The Rise of Respect: A Brief History of How Psychotherapy Learned to Actually Respect People

Before we begin

This text isn’t an academic piece, which typically uses window-dressing-like formalities such as strict APA 7 formatting, third-person writing, avoidance of personal opinions, and similar academic elements. It also doesn’t require a dictionary to be referenced (at least, that is my intention).

If academic writing is your thing, here are two papers on a similar subject (new pages open up):
– on the Dialogical self, titled: The Polyphonic Mind: Navigating the Dialogical Self in Transformative Psychotherapy, here >>
– on the effective elements of transformative psychotherapy, titled: Synthesis of Articulated Empathy, Dialectical Constructivism, and Advice-Giving in Humanistic and Transformative Psychotherapy, here >>

The present article is based on my personal (read: subjective) observations from my private humanistic psychotherapy practice since 1996, and from a position of someone who has been part of the transformation of individuals inspired to help people respectfully since 2011.

I will not avoid the actual sources that address the notions outlined in the text, however. Relevant sources are at the end of this document, along with additional information. Having said that, I simply feel like expressing my thoughts on a respectful approach to helping people through professional psychotherapy in a more free-flowing style, as an average human being, grounded in common sense.

The purpose of this article is not to pass judgments but to emphasize the importance of respect in psychotherapy sessions. I genuinely believe that helping others is a commendable endeavor, and I wish to extend my respect to everyone who takes on such a challenging task, regardless of the school of thought they follow.

Regarding the inner structure of the following text, it is true that psychoanalysis predates behaviorism. I placed the manipulative stuff at the beginning of the article as a literary device rather than as a historical fact.

I like writing in English for a few reasons. First, I enjoy it more because it’s less complicated than my mother tongue. Also, most visitors to the ATCT Blog come from English-speaking backgrounds. If English isn’t your first language, you can easily translate the text into your preferred language. Just select your language from the top-right dropdown menu.

It is important to note that all the notions below represent my current subjective perception and should be understood as such. There is no intention to fix or change you or your therapist (which is a neurobiological impossibility anyway, but still…)

Well, here we go:

Introduction

If you’ve ever been in a therapist’s office and felt truly understood — not just analyzed or managed, but actually seen and accepted for who you are — you’re experiencing the result of nearly a century of dedication and progress in this unique profession we call therapy.

That progress, in its bluntest form, is a story about respect, in my opinion, about whether the person sitting in front of the therapist is a subject to be fixed or a person to be encountered and really seen. And tracing the arc from where psychotherapy started to where it has arrived is, among other things, an exercise in noticing how long it took for a supposedly human discipline to treat human beings with the dignity that word implies.

This is not a story with clear villains. The figures we’ll look at were, by and large, brilliant people doing serious work under the intellectual and cultural conditions of their time. But intellectual conditions matter enormously in psychology, perhaps more than in any other (descriptive) science, because the theory doesn’t just describe people — it shapes how people are treated. Get the theory wrong, and the consequences show up not in a lab notebook but in a person’s life.

So: three movements, three levels of awareness (body, mental, and authentic), three different answers to the question of what a struggling human being actually deserves.

Part One: B. F. Skinner, or the Flattering Illusion of the Trained Subjects

Let us begin with behaviorism, because behaviorism begins with an admirably honest act of erasure. It looks at the full, complicated, sometimes maddening interiority of the human being — the doubts, the choices, the joys, the private experience of being a self — and simply decides that none of this is real, or at any rate, none of it is relevant.

F. Skinner was one of the most eloquent and unsettling champions of behaviorism. What made him genuinely interesting, and genuinely alarming, if I may say so, was that he didn’t shrink from his own conclusions. Many individuals who believe that human beings have no free will and are primarily shaped by their surroundings often exhibit a certain social tact, carefully considering their words and the implications of their views before expressing them. Well, Skinner did not.

He stated, with the confident serenity of a man who has done his homework, that:

The hypothesis that man is not free is essential to applying the scientific method to the study of human behavior.
Skinner, B. F. (1953, p. 147)

The free inner man/woman — the one who deliberates, chooses, and takes responsibility — was, in Skinner’s framing, just a pre-scientific placeholder, a story we told ourselves before we knew better.

This idea is clear, and it goes beyond just how to run experiments. It addresses what you are as a person. In this view, you are an organism shaped by experiences that reward certain behaviors. Your likes, values, and what matters most to you can all be explained by the right mix of support and rewards (read: manipulation), which, in my view, is a very limited notion.

