User:Howardgontovnick/Alvin R. Mahrer

ALVIN R. MAHRER

The years from 1949 to 1954 were exceedingly important time for the clinical psychology program at Ohio State University. As one of many students in the doctoral program, Mahrer had decided to give up a career in boxing and concentrate on understanding human behavior. With a middling interest in the field of psychology or psychological matters, Mahrer had no passionate drive for either a doctorate or a career in psychotherapy, let alone an appreciation for the conceptual issues associated with psychotherapy.(1)

During the golden decade of creativity for the clinical psychology program at Ohio State University, big changes were occurring. Carl Rogers had left for the University of Chicago after developing client-centered therapy, Julian Rotter was writing the bible of social learning theory (Rotter, 1954)(2), and George Kelly was creating his classical personal construct psychology (Kelly, 1955)(3). These three theorists created movements that revolutionized clinical psychology, including client-centered theory and therapy, social learning theory and therapy, personal construct theory, postmodern theory, and constructivist theory and therapy. For a young doctoral student in the program at Ohio State, Mahrer had a sense that this group of unique teachers quietly conveyed a new way of thinking about the human condition; (a) Be bold and break new ground. Dare to be as creative as you can be. (b) Think big, that is think in broad strokes. Dare to revolutionize the field. Dare to violate what is taken for granted. (c) Go beyond the field of psychology. Open your mind and know the works of the great thinkers of the ages. Know the underground issues that constitute the foundations of psychology and psychotherapy.

The atmosphere was electrifying, challenging, inspiring, and galvanizing. Students felt compelled to join this new way of thinking and encouraged to integrate their ideas in some fashion, or to go forth and be innovative – this would be the future of a new psychology. For Mahrer, this atmosphere was a major precursor of what would emerge as the experiential system, experiential psychology, and experiential therapy.

Alvin R. Mahrer, graduated in 1954, from Ohio State University with a doctorate in clinical psychology, went to the VA Hospital in Denver, and became president of the Colorado Psychological Association. In 1967, he was professor and clinical director at Miami University, then the University of Waterloo, and then the University of Ottawa where received the 1992 University of Ottawa Award for Excellence in Research, partly on the basis of his books and journal publications about psychotherapy.(4)

Today Alvin R. Mahrer is a Professor Emeritus in the University of Ottawa’s School of Psychology. He is also the author of 20 books and more than 200 academic publications.

Awards(5)

•	Dr. Mahrer received the Award for Excellence in Research in 1992 from the University of Ottawa

•	He was one of four recipients in the first "Living Legends in Psychotherapy" by the American Psychological Association's Division of Psychotherapy (University of Ottawa News Release, Feb 15, 2002).

•	The recipient of the Rollo May Award for Pursuit of New Frontiers - APA Division 32 (2006)

•	One of four recipients of the first "Distinguished Psychologist Award" from the APA's Division of psychotherapy (2002)

In their classic book Current Psychotherapies (2004 ed.)(6), Raymond Corsini and Danny Wedding wrote; "In the process of editing the Handbook of Innovative Therapy in which some 70 systems are analyzed, I searched for the ideal system of psychotherapy. When I read Mahrer's contribution, I was amazed by the audacity of experiential psychotherapy, which in many ways turns the world upside down. To my knowledge, no one has studied psychotherapy's origins in philosophy or science as well as Mahrer has. He has truly broken new ground.”... “All therapists should consider learning this approach. It is not just another method; in fact, I consider it as revolutionary as was Freud's 100 years ago and Carl Rogers 50 years ago. Experiential psychotherapy is a revolutionary concept that must be tried to be appreciated." (7)

THEORY OF PERSONALITY

The experiential system of psychology rests on a philosophy of science in which the conceptualization of personality is mainly a model or pictorialization made up of convenient fictions, rather than the much more common notion of theories as approximations of what is assumed to be true (Mahrer, 2004)(8). Accordingly, the experiential concepts and principles having to do with personality are to be seen as nothing more than convenient fictions, invented mainly because they are useful, rather than because they are real or true.

