Carl Rogers Meets Donald Winnicott
A humanistic-relational paradigm in psychotherapy
By James Barnes
Photography by Prachie Narain Jackson.
“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
—Carl R. Rogers, 1961
“It appals me to think how much deep change I have prevented or delayed in patients.. by my personal need to interpret. If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever.”
—Donald W. Winnicott, 1968
Person-centered counselling and psychoanalysis—the traditions founded by Carl Rogers and Sigmund Freud, respectively—have rarely been brought together. Historically, each has regarded the other with a mix of disapproval and skepticism. For the psychoanalyst steeped in the Freudian tradition, person-centered counselling is naive—overly optimistic, indulgent of the patient, and blind to the deeper workings of the unconscious that, for psychoanalysis, are key. The Rogerian, by contrast, is likely to view psychoanalysis as illegitimate in its claims to authority, its pretensions to exclusive, expert knowledge, and its presumed power to provide “cure” for its patients. The two standpoints can easily be written to mutually exclude each other, or at least to make for a highly acrimonious coupling with little hope of reconciliation.
Yet, there is another story to tell. This is a story in which psychoanalysis—especially in the hands of Donald Winnicott—turns away from orthodoxy to such a degree, or in such a way, that it comes to share more with person-centered counselling than it does with Freud. Bear with me.
In the mid-20th century, when both Winnicott and Rogers were articulating their core theoretical ideas, there was a profound social, political, and cultural transformation in the West from a mechanistic and hierarchical worldview grounded in positivist certainty toward a more humanistic and egalitarian sensibility that emphasized subjectivity, authenticity, and the complexity of human experience. Rogers and Winnicott, practicing in the US and UK, respectively, were no exception to this. Indeed, in the realm of psychotherapy they were protagonists of that transformation. Despite their different disciplines and styles, and despite the fact that they seemingly had no significant knowledge of each other’s work, something radical and remarkably similar emerged from them. I’m going to call what emerged—or perhaps what existed latent within them both—the humanistic-relational paradigm.
Rogers and Winnicott unite in a shared vision of the psyche and its healing as fundamentally bound up with and dependent on the psychological input of others; they unite in the view that psychological health isn’t about insight, rationality, or correctness but about the freedom and safety to authentically become what one is; and they also unite on a view of psychotherapy, not as a technical procedure done by one to another but as an interpersonal encounter that facilitates a natural and spontaneous healing.
Rogers’s Critique of Psychoanalysis and the Actualizing Tendency
Rogers rejected Freudian psychoanalysis as a matter of worldview. He saw psychoanalysis (as the humanistic tradition, of which he was a key member, did in general) as pessimistic and self-limiting, stuck in a cynical view of existence. For Rogers, people are not unwittingly governed by forces outside of their awareness and beyond their control, but free and inherently capable beings, in need only of the right interpersonal conditions. What Rogers found most distasteful about the psychoanalytic standpoint—and what he saw as most in need of radical reform—was the implicit positioning of the therapist as expert and privileged knower of the other. He rejected the notion that therapeutic change came about through technical knowledge into unconscious material of which the patient was, by definition, ignorant, as this rendered the person passive and dependent on authority figures. This notion echoed the paternalism he had encountered in religious institutions during his early life—institutions that claimed authority over human experience while demanding submission to dogma.
In place of a psyche perpetually at war with itself and the demands of the outside world, Rogers posited an innate drive toward growth, self-fulfillment, and wholeness—the “actualizing tendency,” as he called it, drawing on the work of German neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein. This tendency is always active, striving for the resolution of conflict and self-limitation and the emergence of new, more harmonious ways of being. For Rogers, the process of psychological development, as well as that of healing, emerges organically when the right environment is present. For this to work—for us to become who we are—we fundamentally need authentic, concerned care from a genuinely involved other. In terms of the therapeutic relationship, he defines the “core conditions,” which he sees as aspects of a single stance: (1) empathy, (2) congruence (the authentic alignment of inner experience and outward expression of the therapist), and (3) unconditional positive regard (consistent, nonjudgmental acceptance of the client).
