Some Science and the Person-Centred Approach

A Centre for Research in Human Flourishing seminar

Speaker: Richard Doyle, Assistant Professor in Counselling for Depression, School of Education, University of Nottingham

Carl Rogers described himself as a scientist and strove to apply the scientific method to understanding how people change. In this seminar I take some ideas from physics and biology and explore how these might alter our perspectives on the person-centred experiential approach. I start with some thermodynamic concepts such as entropy and ask what they can tell us about the formative tendency, a central tenet of humanistic psychology. I also consider how ideas from evolutionary biology might prompt us to think beyond the individual in considering human behaviour and distress, and how this might resolve an inconsistency in Rogers’ presentation of the actualising tendency. Along the way I speculatively and tentatively propose how person-centred personality theory might be augmented in response to these ideas.

Richard Doyle holds an MChem and a PhD in chemical physics from the universities of Oxford and Warwick respectively. He has worked in a variety of research environments for over fifteen years. In 2016, circumstances sparked an interest in counselling and he trained in person-centred therapy. His current research interests include the measurement of change in therapy. He has experience as a tutor on the Norwich Centre Diploma in Counselling and since 2021 is an Assistant Professor in Counselling at the University of Nottingham. Currently Richard tutors on the Nottingham MA in Person-Centred Experiential Counselling and Psychotherapy as well as on the Person-Centred Experiential Counselling for Depression course, an IAPT-compliant training for therapists working in the UK National Health Service.