1. The origins of personality lie in what may be pictured as a primitive field consisting of the parental figures and the physical infant (Mahrer, 1989)(9). Picture a circle around the parental figures and the physical infant, and think of that circle as defining the original personality of the infant. Think of the infant (a) as including the potentials for experiencing the parental figures and (b) as being created, organized, and defined by the parental figures. That is, the infants original personality consists of the potentials for experiencing in the parental figures as well as in the infant created by the parental figures. lf for example, the potentials for experiencing in the parental figures include an experiencing of defiance/rebelliousness/opposition, and an experiencing of closeness/fusion/oneness, then these can also serve as the basic personality of the infant. In addition, parental figures can create and define the infant as components of the parents own personal external worlds, can construct and define the basic nature of the infant and endow the infant with meaning. lf for example, the infant is created and defined as the special one/elevated one/ chosen one, then this potential for experiencing comes into existence as part of the original personality of the infant. In other words, the infant’s primitive personality already exists as the primitive world in which the physical infant exists.

2. Personality development consists mainly of the emergence of additional potentials for experiencing and the relationships between those potentials. Together, these additional potentials for experiencing and the relationships between them constitute and define what is ordinarily thought of as the structure of personality, who and what the emerging person is, how the conscious and aware person thinks, feels, acts, interacts, and relates with him- or herself and functions and operates in the world. These additional potentials are the operational potentials for experiencing.

Born out of the more basic deeper potentials for experiencing, the operating potentials for experiencing are created (a) to constitute the conscious, aware person who functions and operates, thinks and feels, has a personality, and creates his or her own personal world; and (b) to keep the person distanced from the sealed-off, inner world of the deeper and basic potentials for experiencing.

3. The construction of a personal external world is another component of personality development. Once there is a person, once a set of operating potentials for experiencing and the relationships between those potentials have been established, the person constructs and builds a personal external world. Beginning in early or middle childhood, the operating potentials for experiencing make it possible for individuals to create and construct their own personal external worlds for at least two main purposes.

One purpose is for the external world to provide appropriate situational contexts for the person to experience the operating potentials for experiencing that are important for the person to experience. In other words, an external world is created by operating potentials to enable experiencing of the operating potentials.

For example, if the operating potential is the experiencing of dedication and devotion, this operating potential can help to create and construct an external world that supports a lifelong dedication to prayer and subservience to God; or a medical career passionately devoted to discovering the cure for cancer; or an external world that supports a musician trying to write a perfect symphony. One’s own external world is created and constructed to serve as situational contexts for the experiencing of one’s own operating potentials for experiencing.

Second, the person creates a personal external world to contain and to constitute one’s own deeper potentials for experiencing. Because the person’s relationship to the deeper potentials for experiencing is exceedingly hateful, terrifying, and disintegrative, these deeper potentials for experiencing tend to fill the external world in a form that is twisted, grotesque, awful, and monstrous, and the person’s relationship with these externalized parts of the external world are typically laced with hate, terror, pain, and dread. In essence, the person creates an external world to house and to be the hissing, snarling externalization of the person’s own awful relationship with the persons own awful form of the deeper potentials for experiencing. That is, the person creates a tormenting, hurtful external world out of his or her own hated, dreaded, tormenting, hurtful deeper potentials.

lf, for example, a person’s deeper potential is the experiencing of defiance, rebelliousness, and opposition, he or she can construct an external world consisting of a willful, defiant son, an opposing group of coworkers, an unforgiving arctic storm, or an enemy nation that hates, resists, defies, opposes, and strikes back. A person’s constructed external world is the essence of his or her own hated and dreaded defiance, rebelliousness, and opposition, in exceedingly painful relationships with the person who created and constructed that personal external world in the first place.

4. The course of human life is seen as persons being and doing what it is important for them to be and do in order for them to undergo the potentials for experiencing that it is important for them to experience. A persons system of potentials for experiencing and the relationships between these potentials, once established, are inclined to remain relatively stable throughout the course of life. However, there can be room for change in the person’s ways of being and behaving, and in the person’s constructed personal world, all in the continuing service of enabling the person to undergo and experience the relatively stable system of potentials for experiencing and their relationships.