Now, set aside for a moment whether Skinner was right about the metaphysics. In the context of psychotherapy and clinical practice — the direct application of behavioral principles to people who are suffering — the consequences of this framework are specific and worth naming.

If behavior is the unit of analysis and the goal is its modification, then you are essentially managing a system, which can overlook the client as a person. You adjust inputs to achieve desired outputs. The person in the chair is not, strictly speaking, a person you need to understand from the inside — they are a behavioral profile that needs adjustment.

At this point, I will not take up your time discussing what I consider to be an audacious act by Mr. Skinner. The photo speaks for itself. He placed his daughter in a controlled box (for six months, if I remember correctly), to demonstrate whatever point he wanted to prove.

You might argue that this is unfair, as many (other) behavioral therapists really care about their clients, and indeed, many do, I should think. But the theoretical structure shapes the relationship whether you want it to or not.

Carl Rogers, who debated Skinner’s position directly and watched behavioral approaches applied in clinical settings, put his reaction with characteristic clarity:

To me, this kind of world would destroy the human person as I have come to know him in the deepest moments of psychotherapy. In such moments, I am in a relationship with a spontaneous person who is responsibly free, that is, aware of this freedom to choose who he will be, and also aware of the consequences of his choice.
Rogers, C. R. (1961, p. 129)

The deepest problem with behaviorism as a therapeutic philosophy is not that it fails to produce results — it often produces results. The problem is what it omits. It omits the question of meaning, the experience of the person doing the changing. It ignores, at the most fundamental level, the possibility that the person sitting across from the therapist has an inner life that matters in itself, not merely as a variable to be manipulated toward a desired outcome.

Behaviorism has made a significant contribution to the field of psychotherapy by highlighting the idea that behavior can be intentionally shaped and modified. However, this perspective also comes with an inherent limitation: it often conflates behavior change with genuine improvement in a person’s overall well-being. Let me say that again: changing one’s behavior on the outside might not translate to real transformation within.

This creates a confusing situation where simply following the rules is mistaken for real change, and small adjustments are seen as true personal growth.

And what makes this particular issue noteworthy is how subtly it manifests in therapeutic practice, often without malice on the part of practitioners.

This subtle but significant overlap is an important issue we should address even today.

Part Two: Sigmund Freud, or the Expert Archaeologist of Your Private Ruin

Freud is a more complicated case, because the psychoanalytic tradition, unlike behaviorism, was genuinely concerned with inner dynamics. It took the inner life seriously — extraordinarily seriously, I might add. It built an elaborate architecture to house its discoveries: the unconscious, the ego and superego, the mechanisms of repression and defense, the hydraulics of libido, and the made-up drama of the Oedipus complex. Whatever its scientific or common sense limitations, psychoanalysis was never guilty of ignoring the human inner life.

And yet.

The relationship in Freud’s analysis shows you a lot about the underlying beliefs of his work: the analyst listens, interprets, and, in due course, delivers the interpretation: this is what your dream really means, this is what your symptom expresses, this is the conflict beneath your apparent problem, and this is what you should feel and do and this is what you should not do.

In this approach to ‘helping’ people, the so-called power-over is employed. The therapist knows best. Incongruously (oddly), Freud himself has warned against that pastoral approach (see his words below from the book An outline of psychoanalysis). To no avail, it seems.

If I may, several honest and very capable people confided in me that their therapist (from the Freudian tradition) had actually told them what they should feel in certain situations!

I can’t speak for Freud and his disciples, but from a modern scientific neurobiological perspective, there’s no way I can be certain about what others feel at any moment—or, let alone, what they ought to feel.

I could cite a dozen peer-reviewed scientific papers from my favorite flavor of hard-core science (cognitive neuroscience) affirming that human perception is subjective. But you might want to look those up yourself, I feel.

The result of such an analytical treatment is that the client is not, in any meaningful sense, an authority on themselves. Their own sense of their experience is, by psychoanalysis’s definition, partial and distorted by unconscious processes they cannot access. They have repressed the relevant material precisely because it was supposedly too threatening to know.

So clients come to the psychoanalyst not to have their self-understanding respected but to have it corrected (!).

Another aim of Freud’s procedure is, in his own terms, to “re-educate” the client. The analyst takes on something of a parental or a preacher role, which might, from the client’s perspective, translate to a rather large amount of implicit authority in the hands of a stranger who has (vehemently) decided they understand the client’s childhood better than the client does (!)

