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DAVID RENNIE
Person-Centred Counselling: An experiential Approach Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998, 160 pages (ISBN 0-7619-5344-2, us$25.95, Softcover) Reviewed by PATRICK O'NEILL
It seems that there are still books about psychotherapy that understand it as a problem-solving relationship between people rather than the application of routines from manuals. In this book, David Rennie gives priority to the working alliance between counsellor and client, and he outlines various ways in which that alliance can be enhanced.
This work began as a training guide, which was eventually expanded to include reflections on the way others have approached central issues in the counselling experience. Rennie draws on a range of theorists such as Carl Rogers and Eugene Gendlen, and makes clear his agreements and disagreements with their positions. He shares Rogers insistence on working within the client's frame of reference, emphasizing the client's experience, choice, and personal freedom and following the client's lead. He agrees with Gendlen that the ability of people to reflect on their own ideas, feelings, and actions is important to their experience and to the possibility of therapeutic change.
The book is informed by Rennie's prodigious research output on the process of counselling. Many readers will know of his work in qualitative research (e.g., Rennie, Phillips, & Quartaro, 1988) and especially its application to the study of the client's experience of psychotherapy (e.g., Rennie, 1992). The book benefits, too, from his generous use of case material, including his willingness to display his own problematic episodes in counselling as didactic examples.
In some preliminary chapters, Rennie addresses general issues in counselling before embarking on ideas about counselling itself. In a chapter on "the client as agent," he notes the various ways clients control their experience, whether or not they consider what they are doing or share the...