Dr. Louise Guerney visits IPS
Pioneer in Child-Centered Play Therapy and Co-Creator of Filial Therapy
Dr. William Nordling brought a special guest to campus, his mentor and friend, Dr. Louise Guerney. The room was packed, with students even standing in the back. The tone was more of a living room chat than a class.
“What attracted me to Play Therapy? It just made sense. Little kids aren’t going to sit and tell you their troubles. And some were not good candidates for other therapies, but I knew they could play and be like other children.”
Guerney began her informal talk by describing the state of child psychology when she went to Penn State.
She had attended a lecture by Melanie Klein in the late 1940s or 1950 itself and immediately saw the limitations of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts had wanted to work with children, she said, but did not know how to extend adult techniques to younger age groups.
The result was a very directive style that did little to foster honest and open self-expression by troubled children.
By that time Carl Rogers was already making strides in shifting therapy away from being therapist-driven. His school of “client-centered therapy” was based on trusting in the client to steer sessions toward areas of interest to them, and in their ability to find healing by pulling from their own resources.
The therapist became a mere facilitator, beginning from the rapport built by an unconditional positive regard for the client.
Guerney made a point of emphasizing that Rogers was “taking on the establishment and was ridiculed.” For that reason Rogers developed his methods under the auspices of research, carefully monitoring process and measuring outcomes to show that his “wild approach of trusting the client was really effective.”
Since not everyone was implementing Rogers yet, Guerney “felt lucky” to be in a department that did. She found client-centered therapy to be “a beautiful system” that fit with many of her own values. The idea that “perceptions matter” was completely novel.
“If you think someone is mad at you, you will behave according to that.”
The role of the therapist is to help you see yourself, while also validating you as a person through total acceptance. The client ends up seeing and working through their skewed views.
She also emphasized that it’s not magical, but merely observing how change comes about and working to facilitate that.
These ideas led to ever-widening discoveries about working with children. The child-centered play therapy that Dr. Guerney helped develop created an environment in which a child could express herself through play while enjoying an accepting, nurturing relationship with an adult (the therapist).
One of the questions put to Guerney was to distinguish between Virginia Axline’s work and her own.
Guerney described the identification of stages most children go through during the course of therapy. Those had not been outlined by Axline, nor any standardized method to identify progress. Perhaps more importantly, Axline’s writings emphasized the principles and theory, while Guerney worked to make it accessible to students by identifying exact skills to learn and apply.
“When I began I was flying by the seat of my pants, reading books but not being sure about how to implement the principles and theories. What do they look like in action?”
Much of her work became to organize and systematize a method of therapy that would have otherwise been relegated to a small group of naturally gifted specialists. In fact, her findings began with her dissertation that sought to develop methods for identifying and predicting which people would have great amounts of “empathy” as therapists.
It turned out to be a futile pursuit, something that escapes reliable prediction. Rather than look for people who “naturally had it”, her work would emphasize understanding how it works and how to teach it to others as an acquirable skill.
She also went on to clarify that empathy is not the mere parroting back of words. Unfortunately there has been confusion in the field by specialists who have mischaracterized empathy as pure technique, making it a cold, clinical unempathic behavior. This is the very reason it needs to be taught, rather than simply read about or summarized. When it is done correctly a person can feel fully understood and valued at the very deepest level of emotion.
Development of Filial Therapy
During the second half, Dr. Guerney went on to describe the work she and her husband, Dr. Bernard Guerney, did in developing Filial Therapy.
They began to consider involving parents in play therapy in the late 1950s, when it was quite radical to think of working with more than one person at a time.
Working at a clinic, Bernard Guerney was disturbed to see mothers being “shunted to the side” when they brought their children in for therapy. They were treated as if they were the problem that now had to be fixed.
He believed they deserved more respect, and wanted to get them involved in the therapy process.
At the time he was the head of Rutgers University Clinic, which gave him the freedom to implement research and monitor the results. The Guerneys began looking for ways to involve the parents, beginning first with conjoint therapy.
They would have the parents observe the therapist working with the child, and then discuss the sessions. From that arose ideas for the parents to try at home. Positive results encouraged a further step.
The Guerneys decided that ultimately parents should be trained to run the same therapeutically structured play sessions at home. This decision was completely radical, and threatening to the mental health establishment.
There was no concept of “paraprofessionals” at the time. Yet the Guerneys were determined not to offer a watered-down version of what specialists could do. They systemized the method into teachable, supervisable steps for non-specialists.
Their belief was that even if most parents will not perform at the level of a clinician, the fact that they continue in the child’s life is far more valuable.
“The acceptance and warmth from the parent are so much more powerful than someone without that real meaning and connection with the child.”
As a result, the parents themselves received much therapeutic help, having their own feelings dealt with in the course of learning. Teaching the skills took several weeks, allowing parents to have adequate time to focus on important issues and process the experience.
This coincided with, and to a large extent promoted, a larger trend to involve lay people in mental health promotion. Community-based centers arose offering parenting classes and other skills training.
“The goal was to try to give more psychological knowledge and skill to the average person.” However, Guerney lamented that few of these centers are still in existence.
