GODFREY BARRETT-LENNARD

BSc, BA (& further studies -UWA), PhD (Chicago), HonDUniv.Murd

Dr. Godfrey (Goff) Barrett-Lennard is the namesake of our training centre. We called our centre after him because of his strong commitment to supporting each individual in finding their unique pathway through life. This is a philosophy that we embrace at Caladenia.

 

Dr Barrett-Lennard began to sutdy Psychology in Perth in the late1940’s but took the significant step of leaving Western Australia in 1954  to study and train with Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago. Rogers was the founder of an innovative school of therapy that  subsequently became known as the person-centred  approach.  He is renowned internationally as pioneering a critical movement in thought and practice during this time. Godfrey Barrett-Lennard continues to be at the forefront of psychotherapy development, with recent groundbreaking books and articles.  He is known within the psychological community for pushing out boundaries, breaking new ground, extending or building onto the views or understanding already gained, rather than from preserving ideas intact. His interests are in the special relationship that is generated in therapy between practitioner and client.

Quotes from the books of Godfrey Barrett-Lennard

‘In the client-centred interview, personal detachment or distance mitigates against the helping process. Feelings of compassion, warmth, respect or admiration, interest or liking and other positive feelings toward the client as a person usually arise in the therapist and are allowed to show’ (Barrett-Lennard, 1998, p99)

'Each phase [of therapy] is like a crest or hilltop from which the view is clearer and the location more discernible than on the slopes and in the valleys between’ (Barrett-Lennard, 1998, p.106)

'Nearly all of us are wounded at times, in a psychosocial sense, and… we carry old wounds that may, under relevant conditions of stress, flare up again.'    In a wounded state the individual naturally retreats, or hits out reactively. The hopeful person reaches from within, initiates, takes action’ (Barrett-Lennard, 1998, p.111-112)

 

"The client ventures, dares now, to actually believe and feel that there is a way ahead that is better than the track behind. Therapy has begun to ease the burden the client has been carrying.  It is giving safety to communication and search from the heart and the edge of awareness, and there is a promise of further respite, discovery, even new vision’..’ Hope has reawakened’ (Barrett-Lennard, 1998, p.112)

‘Experiential groups resemble a pregnancy in which the general character of the growth process and species nature of the offspring are known while its particular characteristics are only evident after birth has taken place and, in some respects, only much later’ (Barrett-Lennard, 1998, p.158)

‘Attempts to instill a new pattern may alter behaviour but cannot produce wellness, since wellness is a fruition of being nor a rendered shape or adjustment’ (Barrett-Lennard, 1998, p.89)

‘Personal experience is usually imbued simultaneously with feelings and with meaning: feelings helping  to inform meaning and meanings contributing to what is felt’ (p.91)

‘Can I resonate to what he is saying, can I let it echo back and forth in me, so deeply that I sense the meanings he is afraid of yet would like to communicate, as well as those meanings he knows?’ (Rogers, 1969, p.223)

‘For the client, the impact of such understanding may be so powerful, that it is as though something that had stopped inside him has begun to move and live again, that some part of his loneliness in a world of imperfect communication and knowing has dissolved, or that some vital connection he had been unable to bring into focus has become suddenly and vividly clear to him’ (Barrett-Lennard, 1963 & 1998 p93)

‘I think of reflections as potential channels for the flow of empathy’ (Barrett-Lennard, 1993, p.8)

‘Distress carried from the past, when it is rather fully expressed and received, often works as a gateway to grappling with related current issues that are even more tender and difficult because of their immediacy in the client’s life’ (1998 p.98)

‘Nearly all of us have experiences, often painful ones, of not belonging and of feeling the need to earn acceptance or manoeuvre to gain it. We do not yearn for one soulmate only but also to be part and partner in larger wholes and yet ourselves within them. An intensive group experience is likely to call these issues to the fore, so that their working becomes clearer to the person and changed by being in the open’  (1998, p.163)

‘How parents relate to the young child’s constant process of exploration and discovery, the example they provide on many levels, how they assist in the child’s discrimination of meaning and connection in his or her world, are just some of the broader strands in their total contribution  to their child’s unfolding’ (1998, p. 192)

‘Being a resourceful parent is surely even more complex and multi-layered than being a resourceful therapist’ (1998, p. 197)

‘Therapy is not only a vehicle for change, not just of interest in terms of its function as a means to an end. It is a context of profound personal engagement and distinctive experiencing. It is itself, both a laboratory and a theatre of life’ (1998, p.233)