To his credit, Freud saw this danger and warned against it:

However much the analyst may be tempted to become teacher, role model, and ideal for others, to create humans in his own image, he mustn’t forget that this is not his task in the analytical relationship; indeed, that he would be betraying his task if he allowed himself to be swept away by his inclinations.
He would then simply be repeating one of the mistakes of the parents, who crushed their child’s independence by their influence. He would be merely replacing the earlier dependence with a newer one. In all his efforts to improve and educate the patient, the analyst should, though, respect his individuality.
(Freud, 2003, p. 307)

Well, from where I stand, this (telling clients what they ought to feel, do, etc.) is awfully close to what might be called Blind compassion: doing something with the intention of helping others, while actually taking away their chance to really assume responsibility and grow.
My thoughts on Idiot compassion in a more general sense, in an article ‘Idiot Compassion & Toxic Empathy: When “Kindness” Goes Wrong’, here >>

Anyway, back to our subject: the relationship structure encourages the analyst to take on authority, whether they intend to or not. This is a deeper issue, I feel. From what I’ve seen, mental or analytical psychotherapy—a common practice worldwide—often works this way.

There is also embedded in the classical analytic structure a peculiar assumption about what is wrong with people. The fundamental Freudian story — in its most schematic form — is pessimistic: the civilized self is at war with its own desires, and formative material (read: causes) has been pushed out of reach. Freud’s view was that this forgotten territory, rich with formative experiences, is not merely lost to time but actively kept from awareness by the individual, further complicating their journey toward healing and understanding.

Let me reinforce that: if the therapist is convinced that there is actually something inherently wrong with the client (which is the case in psychoanalysis, at least to some extent), meaning, there is no light at the end of a tunnel, this is a detrimental (harmful) mentality and does not really allow clients to really advance. This produces a peculiar dynamic in the consulting room: the therapist often knows — or claims to know — what a client feels better than the client does.

To reiterate (repeat), this reflects an outdated mindset, in my view and from the standpoint of modern psychology.

What Freud’s framework struggled with — what Rollo May named as a deep crack in the whole psychoanalytic structure — was will, intention, freedom of choice. The very process of mental or analytical psychotherapy, as May put it, has

built-in tendencies which invite the patient to relinquish his position as the deciding agent.
(Love and Will; May, 1969/2007)

A client lies or sits down. They free-associate and let the analyst interpret. The client is, in a meaningful sense, the object of the analysis rather than its author. The client’s integrity and autonomy — their capacity to choose what their life means and how to live it — is theoretically acknowledged but, in practice, undermined by the very structure of the psychoanalytical relationship.

And yet — and this is important, I feel — Freud gave us something irreplaceable. He insisted, with a stubbornness bordering on the heroic, that the inner life is real, that suffering has meaning, that what happens to us in early life shapes what we become. Before Freud, much of what we would now recognize as psychological pain was either moralized away (weakness of character) or neurologized away (problems of the brain and other parts of the body). Freud took the person’s suffering seriously, as psychological, as something that could be understood, traced, and made sense of. That contribution is not small; we have to give him that.

But there is a long, long distance between taking suffering seriously and treating the sufferer as the authority on their own experience. Freud and his practice mostly did (and still do) the former, not the latter.

The client was (and still is, even today, it seems), to use the phrase that Rogers later introduced, more object of mental diagnosis than subject of their own life. They were told, in varying degrees of directness, what was wrong with them, what they really wanted, what their symptoms actually meant, and what the path to health looked like — all from the outside, all from above, all from a position of claimed expertise about territory that was nominally the patient’s own.

This was not insensibility. It was, in its way, a form of care, I think. But it was care that hadn’t yet learned the difference between mentally analyzing someone and respecting them.

Part Three: The Humanistic Turn, or the Demanding Gift of Being Believed In

During the transformative decades of the 1950s and 1960s, a significant shift was emerging within the realms of psychology and therapy. A diverse group of psychologists and therapists, increasingly disillusioned with the rigid tenets of behaviorism and the hierarchical nature of psychoanalysis, started to forge a new perspective.

They began to articulate a fresh set of assumptions regarding the essence of human beings and the fundamental needs that drive them. This movement sought to explore the intricacies of the human experience, emphasizing individuality, emotional depth, and the quest for self-actualization in a way that challenged the prevailing doctrines of the time.