In the experiential model, the relatively stable system of potentials for experiencing and the relationships between these potentials steers the course of the client’s life. There is little or no place for things such as basic needs and drives, built-in growth or developmental forces with their stages of human growth and development, or pushes and pulls toward human maturity, adjustment, or normal functioning.

5. The roots of pain and unhappiness lie mainly in relationships between potentials for experiencing, relationships that are hateful, disjunctive, antagonistic, destructive, frightening, and disintegrative. These disintegrative relationships can be between any potentials for experiencing, and they are almost uniformly present between the person who is the operating potentials for experiencing and the inner world of deeper potentials for experiencing.

When relationships are disintegrative, virtually any potential for experiencing can be feared and hated by its neighbors. An experiencing of loving closeness, warmth, and intimacy can be bathed in pain and unhappiness by neighboring potentials for experiencing whose relationships poison it.

When relationships are disintegrative, potentials for experiencing can be altered, forced out of their intrinsic, natural form and into a form that is monstrous, painful, and hurtful. An experiencing of determination, strength, and leadership can be twisted into a painful hurtful experiencing of messianic control, arrogant superiority, and uncaring dominance. A potential for experiencing loving closeness, warmth, and intimacy can be twisted into a painful experiencing of losing one’s identity in fusing with another, of sacrificing one’s integrity and independence, of being dangerously vulnerable.

When relationships between potentials are disintegrative, the personal external world can be populated with painful agencies and forces that jab and attack, threaten and abuse, inflict pain and suffering, constrain and control. The person creates and lives in a world of demons and devils, monsters and gargoyles, a world of pain and suffering, agony and anguish.

When deeper potentials for experiencing are stirred, roused, touched, enlivened, the person’s own exceedingly disintegrative relationships toward these deeper potentials can fill the person with jolts of terror and dread that can leave the person in a state of disorganization, disharmony, disorder, disintegration, deadness, numbness, agitation, saturnine depression, vulnerability, or fragility.

6. Deep-seated radical personality change is understood as the consequence of two related changes. One is that relationships between potentials for experiencing shift from being fearful, hateful, and disintegrative, to being loving, welcoming, and integrative. This applies especially to relationships between the operating potentials who are the person and the deeper potentials that are kept sealed off and hidden. This first change is called integration. A second change is that the deeper potentials for experiencing become integral parts of the person, the operating potentials for experiencing. That is, deeper potentials become operating potentials. This second change is called actualization.

These two changes can occur as qualitative shifts, radical and transformational shifts from one state to a different state, rather than being changes that are more gradual or cumulative. ln much the same way, deep-seated, radical personality change depends on one’s readiness and ability to wholly sacrifice and extinguish oneself, to fully hurl oneself into being the inner deeper self, of letting go completely of the very essence and core of who and what one is. It can be appreciated that the experiential meaning of deep seated, radical personality change is not an especially common occurrence.

THEORY OF PSYCHOTHERAPY (10)

l. ln most psychotherapies, the goals emphasize treatment of mental disorders or of presenting symptoms, complaints, and pathological problems related to mental disorders. In contrast, the experiential session is designed to enable a client (a) to undergo a radical transformation and become the qualitatively new person that the person can become, and (b) thereby to become free of his or her painful scene or situation and the painful feelings in that scene or situation.

In the experiential model, there are deeper potentials for experiencing that can become integral parts of a radically new, transformed person. This can be a magnificent, extraordinary achievement that has at least two profound consequences. One is that the client is a radically new and qualitatively different person, with new and different thoughts and feelings, ways of being and behaving, outlooks and perspectives, living and being in a new and different external world. The other side of this consequence is the risk of significant change, loss, or extinction of the ordinary, continuing former person and that person’s thoughts and feelings, ways of being and behaving, outlook and perspective, and external world.

