Person Centred Counselling - Evaluate the criticisms of Person Essay

Person Centred Counselling - Evaluate the criticisms of Person Centered therapy - Essay Example By adapting a non-judgmental acceptance and listening, Deco and Vanteenkiste (2004, p. 24) reveal that therapists manage to promote change. However, trusting that the client will establish their own solutions to their problems introduces lots of criticism that refers to client-centred therapy as dependent on very little theory. This paper evaluates the criticisms against client-centred therapy.  While Rodgers established an approach that focused on clients as human beings that can take full control of their lives, critics such as behaviourists argued that humans are organism that only respond to stimuli and whose habits are only learnt from experiences. Rodgers contradicted this approach to argue that humans are not helpless, but are responsible for their own conduct and behaviour (Deci & Ryan, 2000, p. 228). One psychoanalyst contradicted by Rodgers was Freud, who viewed humans as always being captives of primitive passions that commence from fixations experienced during childhood only to become powerful biological drives. Unlike Rodgers, Freud’s emphasis was on humans’ dark side that constituted of damaging instincts that beyond human control. On the contrary, Deco and Ryan (2000, p. 228) viewed Rogers’ approach as wrong because humans have choices, and control over themselves, thus they are not just characteristically weak and easily broken. Furthermore, humans do not always require assistance from counsellors and experts to enable them amend their weakened lives (Cramer, 2003, p. 86).