Godfrey Barrett-Lennard

This chapter holds that self-diversity is a natural expression of our inherently complex nature and formative experience in diverse relationships. Plurality of self is evident in everyday relations and experience, is reflected in serious literature and is apparent from psychotherapy dialogue. It is also receiving support in pertinent research, though more such study is needed to closely decipher how the multi-self works. Human relationships are seen here both as engines of self-formation and as emergent from the association of selves. Self and relationship are thus viewed as interdependent partners in human life. Felt loneliness is a frequent expression of this interdependence when the self is unduly divided internally or cut off from its life in key relationships or wider systems of belonging. Selves can easily stream pass each other with little relational connection and nurture in the turbulent ‘oceans’ of complex modern societies.

Knowing how a major development began and unfolded creates the possibility of understanding it in depth. The fact that Carl Rogers was an American and that he grew up, lived and worked in particular historical times has great bearing on the nature and impact of his contribution. Already an adolescent when the USA entered the First World War, Rogers’ tertiary education and first professional steps occurred in the 1920s. He then worked full time as a practitioner psychologist through the Great Depression and 1930s, and launched into his academic career and groundbreaking contribution during the Second World War. His innovative trajectory continued to the end of his life in February 1987.

The therapeutic conditions model, influential now for 30 years (Rogers, 1957) is concerned with the agency of change, now with its course. While potent in helping to advance knowledge in its own sphere, this model's elegant economy and focus on factors seen as important at any time and throughout a helping engagement, has acted to divert attention from studying the journey or course of therapy where the feature of interest is the change and progression in process from start to conclusion...

the Relationship Inventory [RI] is a questionnaire research instrument / it also represents an approach to the study of interpersonal relationships generally, and of therapeutic or helping relationships in particular a current view of the theoretical structure of the RI interaction phases in the client-therapist dyad, corresponding to the principal RI forms gathering, scoring, and analysing RI data: practice and rationale / administering the inventory / the issue of timing in gathering RI data / scoring / norms for the RI / reliability and validity new and underused applications of the RI / life relationship environment: helping relationship baseline / family relationships and change / classroom and child-adult relationships / predicting the other's view: metaperception applications