Person-Centered Therapy

Person centered therapy, sometimes abbreviated PCT, is a humanistic approach to psychotherapy developed by the psychologist Carl Rogers and colleagues beginning in the 1940s and extending into the 1980s. It emphasizes the importance of creating a therapeutic environment grounded in three core conditions, unconditional positive regard or acceptance, congruence or genuineness, and empathic understanding, and it seeks to facilitate a client's actualizing tendency, an inbuilt inclination toward growth and fulfillment, through those same three conditions of acceptance, therapist congruence, and empathic understanding.