Rogerian counselling is not based on a set of techniques per se but on a genuine and deep interest in and respect for the individual’s world and their subjective experience. Rogers believed that if the counsellor could embody and offer the core conditions, psychological healing would naturally follow. The conditions, he argued, were both necessary and sufficient for therapeutic change, and he saw the therapeutic encounter that followed as one that enables the client to (re)connect with their own innate capacity for growth and healing, a process merely facilitated—not directed—by the therapist. Indeed, he argued that any therapy that works must work in virtue of the presence of these conditions.
Though Rogers’s rejection of the psychoanalytic status quo was first an ideological one, he ultimately argued that his therapeutic model was empirically derived and validated. Given the subsequent and well-supported finding that the quality of the therapeutic relationship or “therapeutic alliance” is the most reliable predictor of the therapeutic outcome—demonstrated, for example, in Psychotherapy Relationships That Work (Norcross & Lambert, 2011)—his research has stood the test of time.
Winnicott’s Departure from Classical Psychoanalysis
While Roger openly repudiated the Freudian view, Winnicott was reserved and muted in his disagreement; and where Rogers put forward a bold and explicit new position, Winnicott went about his revolution in a much quieter way. Winnicott was not interested in founding a new approach, or even in providing a systematic theory. Indeed, he often framed his contributions as elaborations or extensions of Freud and remained firmly within the community of psychoanalysis. He is generally considered to be a key member of the so-called British middle group—a faction not aligned with the dominant schools of Anna Freud or Melanie Klein—though he apparently didn’t like to think of himself as such.
Nevertheless, Winnicott categorically diverged from the psychoanalysis of Freud, as well as from offshoots of Freudian theory such as ego psychology. Winnicott was closest to the object relations theory of Melanie Klein (who was his supervisor for a period)—which extended psychoanalysis to the preoedipal psychology of children and infants—but he put a decisive importance on the infant-caregiver relationship, which he thought both Freud and Klein ignored or denied.
Like his contemporary Bowlby, Winnicott saw that infants are utterly dependent on their caregivers, not just for physical nourishment but even more so for interpersonal sustenance and care. This “dependency,” which refers to the profound reliance of the child’s nascent psyche on their caregiver-environment, meant for Winnicott that infant and caregiver had to be considered a unit and essentially inseparable. So radical was this that Winnicott famously remarked, “there is no such thing as a baby.” For Winnicott, the caregiver-environment was thoroughly intertwined with the infant’s psyche and immediate to it, therefore unmitigated in its impact and crucial to development.
In place of a psyche perpetually at war with itself and the demands of the outside world, Rogers posited an innate drive toward growth, self-fulfillment, and wholeness—the “actualizing tendency.”
The “one-person” individualistic psychology of Freud, as well as Klein, assumed an already put-together intrapsychic world essentially independent from others and the outside world from the beginning. This view was untenable for Winnicott, and he flipped the Freudian doctrine of “primary narcissism”—the cornerstone of the drive model—on its head. Freud had assumed that the infant was wrapped up and enclosed in a monad of its own experience, investing libido in itself and only relating to and being significantly impacted by the outside world when, later in development, a cognitive link to that world could be made. To Winnicott, this view followed from an ignorance of the primary relatedness of infant and caregiver, and therefore fundamentally mistook human nature. In its place, Winnicott developed a position that put primary relatedness at the core of the psyche, dethroning the Oedipus complex and preoedipal intrapsychic psychology of Freud and Klein, respectively.
Following this, Winnicott also fundamentally departed from the Freudian (and Kleinian) drive model, which viewed innate pleasure-seeking and aggression as the primary drivers of development and human behavior and as the root causes of later psychological issues. Instead, he articulated a theory based on a coupling of what he called the inherited tendency—an innate potential to develop a unique, authentic self—and a caregiver-environment that brings it into being. Like Rogers, Winnicott viewed development as fundamentally happening in a caregiving relationship, though Winnicott elaborates this process in greater detail.
