Editorial

We are delighted to introduce this special issue from PCE 2022, the 15th biennial conference of the World Association of Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and Counseling (WAPCEPC). The conference was held in Copenhagen, Denmark and precedes the subsequent conference, PCE 2024, originally scheduled to be held in Ukraine, now graciously being held in Athens, Greece, in September 2024. The theme of PCE 2022 was ‘How Can I Be of Help? Formulating and Facilitating Change Together’.

Please explore Les Greenberg’s (2023) look at how to change emotion with emotion. He provides an overview of the role of emotion, including a goal-directed motive to survive and thrive, the primacy of emotion for the pursuits of life, organizing schemes, need satisfaction, the subservient role of cognition, the role of feeling in learning and memory, automatized and voluntary actions guided by feelings, and the coherent stories into which we organize our experiences. Greenberg highlights both the relational and task-oriented work which emotion focused therapy provides to not only experience but change emotion in a transformative synthesis.

Remaining in an emotion focused vein, explore with Junmei Wan (2023) a continuation of her body of self-reflective work using a qualitative self-as-subject heuristic inquiry approach on how documentary film making can treat emotional blocks, similar to the systematic evocative unfolding technique. She used camera witnessing, film footages, watching and editing as processes, data sources, and data analyses to recollect, unfold, and retell to make sense of her experience. It is interesting how Wan uses technology, process steps, and perspective taking to find how she can be of help in a novel sense of the phrase ‘facilitating change together’.

Dive with Susan Stephen (2023) into the kind of help, change or outcome that is facilitated in person-centered therapy. She describes an emerging model of congruent functioning, originating from the development of the Strathclyde Inventory, supported by three lines of quantitative and qualitative evidence, while highlighting cultural differences. She concludes by asking the question ‘how can I not be of help?’ with a case example of apparent deterioration in congruent functioning, and proposes developing and maintaining congruent functioning is not just for clients, but for therapists too.

Consult Leslie Elllis’s (2023) provision of three PCE dreamwork practices. Gestalt therapy suggests a means to enter a dream element. Focusing reveals how dreams provides a means to help. Jung suggests how a dream can be dreamed onward. All three practices reveal how experiences can be transformed in change-moments, or felt shifts, and how over time the integration of the practices in working with dreams may lead to new ways of following and learning from experience while awake as well. Ellis provides rich personal and clinical examples that bring to life the practices and implications discussed.

Enhance your way of being through Árpi Süle’s (2023) discussion of the classic concern of doing and being and how, when a therapeutic process appears stuck, it may be that the therapists is functioning in structure-bound ways. Süle offers four perspectives to help explain and suggest a focusing exercise related to each perspective: meaning-making, experiential, relational, and existential. In each case, the focusing exercise can enhance ways of being and better understand and address the issues and the person the client brings to therapy.

Learn about the state of writings in PCE psychotherapy in Danish over 60 years with Bagge and Hoffman (2023). They provide a bibliographical survey, organizing the Danish literature into both original and translated PCE works and other humanistic therapy works. The literature search revealed that motivational interviewing and emotion-focused therapy were most represented and that there is a need for both new Danish works and translations to grow the literature available to Danish-speaking readers.

Finally, move forward with your understanding of the thematic question, ‘How can I be of help?’ with Tudor and Rodgers (2023) critical look at its underpinnings and alternatives. Tudor and Rodgers excavate the origins of the question within the PCE context, including implicit Western assumptions, and pose various alternative questions, landing on ‘Can we be of help?’ as an important jumping off point for personal growth, relationships, therapy and life.

Each of the above articles contribute to a better understanding of ‘helpers’ and of ‘helping relationships’ as construed in person-centered and experiential ways. In this regard, all of the authors offer an interesting input that can represent the spirit of the Conference as a meeting point for growth and change by posing critical and alternative questions, researching and theorizing with various methods, and by using different practices in a vital synthesis.