of its own aspirations. There are many potential explanations for this, but one might be that it represents an (erroneous, in my view) inference about overall self-awareness from Rogers's descriptions of therapeutic movement as coinciding with clients" discussing emotions in the present --i.e., that if clients in therapy move toward discussing emotions in the present, then that is what we should do in counselling training in an effort to become self-aware.

The existential concept of self-exploration, much more akin to my own view of self-awareness, has been nicely captured:

It involves deep thinking about one's way of being so as to reach to an inwardness, which will become the core of one's actions and outward relations. This thinking is not the thinking of cerebral analysis, but the thinking of reflective attention to what is already there; it bears great similarity with meditation... Bringing to light in oneself what is already there is a matter of paying attention and respect to oneself and it is not dependent on having a high IQ. (van Deurzen 2002a, pp. 168-169)

Conclusion

It is in identifying areas of weakness highlighted in each approach by the other, as well as areas strengthened in each by a careful consideration of the insights of the other, that I find personal value in terms of developing my own therapeutic practice. The primary question for me at this stage centres on the extent to which, having located these areas, one can enhance therapeutic practice without diluting one's theoretical commitments into some kind of mushy middle ground. In some instances, the answer is straightforward: there seems no harm at all, for example, in jettisoning 'part-of-self-awareness' in favour of an existential concept of self-awareness. Likewise for the client's frame of reference: I believe therapeutic effectiveness is enahnced by taking an open stance rather than the client's stance, and I can see no reason why this should necessarily conflict with person-centred theory or any therapist's ability to deliver the core conditions (although clearly it could, if approached incompetently).

In other areas, such as the actualizing tendency and the role of over-arching theories of personality, matters are less clear. Here the question is less whether therapeutic practice can be enhanced by paying attention to the ideas of a different tradition; it is more a matter of evaluating underlying theory and clarifying a position which consistently integrates that theory with personal philosophy. In my view, person-centred theory development has long suffered from neglect, in part due to a tendency to infer (erroneously) that empirical support for relationships factors as predictors of therapeutic outcome translates directly into empirical support for underlying person-centred theory. And while existentialism itself provides a huge body of philosophical literature, existential counselling hardly fares any better than the person-centred approach in terms of offering a robust theory of counselling. I am left feeling that both are wanting and that a great deal more work will need to be done by individual practitioners evaluating their own engagement with either.