ABSTRACT
In the years when William Glasser rst began formulating his views about the human change process, the psychological community at large was beginning to make an important shift. Starting primarily with Adler and Jung in the 1940s, mental health professionals were noting that human experience seemed to involve more than psychoanalysis had explained. By the 1950s, many practitioners and researchers were forming ideas that honored people’s ability to choose and control their thoughts, feelings, and actions, thus freeing themselves from the chains of determinism. As the psychological Zeitgeist moved toward existentialism, psychotherapy increasingly reected a focus away from a client’s internal drives and toward a client’s perception of the world; from a deterministic view of the past toward free will in the present; and from the counselor as anonymous analyst toward the counselor as involved participant in a relationship that was, itself, a factor in healing. It was in the context of this psychocultural revolution, when innovators were developing such theories as person-centered, existential, and Gestalt, that the genesis of reality therapy began.