In Winnicott’s language, our basic state is one of “going on being”—the continuous, uninterrupted experience of existing as oneself—but this depends on a “holding environment” characterized by attuned, responsive, and consistently “good enough” care. This environment provides a basis for the emergence and sustenance of what he termed the “true self”— the authentic, spontaneous core of a person. The true self, which he linked to the capacity to play and be playful (in both child and adult), is marked by a natural, vital, spontaneous and creative mode of being, which forms the basis of psychological development and health. The true self is vital to who we are and how we develop, and it is at the basis of healing psychological difficulties later in life, Winnicott argued. Therapy then requires a reinstatement of the original coupling between a consistent, attuned, nonintrusive other and the individual’s natural tendency toward healing that this facilitates.
In psychoanalytic terms, this marks a shift from the “one-person” model of Freud, Klein, and related schools to a “two-person” relational model. This model became, in the 1980s and 90s, the cornerstone of relational psychoanalysis. Building on Winnicott’s emphasis on dependency, mutual influence, and the centrality of the therapeutic relationship, thinkers such as Stephen Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, and Lewis Aron later decisively moved psychoanalysis beyond the classical drive theory, formally reconceptualizing the psyche as inherently intersubjective, shaped through and dependent on relationships with others.
A Shared Foundation
Though very different in their personalities and philosophical outlook, both Rogers and Winnicott came to essentially the same conclusion: The roots of both development and healing lie in processes that emerge out of, and thoroughly depend on, an environment of care, as facilitated by a psychologically attuned and regulating other. They also fundamentally agreed that our nature is essentially indeterminate and unconflicted, rather than tragically determined by conflicting psychic or biological forces. This viewpoint allowed them to be concerned instead with freedom, creativity, and becoming. Within this broad vision, however, Rogers and Winnicott also went on to develop very similar accounts of the etiology and essential character of psychological and emotional distress.
If the human condition is viewed as fundamentally introverted, with development seen as an internal, individual process and relationships viewed as secondary (as Freud and Klein saw it), psychiatry and psychotherapy will center on internal dysfunctions or conflicts within the person. Conversely, if the human condition is viewed as fundamentally extroverted, with development seen as relational and socially situated, the causal focus shifts to the environment, particularly primary caregivers. Rogers and Winnicott unite on the view that the vicissitudes of the world, not of the instincts, are primarily responsible for the ways in which we come to suffer psychologically and emotionally.
Sometimes, the facilitating environment (for Winnicott) or the core conditions (for Rogers) fail in some important aspect during development. For Rogers, this leads to a state of “incongruence,” and for Winnicott, it leads to a “false self.”
For Rogers, the term “incongruence” describes a discrepancy between what we feel we have to be in order to be loved and who we really feel we are. This results in what Rogers called “conditions of worth,” which are internalized beliefs about standards we must meet to be accepted and valued by others, especially by significant caregivers in early life. A person is depressed, anxious, even psychotic, because of a fundamental discord and duplicity at the heart of their worlds—between their need to become “who they are” and injunctions and blocks against that from the outside. Rogers considered the dynamics of such divergences to be at the roots of most psychological distress encountered clinically. The essential task of therapy for Rogers was to effectively bring these two into alignment, through the provision of the core-conditions.
Winnicott proposes something very similar. When the caregiver-environment is unresponsive or overly controlling, in his terms, the child learns to adapt prematurely, constructing a “false self”—a defensive structure that complies with external expectations but masks the authentic experience underneath. The “environmental failures” and the false self adaptations that ensue effectively cut the person off from aspects of their being, which is to say, from their true self. Though he didn’t use the term “incongruence,” the word could also mark the divergence between the true self and false self. Winnicott, like Rogers, saw psychotherapy as a space in which these early failures could be repaired through a new “holding environment,” provided in relationship with the therapist. Winnicott saw this in terms of a “regression to dependence,” in which false self-structures could dissipate and the capacity for going on being and dwelling again in the true self could be recovered and reinstated. Though Rogers would take issue with the idea of regression and dependency, the alignment is clear.