The humanistic psychology movement — associated most prominently with Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, though it was considerably broader than just these two — proposed something that sounds simple and was, in practice, radical: people have within themselves the resources for their own growth. The therapist’s job is not to fix them, not to condition them, not to tell them what they ought to feel, not to interpret them from on high. The job is to create the conditions in which their own growth becomes possible.

Enter Carl Rogers

Carl Rogers described this shift in his own career with characteristic candor:

One brief way to describe the change that has taken place in me is to say that, in my early professional years, I was asking: How can I treat, cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question this way: How can I provide a relationship that this person can use for his personal growth?
Rogers, C. R. (1961, p. 32)

It sounds like a subtle reorientation. In practice, it was a revolution.

What Rogers introduced as the core of therapeutic work — what he sometimes called the necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic change — were not techniques. They were qualities of a relationship.

Genuineness: the client is a real, alive, breathing person, not just a slightly or profoundly doomed mental ruin in need of fixing. Empathy: not a diagnostic procedure but a genuine effort to understand others from the heart, not the mind. And what he called “unconditional positive regard” — a care for the person that doesn’t depend on whether they behave acceptably, whether they have ‘the right’ insights, whether they’re making progress.

This is, if you sit with it, a much deeper comprehension of what a struggling person actually needs. Not to be told what’s wrong with them or to be managed toward ‘better behavior’.

Abraham H. Maslow

Maslow, approaching the concept from a unique perspective, introduced us to the idea of self-actualization. This concept suggests that human beings possess an innate drive for personal growth and development. It emphasizes that true health transcends merely being free from illness; instead, it represents a proactive journey toward realizing one’s fullest potential.

This journey not only involves overcoming obstacles but also embracing opportunities for self-discovery and fulfillment in various aspects of life:

Not only is it fun to use our capacities, but it is necessary for growth.
The unused capacity or skill can become a disease center, or else atrophy or disappear, thus diminishing a person.
Maslow, 1998, p. 225, Toward a psychology of being

In practical terms, consider this: once you address the deep-seated issues stemming from your relationship with your parents, and once the weight of your anxieties finally lifts, what then?

My point is, simply eliminating the negativity that has shadowed your life does not automatically equate to true fulfillment.

It’s important to recognize the distinction between merely existing free from problems—such as overcoming addictions, escaping depression, and so on—and genuinely thriving in a life filled with happiness and prosperity. True contentment transcends the absence of struggles; it embodies a vibrant, fulfilling existence where joy and abundance flourish.

For Maslow, this wasn’t just a theoretical model — it was a statement about what people are fundamentally oriented toward. Given adequate conditions, people grow. They don’t need to be shaped, fixed, corrected, or directed; they need space and support to develop in their own rhythm.

Rollo May and his grounded approach

Rollo May introduced a profound existential perspective, emphasizing that human beings inevitably confront challenges that remain unsolvable by any extent of conditioning, manipulation, or interpretation.

He proposed that anxiety is not merely a symptom to be eradicated; rather, it is a companion to the experience of making authentic choices. This understanding highlights the intrinsic link between anxiety and the freedom to choose, suggesting that facing our fears is an essential part of the human condition.

A therapy that aims to eliminate all discomfort does not help people become freer — it helps them become more defensive. The goal, in the existential-humanistic framework, is to face the unavoidable difficulties of being human with courage and awareness, not to be protected from them by an ‘expert’ therapist.

This is a genuinely more respectful stance toward the client, I feel.

The limits of the humanistic approach

And here is where the mild critique is warranted, because the humanistic approach, for all its warmth and depth, has its own particular demand hidden inside it.

The humanistic vision of the person is, at its core, deeply aspirational. It suggests — and this is both its strength and its occasional blind spot — that people want to grow. That they are, in some fundamental sense, ready and willing to take up the challenge of becoming more fully themselves. Well, this might not be the case. Not every therapist wants to fix and direct, and not every client wants to really grow.

Maslow’s picture of the self-actualizing person is beautiful and inspiring. It is also, I think, potentially a new kind of burden. When “becoming the self you truly are” becomes the implicit standard, it creates its own pressure: the pressure to be doing the work, to be on the journey, to be moving.

And, even more importantly, what about the person who isn’t ready? What about the person who doesn’t actually want to assume full responsibility for the conduct and outcome of their life, at least not yet, and maybe not in the way the humanistic theory prescribes?