The second profound consequence is that the qualitatively new person no longer creates and lives in the former person’s personal world, with its painful feelings in its painful scenes and situations. The experiential solution is to become a qualitatively new person who is free of the former person’s pains and hurts in the former person's painful and hurtful personal world, and this can include what many other therapists refer to as presenting complaints, psychological problems, symptoms, and mental disorders.

2. The theory of problem identification. In most therapies, there is typically something referred to as “the problem” - diagnosed mental illness, the thing that psychotherapy is to treat. In most therapies, it is identified by giving it a name or label, for example poor impulse control, a pathological grief reaction, lack of assertiveness, sexual dysfunction, ego diffusion, post-traumatic stress disorder, premature ejaculation, chronic fatigue, hypomania, dissociation, identity disorder, fear of intimacy, hallucinations and delusions, depressive disorder, panic disorder, borderline personality disorder, or an abusive personality.

ln the experiential conceptual system, what is commonly referred to by other therapists as a problem is set aside, and the preference is for careful identification of the painful scene of strong painful feeling. There are at least three reasons for this. (a) From the experiential viewpoint, the genuine difficulty or trouble or concern, the real focus of therapy, is the painful feeling in a painful scene or situation. Saying that the genuine focus of therapy is some sort of name or label, e.g., hypomania or fear of intimacy or abusive personality, would simply be inaccurate, a mistake, at least in the experiential perspective, mainly because these labels do not refer to or include the actual anguish and pain, or the scene in which the painful feeling occurs. (b) Experiential work means finding the precise instant when the painful feeling peaks, and this can be discovered by first carefully identifying and then fully living and being in the painful scene or situation of painful feeling. Identifying the scene of painful feeling is crucial in experiential work. (c) Identifying the painful scene of painful feeling can be exceedingly scary and threatening, bothersome and unpleasant. After all, the work consists of living and being in the painful scene of painful feeling. An effective way of staying away from the painful scene of painful feelings is instead to give it a name or label, such as; a marital problem, an anger management problem, a fear of intimacy, or hypomania. Therefore, by merely naming and labeling it effectively keeps the person from ever carefully identifying the painful scene of painful feeling, from ever living and being in it, and certainly from ever discovering the instant of peak painful feelings. In other psychotherapies, the patient may talk about it and try to understand it. However, one does not willingly hurl oneself back into it.

3. The theory of access to the inner deeper world. Many theories emphasize deeper material of which the person is essentially unaware. According to many of these theories, the person in the conscious state is nevertheless able to gain access to this unconscious material by such means as the careful study of the client’s case history, symptoms, dreams, psychological tests, pathological behavior, cognitions, and thought patterns, especially under the guidance of a psychotherapist. In other words, much of the common meaning of unconscious is presumed to be accessible to discovery, insight, and understanding by the conscious person in the conscious state.

The experiential model depicts a further or deeper internal world that is essentially outside of and beyond accessibility by the person in the ordinary conscious state. Access to this other deeper world of deeper potentials for experiencing requires that the person must exit from the ordinary state of conscious awareness, must disengage from the ordinary state of consciousness, and instead must enter into an extraordinary state beyond and outside of the ordinary state of consciousness.

4. The theory of the target of therapeutic change. In most therapies, when the target is thought of as the outcome, the target is the clients presenting complaints, symptoms, psychological problem, or mental disorder. When the target is what is to be treated to have a successful outcome, aspects of the client, for example, the client’s irrational belief, poor defense mechanisms, or inadequate insight and understanding, are the target.

In contrast, the experiential conceptualization holds that the target of change is the client who has the complaint, symptom, or mental disorder, who has the irrational belief, poor defense mechanisms, or inadequate insight and understanding. The target of change is the very person who is the “I” saying, “I have a problem. . . I am depressed. . . I feel frightened." The target is the core person oneself, rather than something about the client.

