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This new volume updates the concept of Field Theory-Dr. Combs' groundbreaking theory of personality-and further expands upon Carl Roger's ideas on client-centered therapy, which have long been a major influence on psychotherapy and personality theories.

An experiment to determine whether good counselors could be distinguished from poor ones on the basis of their characteristic "ways of perceiving" self, others, and the task of counseling. The names of 29 counselors-in-training were arranged in order of preference from "best" to "poorest," at the end of a year long training institute by the 14 faculty members who taught and supervised them. These rank orders were correlated with S's characteristic ways of perceiving scores inferred from blind analysis of four "human relations incidents" written by each counselor in a personabty theory course. Statistically significant correlations ranging from .40 to .65 were obtained for all 12 aspects of perceptual organization indicating clear distinctions can be found between good and poor counselors in perceptual terms.

In recent years a great deal of attention has been given to the interpretation of behavior in terms of self theory. Rogers [4], for example, has defined the well-adjusted individual as one able to accept all perceptions, including those about self, into his personality organization. He describes the situation as follows: "It would appear that when all of the ways in which the individual perceives himself-all perceptions of the qualities, abilities, impulses, and attitudes of the person, and all perceptions of himself in relation to others-are accepted into the organized conscious concept of the self, then this achievment is accompanied by feelings of comfort and freedom from tension which are experienced as psychological adjustment" [4, p. 364]. He points out that this relationship between self-acceptance and adjustment is a commonly observed phenomenon in client-centered therapy and seems to increase in the client as therapy progresses and adjustment improves.Combs [1] and Snygg and Combs [5], adapting Rogers' definition to their phenomenological interpretation, have described the welladjusted individual in terms of the adequacy of the self organization. They define the adequate self as follows: "A phenomenal self is adequate in the degree to which it is capable of accepting into its organization any and all aspects of reality" [5, p. 136]. They point out that the individual who feels inadequate to deal with his perceptions of reality, feels threatened by such perceptions and is likely to reject or distort them. The maladjusted person, in phenomenological terms, is characterized by many threatening perceptions, and his maladjusted behavior occurs largely as a result of his attempts to deal with the threats to which he feels himself subjected. In this sense a maladjusted person is synonymous with a threatened one.

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