experiential psychotherapy
a broad family of psychotherapies originating in the 1950s and 1960s and falling under the umbrella of existential–humanistic psychology. A core belief of the approach is that true client change occurs through direct, active “experiencing” of what the client is undergoing and feeling at any given point in therapy, both on the surface and at a deeper level. Experiential therapists typically engage clients very directly with regard to accessing and expressing their inner feelings and experiencing both present and past life scenes, and they offer clients perspectives for integrating such experiences into realistic and healthy self-concepts. Experiential psychotherapy has its antecedents in the work of U.S. psychiatrists Carl A. Whitaker (1912–1995) and Thomas P. Malone (d. 2000), Austrian-born U.S. psychologist Carl Rogers, U.S. philosopher and psychologist Eugene T. Gendlin (1926– ), and others.