5. The theory of psychotherapeutic change. The experiential model of psychotherapeutic change consists of four steps. In the first step, the client disengages from the ordinary state of conscious awareness and enters the inner deeper world of the essentially unknown and unexplored deeper potentials for experiencing. The first step culminates in the client discovering a deeper potential for experiencing, coming face to face with the deeper potential, touching and being touched by the deeper potential.

The conceptual foundation of the second step is that the client’s relationships with deeper potentials are typically so negative and disintegrative that the client does not know of the existence of the deeper potentials and does not know that he or she does not know. The deeper potentials are utterly terrifying and grotesque, dreadful and twisted. The experiential model allows for the magnificent possibility of converting the awful and disintegrative relationship into a relationship of welcoming and accepting, of embracing and enjoying, of trusting and playful joyfulness. The deeper potential that had been discovered in the first step is loved and befriended in the second step, and this paves the way for the third step.

The purpose of the third step is for individuals to give up their identity, to let go of everything that they are, to surrender themselves, and instead to be the deeper potential for experiencing. They undergo the radical transformation into the utterly new person who is the deeper potential. In this conceptual picture, the person exits the old person, leaving him or her behind, and emerges as the whole new person who is the deeper potential for experiencing. The shift is to be all at once, rather than gradual; complete, rather than partial; and exuberantly vibrant, rather than muted.

The fourth and final step occurs when the formerly deeper potential becomes an integral new operating potential in the qualitatively changed system of operating potentials, and when this radically new person exists and lives in the qualitatively new world of the qualitatively new person. In this conceptualization, when a deeper potential for experiencing becomes an integral part of the former system of operating potentials, a wholesale transformation has occurred and a qualitatively new person has emerged. This whole new person is born in this session, and it is this whole new person who can leave the session and live and be in the new person’s new world (Mahrer, 2002)(11).

6. The requisites of psychotherapeutic change. Perhaps the main requisite for the client is that, in this session, there is sufficient readiness and willingness to undergo the changes of proceeding through the steps and sub-steps of the session.

For the therapist, there are two main requisites. (a) The therapist’s own model, picture, conceptualization, and foundational beliefs should have a friendly goodness-of-fit with those of the experiential system The therapist must, for example, see the session as an opportunity for the client to become the qualitatively new person that the person can become and to be essentially free of the painful scene of painful feeling that was front and center in the session. (b) The therapist should have a sufficient measure of proficiency and competency in the working operations, methods, and skills needed to conduct the experiential session. Ordinarily, this calls for progressive and continuing training in explicit skill development.

The Steps For Each Session of Experiential Psychotherapy (12)

Step 1 – Discover The Deeper Potential For Experiencing

A.	Enter Into A State of Readiness For A Transformational, Quantum, Qualitative Shift B.	Select A Scene of Strong Feeling C.	Live And Be In The Scene Of Strong Feeling D.	Describe What Is Going On When The Feeling Reaches Its Peak E.	When The Feeling Reaches Its Peak, Use One Of The Methods To Discover The Deeper Potential For Experiencing

-	Find and describe the precise moment when the feeling peaks (and then) -	Further and further intensify the experiencing until a new experiencing occurs (or) -	Penetrate the core of the painful feeling until a deeper potential for experiencing appears (or) -	Replace the bad feeling with an artificial false good feeling until the feeling becomes genuinely good, and a deeper potential for experiencing appears (or) -	Be the special other person until a deeper potential for experiencing appears.

Step 2 – Welcome And Accept The Deeper Potential For Experiencing

•	Savor, Enjoy The Immediately Ongoing Bodily Sensation •	Name And Describe The Deeper Potential For Experiencing •	Tell How And Why The Deeper Potential For Experiencing Is Good, And How And Why It Is Bad. •	Name And Describe Someone Who Is The Exemplar – Model Of The Deeper Potential For Experiencing. •	Tell How You Keep The Deeper Potential For Experiencing Hidden And Disproved.

