Experiencing Carl Rogers From the Client's Point of View: A Vicarious Ethnographic Investigation. I. Extraction and Perception of Meaning

Therapy is usually described from the therapist's point of view. It is often portrayed as a process of interventions operating on clients to produce changes in structures and processes. Even Carl Rogers has been portrayed as a directive, interventionist therapist. Despite statements that it is clients who make therapy work there are virtually no descriptions of how clients do this. In this study 2 researchers used a vicarious empathic ethnographic method to try to enter into clients' experience of Carl Rogers through transcripts of his work with 3 clients. The goal was to explore how clients actively construed the therapy encounter and used it in terms of their own purposes. Of particular interest were 3 questions: Do different clients construe "the same" therapeutic stimulus differently? (Answer: yes.) How did the 2 vicarious clients experience Carl Rogers? (1 construed him as more empathically on-target than the other, but both construed him as significantly missing with 2 out of the 3 clients.) Was Car...