Therapy then requires a reinstatement of the original coupling between a consistent, attuned, nonintrusive other and the individual’s natural tendency toward healing that this facilitates.
Empathic Adaptation over Technique
Whether it is framed in terms of “false self adaptations” or “conditions of worth,” psychological distress is principally understood by both Winnicott and Rogers in terms of adaptation to environmental failure. These adaptations are a compromise, which keep the person functioning in the world but at a cost. For both, the point cannot be to try and fix the adaptation (i.e., the symptoms)—as if the problem lies there—but is instead to rectify the failed aspects of the environment. Here failures of the world take the place of failures of or in the individual.
The therapist’s role, accordingly, is that of caregiver-environment, and therapy is configured accordingly. There is a decisive movement away from technical intervention and toward a way of being with people. For both, what matters most in this regard is who the therapist is for the client, rather than what they know or can do, something which is provided for them, not done to them. While Rogers is well known for replacing interpretation with attunement and empathic involvement in the client’s world, much less known is how closely Winnicott’s mature view of “technique” resonated with this. Winnicott increasingly came to see much of what he said in session as a way of “giving back to the patient” what they were already expressing—formulating experience that was near to awareness. This is strikingly close to Rogers’s idea of empathizing with what is just below the surface of the client’s words. In a sense, for Winnicott, only interpretations that the client “already knows” can be heard—just as only what is within the infant’s “omnipotence” (the experience of self-creation ) can be incorporated in/as the self.
Though Winnicott did of course provide psychoanalytic interpretations and believed in their value, he came to conceive of this value principally in terms of providing the experience of being understood (or not). Winnicott’s oft-quoted line “I mainly interpret to show the patient the limits of my understanding” underscores the relational meaning and impact of what is said, as opposed to any theoretical targeting. While Winnicott remained deeply attuned to transference and countertransference—perhaps more than anyone—he ultimately placed his faith in the client’s own capacities to emerge out of it, as facilitated by the therapist.
Rogers’s and Winnicott’s unmistakable proximity becomes clear in Winnicott’s seminal 1969 paper “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications,” quoted at the beginning of this essay. In it, he laments his past eagerness to interpret, which he links to a “need to be clever.” Instead, he praises the therapist’s capacity to hold off, allowing space for the patient to come to their own understanding. He concludes this by saying, “The principle is that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers.” This might as well have come from Rogers’s own mouth.
With Rogers and Winnicott … the therapist is not first asking, “What unconscious conflict is this a symptom of?” but rather, “What essential experience has been missing in this person’s life?”
A Clinical Illustration
Let me offer a hypothetical case example to illustrate how this diverges from a traditional psychoanalytic standpoint. A client comes to therapy describing a profound sense of emptiness saying things such as, “I keep on waking up feeling sluggish and heavy,” or “I can’t see the point of life anymore.” They struggle with low self-worth, persistent self-criticism, and a feeling of being disconnected from themselves and others.
From a Freudian or Kleinian standpoint, the therapist will think primarily in terms of a conflict deriving from their unconscious, in their internal worlds. They might, for example, assume that some form of loss has occurred and that this loss has triggered an innate anger and destructiveness, something which remains unconscious because the person does not feel they can safely express it. In Freud’s view, that aggression may have been turned inward against the self, leading to guilt and self-reproach. In Klein’s view, the person may unconsciously feel they have damaged or destroyed their inner “good objects” and now experience hopelessness and self-punishment. For both theorists, the problem is an internal one—a conflict between hypothetical internal drives and reality—and the overarching task is to help the person become conscious of these hidden dynamics. The therapist is principally focused on interpreting these hypothesized dynamics, confronting the patient with what has been repressed.