Step 3 – Be The Deeper Potential For Experiencing In Scenes From The Past                   

A.	Find, Locate Scenes From The Past B.	Be The Deeper Potential For Experiencing In Scenes From The Past -	The context is high on silliness, zaniness, playful unreality, freedom from reality constraints, ridiculousness, wildness, fantasy. -	3 - 2 - 1 - Go -	Stay being the whole new person from now on. -	Pop from one past scene to others in no special sequence, in scenes where you could – should have been the whole new person.

Step 4 – Be The Whole New Person In The Whole New External World

A.	Remain Being The Whole New Person B.	Find Imminent Scenes And Situations That Are Outrageously Unrealistic -	Start with the next time when the whole new you meets up with the initial scene of strong bad feeling. -	Invent an outrageously unrealistic world for the whole new person you are. -	What outrageously unrealistic impulse would the whole new you love to carry out? -	How will the whole new person look, talk, dress, walk, listen? C.	Be The Whole New Person In The Imminent Scenes And Situations Of Outrageously Playful unreality D.	See What Imminent Scenes Appear When You Add A Little Reality E.	In The Realistic Imminent Scene Rehearse And Modify The Scene And What To Do In The Scene -	Use bodily-felt sensations as checks and guides. -	Arrive at what the whole new person can do in leaving the session, and in living in the realistic imminent scene. -	Give the person who entered the session a chance to object, and to take over once again. F.	Commit Yourself To Being The Whole New Person In The Whole New Post-Session World G.	Be The Whole New Person In The Whole New Post-Session World

HAVING YOUR OWN SESSION

Experiential psychotherapy can work with people who want to be able to have experiential sessions by themselves (Mahrer, 2002)(13). In either case, the steps and sub-steps are the same. The only difference, is that one assumes the “role” of the therapist. One can learn by oneself how to have one’s own experiential sessions, and in this case the experiential psychotherapist plays no role at all. It is also common for the experiential psychotherapist to help by teaching practitioners or students to hold their own experiential sessions.

Evaluation of Each Session

In many therapies, it is common to evaluate the success or failure of a program of sessions, starting with a pretreatment evaluation of the problem or mental disorder, and ending with a post-treatment evaluation of the outcome of the program of sessions. In contrast, each experiential session is its own mini-therapy, and success or failure is only judged in terms of each immediate session. Because each session is its own mini-therapy, evaluation refers to seeing if each session is successful or unsuccessful.

There are two ways to evaluate the nature and degree of success of each experiential session:

a) To what degree did the session achieve each of the steps of the session? For each of the four steps, evaluation can focus on whether or not the step was achieved, and on how well the step was achieved. These determinations are typically evident to the therapist and the person in the session. lf a researcher has observed the session, it is typically evident to him or her as well. b) To what degree did the session achieve the two goals of each session? Was the client successful in undergoing the qualitative shift into becoming the qualitatively new person and if so, to what degree? This can be determined carefully and objectively in the session itself, and it can be determined by whether the qualitatively new person is present in the opening of the subsequent session, The second question is whether the person is free of the painful scene of painful feeling. This can be determined both in the session itself and by whether or not the painful scene of painful feelings is still present or is essentially gone in the subsequent session when the person identifies the scene of strong feeling that is front and center in the session.

SUMMARY

Experiential psychotherapy rests on a model of potentials for experiencing in relationship with one another. The key to experiential sessions is a scene of strong feeling as a doorway into the inner world of deeper potentials for experiencing. The gift offered by experiential sessions is the opportunity to undergo a magnificent shift into becoming the qualitatively new person that the person is capable of becoming, a new person who can be free of the old person’s painful scenes of painful feelings.

It is rather likely that the future of experiential psychotherapy includes (a) further adoption by a relatively small constituency of psychotherapists whose way of thinking is friendly to the experiential way of thinking; and (b) progressive evolution and development so that experiential psychotherapy becomes more and more the psychotherapy it is capable of becoming.

