ABSTRACT

Wyatt (2001a) edited a volume concerning congruence and in her introduction to it she (p. vii) reports that from the 1950s when Rogers first used the term, it received little further attention until the late 1980s. One of the ways in which it has been thought and written about since then is in terms of how it may be communicated. This is partly the focus of Cornelius-White’s (2013: 199–204) consideration of congruent communication and expanded ideas of congruence. While the classical client-centred position is that congruence is rarely, if ever, directly communicated in words but rather, as Cornelius-White (2007: 174) explains, via body language which is the product of internal congruence, some writers have become concerned with the appropriateness and nature of ‘congruent responses’ and (Wyatt 2001b: 79–95) ‘the multifaceted nature of congruence’.