Editorial

With this issue of Person Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies (PCEP) we initiate our regular publication schedule of four issues per year. This issue contains four regular articles, a review essay, and two book reviews. As with our inaugural issue, the articles once again represent a broad range of work from our tradition, from Germany to the UK to the USA.

Two of the articles (Eckert, Höger and Schwab; Rodgers) review existing bodies of research, while one article each addresses issues of practice and theory (Friedman; Cooper). Eckert, Höger and Schwab review research on Person-Centered therapy in German-speaking countries; they urge us to continue pushing for rigorous quantitative research, especially randomized clinical trials. Rodgers’ paper is also a research review, but moves in a very different direction, surveying qualitative research on the client’s experience of psychotherapy. These papers hark back to two aspects of Carl Rogers’ legacy as a ground-breaking psychotherapy researcher: The Rogers of the first psychotherapy clinical trial study (Rogers and Dymond, Psychotherapy and Personality Change, 1954), and the Rogers who was committed to understanding clients’ experiences from the inside.

The other two regular articles look at aspects of our tradition not addressed in our special inaugural issue: Focusing-oriented therapy and existential therapy. Friedman contributes a very personal paper on his therapy with Gene Gendlin, and is the first paper we have published that addresses specifics about the therapy process, including therapy transcripts. The last of the regular papers is an incisive survey by Cooper of the contributions and challenges of existentialism to person-centered therapy, and adds an important voice to PCEP, providing a useful update to older writings on existential therapy.

Also in this issue, we initiate our practice of regularly publishing reviews of recent noteworthy books on person-centered and experiential therapies. We will publish two types of book review. Regular book reviews are generally 1000 words or less (e.g., Sanders’ review of the Dictionary of Person-Centred Psychology and Barrett-Lennard’s review of the Chicago 2000 ICCCEP conference volume). Review Essays, on the other hand, are extended reviews, of roughly the same length as regular articles (and reviewed like regular articles), of books of major importance for members of our World Association. Thus, we are pleased to be able to publish Kirschenbaum’s Review Essay on Russell’s oral history of Carl Rogers. If you are an author or publisher or have a book that you would like to see reviewed in PCEP, please contact our Book Review Editor, Martin van Kalmthout (email: M.vanKalmthout@psych.kun.nl ).

By all accounts, last Fall’s inaugural issue has been very well received, but we are aware that some World Association members may have not received a copy, possibly because they joined the World Association for 2003 but not 2002. If that is the case for you, you can still order it at a reduced rate, by going to the PCEP website, at: www.pce-world.org/journal.htm.

Looking ahead, we hope that you are as excited as we are about the upcoming triennial PCE Conference in The Netherlands this July. There will be an open discussion on PCEP, so we hope to see many of you there in person, and to hear your comments and ideas for your journal. Furthermore, now that we have our own journal, it is the intention of the World Association’s Board that PCEP should replace the conference volumes that have come out of the previous ICCCEP/PCE conferences. This will ensure generally more timely publication of conference papers than has been possible in the past and will reduce the complications and uncertainties of obtaining a new publisher each time. In particular, we are planning to devote at least two issues, this year and next, primarily to papers from the Egmond aan Zee conference, so if you are presenting a paper there, please consider writing it up and submitting it to us at or soon after the conference.

Robert Elliott, Dave Mearns, Peter F. Schmid, March 2003