Person-centered and experiential psychotherapy and transactional analysis – contributions of two humanistic approaches to challenging or confounded counselling situations

Abstract

ABSTRACT Both the person-centered and experiential (PCEP) and the Transactional Analysis (TA) approaches act on the assumption that the counselor would have unconditional positive regard (UPR) or an OK-OK-Position, respectively, and be real and self-disclosing. Thus, they complement each other very well. At times, counselors have to work with offensive, devaluating, passive, and otherwise challenging clients; furthermore, they can face confounded counseling tasks, e.g., having to counsel, control, evaluate or protect at the same time. Merging the central principles of PCEP – the experiential process and the encounter – with the TA focus on dysfunctional communication processes and challenging confrontations, may provide fertile ground for dissolving stuck processes in such counseling situations. Therefore, the paper presents a catalog of fourteen PCEP and TA perspectives, with examples, and unfolds their potential implications. We argue that the two approaches may enrich one another in difficult or confounded counseling situations.