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Mutuality in person-centered therapy: A new agenda for research and practice

Rogers (1957) hypothesized that, if two people are in psychological contact, and when the client is incongruent and minimally perceives the therapist's empathy, unconditional positive regard and congruence, this would be necessary and sufficient for constructive personality change. In this paper we propose that this research hypothesis, while a helpful one for testing theory, has inadvertently resulted in only a partial exploration of the process of person-centered psychotherapy insofar as it conceptualizes the therapeutic relationship as the provision of empathy and unconditional positive regard from the therapist to the client. Therefore, research has tended to focus only as far as client perception of the therapist conditions and little attention has been paid to the process of and requirements for “receiving” the conditions. In other writings, however, Rogers (1959) described the therapeutic relationship as consisting of bi-directional, reciprocal, and mutual interaction between client and therapist. Receiving the conditions is a worthwhile area for research and study and can inform the development of practice. We suggest that for the conditions to be actively received the contribution of the client to the therapeutic relationship has to be considered. The result is a new hypothesis in which experiences of mutuality are realized as a result of the client, in addition to the therapist, experiencing increasing levels of empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard. The paper concludes that person-centered psychotherapy is inherently relational and we highlight the potential and implication for mutual relating within person-centered psychotherapy.