With Rogers and Winnicott, by contrast, the therapist is not first asking, “What unconscious conflict is this a symptom of?” but rather, “What essential experience has been missing in this person’s life?” Depression, in this view, is not so much the result of repressed aggression, but the consequence of relational deprivation—of neglect, conditional love, or emotional misattunement. Where Freud and Klein focus on conflict, Rogers and Winnicott focus on deficits of care. The person may feel worthless or empty not because they are repressing unacceptable feelings, but because they never felt fully seen, accepted, or allowed to be their real self. For Rogers and Winnicott, the therapeutic change maker would not be “insight” but the provision of what was originally missing or distorted at the scene of environmental letdown(s)—understanding and attuning to the person and what they think and feel in the context of consistent, reliable care. It is this experience over time, much more than any abstract insight gained from the outside, that initiates what is ameliorative. While much may be said about what has happened and how the person feels, the overarching point is not so much the content but the evolving relationship.
Conclusion
In both Rogers and Winnicott, we encounter a powerful affirmation of the psyche as something that comes alive only in the presence of another who is attuned, receptive, and emotionally available. Despite their differing vocabularies, Rogers and Winnicott converge on the view that psychological health involves the freedom to be one’s spontaneous, feeling, and creative self—unimpeded by internalized injunctions or the absence of relational conditions that constrain, inhibit, or distort that self. They both envision the self not as an internal structure to be assembled correctly or incorrectly, that is ordered or disordered, but as a dynamic process that evolves uninhibited when graced with the permissions and safety of a caring interpersonal environment.
As mentioned above, Winnicott had a strong influence on the later tradition of relational psychoanalysis. Yet, relational psychoanalysis overlooks its commonalities with the Rogerian, person-centered tradition. Bringing Winnicott into dialogue with Rogers is not merely an effort to retroactively expand the boundaries of psychoanalysis. It is also a recognition that there is a paradigm that transcends disciplinary borders, something which offers a compelling counternarrative to the status quo. This humanistic-relational paradigm, as I am calling it, is not merely a set of values or an orientation; it offers a coherent model of mental distress and healing, with its own internal logic, theoretical underpinnings, and practical and ethical commitments. It proposes a fundamentally different way of understanding what it means to be a person, to suffer, and to heal. Implicit in it is a powerful critique not only of traditional psychoanalysis but also of the biomedical psychiatric framework of “mental disorders,” as well as the framework of cognitive-behavioral psychology. The humanistic-relational paradigm decisively rejects individualistic, mechanistic, and reductionist accounts of the human condition. In its place, it champions a holistic vision of mind and life, one grounded not in individual control or conformity, but in an authenticity and self-expression made possible through connection with the others on whom we depend and through which we can thrive.
The Humanistic-Relational Paradigm
The Primacy of Relationship: the therapeutic relationship as the fundamental agent of change, emphasizing the therapist’s attunement, responsiveness, and authenticity over any set of techniques.
Nonintrusive Stance: rejection of the therapist as expert interpreter or “fixer,” emphasizing empathic understanding as an end in itself, as well as the therapist’s presence, openness, and fallibility.
Facilitation of Authenticity: the belief that psychological health fundamentally involves authenticity—the freedom to be one’s spontaneous, feeling, and creative self and accordance with it.
Nonpathologizing stance: rejection of classical definitions of pathology or psychological dysfunction, finding meaning, purpose and, most importantly, adaptation in so-called “symptoms.”
Focus on environmental deficit or injury: focus on the failures of the environment to provide the requisite interpersonal nutrients for development.
James Barnes, MSc, MA, is a psychotherapist and a faculty member at Iron Mill College, Exeter, where he specializes in integrative counselling and the intersection of person-centered therapy and psychoanalysis. He regularly contributes essays to such platforms as Aeon magazine and Psychology Today, as well as speaking at events in the UK and abroad.
Published October 2025