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Person-Centered Psychotherapy

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Person Centered Psychiatry

Abstract

Therapeutic effectiveness depends substantially on understanding that people have three fundamental aspects (body, thoughts, and soul) that function synergistically to maintain health and well-being. Person-centered therapeutics (PCT) treats disease and promotes health by an integrated approach to a person’s physical, mental, social, and spiritual well-being. The effectiveness of PCT depends on the three major characteristics: (1) use of a person-centered working alliance, which is the physical component critical for PCT efficacy; (2) the assessment of personality structure and function to promote self-awareness and a developmental perspective on health in a person’s creative life narrative, which is the mental component critical for PCT efficacy; and (3) the integration of evidence-based physical, mental, and social interventions, which synergistically activate the psychobiological mechanisms underlying the development of well-being. Diverse therapeutic techniques influence health and personality development in ways that are largely indistinguishable from one another or from effective allopathic treatments, suggesting there is a common pathway to well-being. Evidence-based interventions may be physical–behavioral (e.g., diet, exercise, sleep hygiene), emotional–cognitive (e.g., emotional self-regulation, cognitive therapy), or social–existential (e.g., social engagement, narrative or existential therapy, and meditation). When applied separately such interventions have weak and inconsistent effects, but when combined appropriately, they interact synergistically to produce strong and consistent improvements. Such integrative multicomponent treatments increase plasticity, virtue, and healthy functioning, which in turn interact synergistically as the motor of well-being. Strong and consistent improvement in any aspect of health requires integration of physical, mental, and spiritual interventions to address the unique profile of strengths and weaknesses in all three aspects of a person’s well-being.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, Campus Box 8134, 660 South Euclid Avenue, St. Louis, MO, 63110, USA

    C. Robert Cloninger MD, PhD

  2. President, Anthropedia Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri, USA

    Kevin M. Cloninger PhD

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  1. C. Robert Cloninger MD, PhD
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Correspondence to C. Robert Cloninger MD, PhD .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Psychiatry, New York University Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York, USA

    Juan E. Mezzich

  2. Laboratory Ethics, Professionalism, University of Western Brittany, Bohars, France

    Michel Botbol

  3. Dept. of Psychiatry, University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    George N. Christodoulou

  4. Department of Psychiatry, WASHINGTON UNIV SCH MED Department of Psychiatry, Saint Louis, Missouri, USA

    C. Robert Cloninger

  5. Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Coral Gables, Florida, USA

    Ihsan M. Salloum

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Cloninger, C.R., Cloninger, K.M. (2016). Person-Centered Psychotherapy. In: Mezzich, J., Botbol, M., Christodoulou, G., Cloninger, C., Salloum, I. (eds) Person Centered Psychiatry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39724-5_19

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