Schizophrenia has challenged the person-centered approach since the Wisconsin Study in the 1960s. That project set out to prove that the core conditions were sufficient, not only for the population of Chicago neurotic clients (Coulson, 1987), but for those who had been labelled schizophrenic. Although the study led to a detailed and interesting publication (Rogers, 1967), the data were incomplete and the results characterized by non-findings on the main hypotheses. That is not a purely negative conclusion because it has led us to look at other variables such as the motivation of a largely institutionalized population and the therapeutic context as well as the therapeutic relationship. However, it effectively marked the end of the clinical progression of client-centered therapy in the USA as Rogers and his colleagues subsequently directed their attention away from clinical settings and research to respond to the popular appeal of the approach and later towards political concerns.

So, was schizophrenia a bridge too far for client-centered therapy? Or was the problem as much epistemological as anything else? How could a therapeutic approach that emphasized the idiographic and took a phenomenological perspective articulate with an illness model that required norm-based diagnosis and treatment protocols? This conflict has dogged personcentered and experiential therapies throughout the past forty years. In some parts of the world the struggle has been engaged and PCE therapies have retained a presence in mainstream secondary mental health provision — albeit a shaky presence as outlined in the last issue of PCEP (Hutschemaekers & van Kalmthout, 2006). In other parts of the world the conflict has proved too much and efforts have gone into developing services in the private sector or in primary health care where the medical model is not so symptom-centered and attends better to the whole person of the patient.

Yet, this need not be the end of the story of PCE therapies in relation to chronic or severe forms of mental illness. PCE therapies emphasize listening to and revealing the experiencing and process of the individual patient, an approach that is potentially well-suited to clinical work among patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. In addition, a person-centered phenomenological approach is highly appropriate for the empirical investigation of the experiential processes that characterize living with and recovering from mental illnesses. This is the position taken by Jan van Blarikom in one of the papers in this issue — the first of what is intended to be three papers on a person-centered approach to chronic mental illnesses. In his paper, A person-centered approach to schizophrenia, van Blarikom challenges us to relinquish our resistance to the description of schizophrenia as an illness and to seek to work with the patient as they present themselves. Some readers will, initially at least, react with horror to this suggestion. Others will point out that many members of the psychiatric profession themselves rail against an illness model for schizophrenia. But the heart of van Blarikom’s provocation is his care for the people with whom he works and his invitation to PCE colleagues to become involved.

Coulson, W. (1987). Reclaiming client-centered counseling from the person-centered movement.

Comptche, CA: Center for Enterprising Families.

Hutschemaekers, G. J. M. & van Kalmthout, M. (2006). The new integral multidisciplinary guidelines in the Netherlands: The perspective of person-centered psychotherapy. Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies, 5, 101–113.

Rogers, C. R. (Ed.). (1967). The therapeutic relationship and its impact: A study of psychotherapy with schizophrenics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.