Prof. Dr. John Rowan, my dear mentor from the Rushmore University, writing about humanistic counseling in his seminal (influential, important) work Ordinary Ecstasy: The Dialectics of Humanistic Psychology (3rd ed., 2001), quotes a bracing (refreshing) formulation:

It is the counselor’s function to lead the counselees to accept responsibility for the conduct and outcome of their lives.
May, as cited in Rowan (2001, p. 16)

That is a powerful and honorable goal. It is also, for someone who is simply exhausted and frightened, a very large task and maybe too tall an order.

The humanistic tradition, at its best, knows this. Rogers’s unconditional positive regard is explicitly designed to meet people where they are, not where they should be.

But the overall cultural and theoretical atmosphere of humanistic psychology — the emphasis on growth, actualization, authenticity, and the fully functioning person — might, in less skillful hands, generate its own covert judgment: that a person who is not visibly growing is somehow failing the therapy, if not failing themselves.

There is a huge number of people who come to therapy not because they want to be transformed but because they just want to survive the week. People who are not looking for life-changing breakthroughs or the discovery of their deeper selves might only be looking for a temporary relief. The humanistic framework, at its most theoretically committed, may not always have sufficient grace for those who simply need to survive or exist without being asked to flourish and transform. It is simply too much for a lot of people.

In my view, this is not a critical flaw. However, it is a limitation that deserves to be acknowledged openly. By naming it, we show respect for both those affected and the tradition that has genuinely moved closer to human dignity than what came before.

Conclusion: What Respect Actually Requires

The journey outlined in this article — progressing from manipulative behavioral techniques to a focus on analytic authority, and ultimately arriving at a more respectful humanistic engagement — fundamentally illustrates the lengthy process by which a helping profession gradually comes to appreciate and acknowledge the full humanity and individuality of the individuals it aims to assist.

This narrative reflects, at least that’s how I see it, a deepening understanding of what it means to be a living person in the realm of care and support. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing and honoring each person’s unique experiences and needs. By approaching individuals with empathy and compassion, we can better connect with their journeys and provide the thoughtful support they deserve.

Behaviorism treated the person as a choiceless system to be optimized. It had real results and almost no inner life.

Psychoanalysis took the inner life seriously but reserved the right to be its primary interpreter, turning the person into a text to be read and rewritten rather than a living self to be respectfully accompanied.

Humanistic psychology returned authority to the person, grounded the therapeutic relationship in genuine respect, and insisted that health is something the person moves toward from inside themselves, not something done to them from outside.

That is progress. Genuine progress, in my opinion. And it is worth taking a moment to appreciate how non-obvious it was, how hard-won, how many interesting and serious minds it took to arrive at what now sounds, in its basic formulation, almost like common sense.

But the end of this story is not, “and then humanistic psychology solved it all.” There is no winner here, I feel.

The question of what respect requires never really closes. It keeps opening into new territory, because human beings keep presenting themselves in forms that challenge our theories.

Some people need a behaviorally structured environment (meaning conditioning) to create enough safety for anything else to be possible. The analytic excavation of buried patterns genuinely helps some people. Some people don’t want to be respectfully accompanied — they want to be told what to do, what to feel, at least for a while, because the alternative is simply too frightening.

Respect is not just a momentary stance or a simple technique; it’s more like a heartfelt commitment. It involves continuously choosing to see the person in front of you as a whole individual, rather than reducing them to your own assumptions or theories about who they are. This ongoing effort shows we understand the complexity and uniqueness of every person we encounter.

Skinner had a theory. Freud had a theory. The humanists have a theory. The theories are useful, of course. They are also all, in their different ways, smaller than the people they are trying to describe.

What the rise of respect in psychotherapy has taught us — slowly, imperfectly, with many long detours through authority and mechanism and kindly-meant dismissiveness — is that the most important thing a therapist can do is remain genuinely curious about this particular person, in this particular moment, with this particular kind of suffering.

Not merely as an example of a particular personality type, nor as a sign of an underlying psychological issue with daddy, and certainly not as a hopeful individual striving toward self-actualization who has yet to get there. Instead, simply vibrant, dynamic human beings, full of thoughts, feelings, free will, and experiences that shape their unique existence.

Which turns out to be the most demanding and, at the same time, rewarding thing to do, at least for me.

– Edmond Cigale, Ph.D.
book online humanistic consulting and coaching today >>