Main description:

Art Bohart is one of today's foremost theorists and practitioners of person-centred therapy. His work has influenced generations of person-centred students and practitioners, both here in the UK and in the USA, his home country. This book brings together his personal pick from the many papers he has delivered at conferences in Europe and the USA, previously unpublished. They are, as he says in his introduction, packed with ideas that have only now found their way into print. Here, he shares his thoughts on topics including wisdom in psychotherapy, the role of empathic listening, therapy as a meeting of persons, why interventionism isn't therapeutic, how to practise integratively from a person-centred point of view, therapist mindsets and assimilative integration, subjectivity in psychotherapy and psychology, client courage, hope, what isn't wrong with avoidance, and the nature of the self and change. These are all issues with which person-centred therapists grapple daily, distilled by a master of his art and presented here as powerful lessons for us all.

Contents:

Foreword by Pete Sanders, Introduction, 1. Person-centred therapy: a radical vision, 2. Enhancing personhood: working with the one who does not get ill, 3. Further meditations on clients' wisdom, 4. Empathy-based psychotherapy: developing a model of person-to-person psychotherapy, 5. Self-organising wisdom in psychotherapy: theoretical conception and early empirical investigations (co-authored with Makenna Berry Newton), 6. Some neglected insights of Carl Rogers, 7. Becoming the self that one is: an implicational view of personal change, 8. Listening to subjectivity, 9. Of mindsets and meta-perspectives: person-centred therapy and assimilative integration, 10. Listening as being, 11. The pernicious idea of avoidance, 12. Working with the internal critic.