Further glimpses into the future seem to suggest at least three ways in which the psychotherapies of today may be essentially unrecognizable a hundred years or so from now (Mahrer, 1997 (14), Mahrer & Boulet, 2001 )(15)(a) Future technologies will likely provide far better ways of creating, offering, providing virtual reality people and contexts that psychotherapists currently provide for clients, eg., the good listener, the one who can be counted upon, the attractive confidante. (b) The methods of self-change are likely to undergo a powerful evolution, both in sheer effectiveness and in popular adoption by people in general. (c) Today’s experiential psychotherapy will likely be replaced by methods and programs enabling people to achieve higher and higher levels of optimal being and behaving.

Books by Alvin R. Mahrer, Ph.D.

What Is Psychotherapy For? An Alternative To The Profession of Psychotherapy [2010] The Optimal Person [2009] The Manual of Optimal Behaviors [2008] How Psychotherapy Can Become A Science [2007] The Other Deeper You. [2007] The Creation of New Ideas In Psychotherapy: A GuideBook [2006] Supervision of Psychotherapists: The Discovery-Oriented Approach. [2005] Why Do Research In Psychotherapy? Introduction To A Revolution. [2004] Theories Of Truth, Models Of Usefulness. [2004] The Complete Guide To Experiential Psychotherapy. [1996/re-issue 2004] Becoming The Person You Can Become: The Complete Guide To Self-Transformation. [2002] Dream Work: In Psychotherapy & Self-Change. [1990] How to do Experiential Psychotherapy: A Manual for Practitioners. [1989] The Integration of Psychotherapies: A Guide for Practicing Psychotherapists. [1989] Therapeutic Experiencing: The Process of Change. [1986] Psychotherapeutic Change: An Alternative Approach to Meaning & Measurement. [1985] Experiential Psychotherapy: Basic Practices. [1983] Experiencing: A Humanistic Theory of Psychology & Psychiatry. [1978] Creative Developments in Psychotherapy. [1971] New Approaches to Personality Classification. [1970] The Goals of Psychotherapy (editor). [1967]

For further information on Dr. Alvin Mahrer’s publications, see www.almahrer.com

References

(1) Mahrer, Alvin R.  Becoming The Person You Can Become. The Complete Guide To Self-Transformation. Colorado. Bull Publications. 2002

(2) Rotter, J.B. Social Learning and Clinical Psychology. Englewood Cliffs. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. 1954. (3) Kelly, George A. The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Vols. I, II. New York. Norton. 1955 (4) Mahrer, Alvin R.  Becoming The Person You Can Become. The Complete Guide To Self-Transformation. Colorado. Bull Publications. 2002

(5) www.almahrer.com

(5) Corsini, Raymond J. & Wedding, Danny. Current Psychotherapies - 7th Edition. Toronto. Thomson Brooks/Coles. 2005

(6) Ibid, Page XI (7)  Mahrer, Alvin R. Theories of Truth, Models of Usefulness: Toward A Revolution in the Field of Psychotherapy. Chichester, U.K. Wiley. 2004

(8) Mahrer, Alvin R.  Experiencing: A Humanistic Theory of Psychology & Psychiatry. Ottawa. University of Ottawa. Press. 1989

(9) Mahrer, Alvin R.  The Complete Guide To Experiential Psychotherapy. Colorado. Bull Publications. 2004 (10) Mahrer, Alvin R. Becoming The Person You Can Become. The Complete Guide To Self-Transformation. Colorado. Bull Publications. 2002

(11) Mahrer, Alvin R. The Other Deeper You. Ottawa. University of Ottawa Press. 2007

(12) Mahrer, Alvin R. Becoming The Person You Can Become. The Complete Guide To Self-Transformation. Colorado. Bull Publications. 2002 (13) Mahrer, A.R. What are the "Breakthrough problems" in the field of Psychotherapy? Psychotherapy. Volume 34, Number 1. Spring, 1997. (p.81)

(14) Mahrer, A.R. & Boulet, D.B. What are some promising developments in psychotherapy with "psychosis"? Introduction and preview. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 31, 5-14.

(15) Mahrer, A.R. & Boulet, D.B. What are some promising developments in psychotherapy with "psychosis"? Introduction and preview. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 31, 5-14.