- Congruence: being genuine and open; not playing a role or presenting a facade; the counselor "is aware of and accepts his own feelings, with a willingness to be and express these feelings and attitudes, in words or behavior" (Patterson, 1973).
- Understanding: perceiving the client's phenomenal field; sensing the client's inner world "as if" it is the counselor's; not diagnostic or evaluative; empathy.
- Acceptance: "unconditional positive regard"; the counselor accepts the client "as an individual, as he is, with his conflicts and inconsistencies, his good and bad points" (Patterson, 1973).
1. Interview techniques. Once stereotyped as "unhuh" counseling in its early days of development, due to Rogers' (1942) emphasis upon nondirective interview techniques, the client-centered approach has evolved into a much more sophisticated repertoire of counselor interview behaviors in recent years. In tracing this evolution, Hart and Tomlinson (1970) have delineated three periods during which different interview techniques predominated:
a. Nondirective period (1940-1950). [The] counselor used verbal responses with a minimal degree of "lead" (Robinson, 1950), such as simple acceptance, clarification and restatement, to achieve client in sight.
b. Reflective period (1950-1957). [The] counselor concentrated almost exclusively upon reflection of feelings, which was substituted for clarification from the preceding period, the goal being to "mirror the client's phenomenological world to him" (Hart and Tomlinson, 1970).
c. Experiential period (1957-present). [The] counselor engages in a wide range of interview behaviors to express basic attitudes and, in contrast to previous roles, relates relevant personal experiences to the client, in order to facilitate the latter's experiencing.
Thus, in contemporary client-centered psychotherapy, the counselor is much more active than ever before, as indexed, for example, by client/counselor "talk ratios." Presumably the same would be true of client-centered career counseling, although neither Patterson nor others have made this application as yet. Assuming that the extrapolation is justified, it would mean that the client-centered career counselor would make responses during the interview with a higher degree of "lead," such as approval, open-ended questions and tentative interpretations, the purpose of which would be to foster and enrich client experiencing as it relates to implementing the self-concept in an occupational role.
2. Test interpretation. One of the central issues with which client centered career counselors have had to contend has been how to reconcile the use of tests with the tenets of the Rogerian approach. To resolve what appears to be a basic incompatibility between the non-evaluative counselor attitudes of acceptance, congruence and understanding on the one hand, and the evaluative information derived from tests on the other, client-centered career counselors have proposed that tests be used primarily for the client's edification, not the counselor's. Patterson (1964) argues that "The essential basis for the use of tests in [client-centered] career counseling is that they provide information which the client needs and wants, information concerning questions raised by the client in counseling"... Similarly, Grummon (1972) concludes that "Tests can be useful in [client-centered career counseling], provided that the information they supply is integrated into the self-concept". To achieve this "client-centeredness" in using tests, several innovative procedures have been proposed: First, tests are introduced as needed and requested by the client-what Super (1950) has termed "precision" testing as opposed to "saturation" testing. In other words, the client can take tests whenever appropriate throughout the course of career counseling, rather than as a battery before it starts. Second, the client participates in the test selection process (Bordin and Bixler, 1946). The counselor describes the kind of information the client can gain from the various tests available, and the client decides which behaviors he/she wants to assess. The counselor then usually designates the most appropriate measures with respect to their psychometric characteristics (applicability, norms, reliability, validity). Finally, when the tests have been taken and scored, the counselor reports the results to the client in as objective, nonjudgmental a way as possible and responds to the latter's reactions within a client-centered atmosphere (see Bixler and Bixler, 1946, for interview excerpts which illustrate this type of test interpretation).
3. Occupational information. The principles underlying the use of occupational information in client-centered career counseling are much the same as those governing test interpretation. Patterson (1964) enumerates four of them:
a. Occupational information is introduced into the counseling process when there is a recognized need for it on the part of the client...
b. Occupational information is not used to influence or manipulate the client...
c. The most objective way to provide occupational information and a way which maximizes client initiative and responsibility, is to encourage the client to obtain the information from original sources, that is, publications, employers, and persons engaged in occupations...
d. The client's attitudes and feelings about occupations and jobs must be allowed expression and be dealt with therapeutically.
Grummon (1972) adds the observation that, in the process of presenting occupational information, the career counselor should not lose sight of the Rogerian dictum, stemming from phenomenological theory, that "reality for the individual is his perception of that reality." Thus, Rusalem (1954) proposes that "the presentation of occupational information must assume that for the client it becomes a process of selective perception." Likewise, Samler (1964) states that 'The process of occupational exploration is psychological in the sense that the client's perceptions are taken into account." The client-centered career counselor recognizes, then, that occupational information has personal meanings to the client which must be understood and explored within the context of needs and values as well as objective reality.
Comment. The model and methods of client-centered career counseling represent not only an application of Rogerian principles to decision making, they also synthesize this approach with core concepts from trait-and-factor and developmental theory. Patterson (1964) incorporates a refined "matching men and jobs" concept of career choice when he states that it "may still be broadly conceived as the matching of the individual and a career, but in a manner much more complex than was originally thought," and he draws heavily upon Super's (1957) self-theory of career development to introduce this dimension into the otherwise historical, "right now" focus of client-centered psychotherapy. It is problematical, however, whether even this comprehensive a synthesis, which might also include the contemporary client-centered emphasis upon greater counselor activity, meets some of the criticisms which have been leveled at client-centered career counseling. Theoretically, Grummon (1972) has expressed concern over the almost exclusively phenomenological orientation of the client-centered approach, which ignores the effect of stimulus variables upon the acquisition and processing of information about self and the world of work. He observes that: The theory's failure to elaborate how the environment influences perception and behavior is for the writer [Grummon] a significant omission which has special relevance for many counseling situations." Pragmatically, the principal pitfall also concerns the potential disjunction and disruption that the introduction of information into the interview process by the counselor often creates. It is still not clear from Patterson's formulation how the counselor informs the client about occupations without shifting from a client-centered role to a didactic one and thereby compromising the very attitudes which supposedly promote self-clarification and actualization. His suggestion that the counselor read occupational information aloud to the client does not appear to be the panacea.
