ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on personal responsibility in humanistic and existential approaches. A major strand running throughout the writings of Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centred or person-centred counselling and therapy, has been a concern with personal responsibility. Person-centred counselling provides a nurturing emotional relationship in which many may find the psychological freedom to experience their own feelings and attach their own meanings to their experiences. The notion of responsibility is pervasive throughout the work of Fritz Peris, the founder of gestalt therapy. The contact boundary is the boundary between organism and environment and it is at this boundary that psychological events take place. The awareness technique in its most basic form is limited by its slowness in producing change. The acquisition of irresponsibility may be mainly viewed in terms of the development of scripts. Scripts are preconscious life plans by which people structure their time.