For more on Dr. Guerney’s background visit: http://www.nire.org/about-nire/nires-staff/louise-guerney/
Pioneer in Child-Centered Play Therapy and Co-Creator of Filial Therapy
Dr. William Nordling brought a special guest to campus, his mentor and friend, Dr. Louise Guerney. The room was packed, with students even standing in the back. The tone was more of a living room chat than a class.
“What attracted me to Play Therapy? It just made sense. Little kids aren’t going to sit and tell you their troubles. And some were not good candidates for other therapies, but I knew they could play and be like other children.”
Guerney began her informal talk by describing the state of child psychology when she went to Penn State.
She had attended a lecture by Melanie Klein in the late 1940s or 1950 itself and immediately saw the limitations of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts had wanted to work with children, she said, but did not know how to extend adult techniques to younger age groups.
The result was a very directive style that did little to foster honest and open self-expression by troubled children.
By that time Carl Rogers was already making strides in shifting therapy away from being therapist-driven. His school of “client-centered therapy” was based on trusting in the client to steer sessions toward areas of interest to them, and in their ability to find healing by pulling from their own resources.
The therapist became a mere facilitator, beginning from the rapport built by an unconditional positive regard for the client.
Guerney made a point of emphasizing that Rogers was “taking on the establishment and was ridiculed.” For that reason Rogers developed his methods under the auspices of research, carefully monitoring process and measuring outcomes to show that his “wild approach of trusting the client was really effective.”
Since not everyone was implementing Rogers yet, Guerney “felt lucky” to be in a department that did. She found client-centered therapy to be “a beautiful system” that fit with many of her own values. The idea that “perceptions matter” was completely novel.
“If you think someone is mad at you, you will behave according to that.”
The role of the therapist is to help you see yourself, while also validating you as a person through total acceptance. The client ends up seeing and working through their skewed views.
She also emphasized that it’s not magical, but merely observing how change comes about and working to facilitate that.
These ideas led to ever-widening discoveries about working with children. The child-centered play therapy that Dr. Guerney helped develop created an environment in which a child could express herself through play while enjoying an accepting, nurturing relationship with an adult (the therapist).
One of the questions put to Guerney was to distinguish between Virginia Axline’s work and her own.
Guerney described the identification of stages most children go through during the course of therapy. Those had not been outlined by Axline, nor any standardized method to identify progress. Perhaps more importantly, Axline’s writings emphasized the principles and theory, while Guerney worked to make it accessible to students by identifying exact skills to learn and apply.
“When I began I was flying by the seat of my pants, reading books but not being sure about how to implement the principles and theories. What do they look like in action?”
Much of her work became to organize and systematize a method of therapy that would have otherwise been relegated to a small group of naturally gifted specialists. In fact, her findings began with her dissertation that sought to develop methods for identifying and predicting which people would have great amounts of “empathy” as therapists.
It turned out to be a futile pursuit, something that escapes reliable prediction. Rather than look for people who “naturally had it”, her work would emphasize understanding how it works and how to teach it to others as an acquirable skill.
She also went on to clarify that empathy is not the mere parroting back of words. Unfortunately there has been confusion in the field by specialists who have mischaracterized empathy as pure technique, making it a cold, clinical unempathic behavior. This is the very reason it needs to be taught, rather than simply read about or summarized. When it is done correctly a person can feel fully understood and valued at the very deepest level of emotion.
Development of Filial Therapy
During the second half, Dr. Guerney went on to describe the work she and her husband, Dr. Bernard Guerney, did in developing Filial Therapy.
They began to consider involving parents in play therapy in the late 1950s, when it was quite radical to think of working with more than one person at a time.
Working at a clinic, Bernard Guerney was disturbed to see mothers being “shunted to the side” when they brought their children in for therapy. They were treated as if they were the problem that now had to be fixed.
He believed they deserved more respect, and wanted to get them involved in the therapy process.
At the time he was the head of Rutgers University Clinic, which gave him the freedom to implement research and monitor the results. The Guerneys began looking for ways to involve the parents, beginning first with conjoint therapy.
They would have the parents observe the therapist working with the child, and then discuss the sessions. From that arose ideas for the parents to try at home. Positive results encouraged a further step.
The Guerneys decided that ultimately parents should be trained to run the same therapeutically structured play sessions at home. This decision was completely radical, and threatening to the mental health establishment.
There was no concept of “paraprofessionals” at the time. Yet the Guerneys were determined not to offer a watered-down version of what specialists could do. They systemized the method into teachable, supervisable steps for non-specialists.
Their belief was that even if most parents will not perform at the level of a clinician, the fact that they continue in the child’s life is far more valuable.
“The acceptance and warmth from the parent are so much more powerful than someone without that real meaning and connection with the child.”
As a result, the parents themselves received much therapeutic help, having their own feelings dealt with in the course of learning. Teaching the skills took several weeks, allowing parents to have adequate time to focus on important issues and process the experience.
This coincided with, and to a large extent promoted, a larger trend to involve lay people in mental health promotion. Community-based centers arose offering parenting classes and other skills training.
“The goal was to try to give more psychological knowledge and skill to the average person.” However, Guerney lamented that few of these centers are still in existence.
For more on Dr. Guerney’s background visit: http://www.nire.org/about-nire/nires-staff/louise-guerney/