DAVID RENNIE Person-Centred Counselling: An experiential Approach Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998, 160 pages (ISBN 0-7619-5344-2, us$25.95, Softcover) Reviewed by PATRICK O'NEILL It seems that there are still books about psychotherapy that understand it as a problem-solving relationship between people rather than application of routines from manuals. In this book, David Rennie gives priority to between counsellor and client, and he outlines various ways in which that can be enhanced. This work began as a training guide, which was eventually expanded to include reflections on way others have approached central issues in counselling experience. Rennie draws on a range of theorists such as Carl Rogers and Eugene Gendlen, and makes clear his agreements and disagreements with their positions. He shares Rogers insistence on within client's frame of reference, emphasizing client's experience, choice, and personal freedom and following client's lead. He agrees with Gendlen that ability of people to reflect on their own ideas, feelings, and actions is important to their experience and to possibility of change. The book is informed by Rennie's prodigious research output on process of counselling. Many readers will know of his work in qualitative research (e.g., Rennie, Phillips, & Quartaro, 1988) and especially its application to study of client's experience of psychotherapy (e.g., Rennie, 1992). The book benefits, too, from his generous use of case material, including his willingness to display his own problematic episodes in counselling as didactic examples. In some preliminary chapters, Rennie addresses general issues in counselling before embarking on ideas about counselling itself. In a chapter on the as agent, he notes various ways clients control their experience, whether or not they consider what they are doing or share process with counsellor. In a chapter on the first meeting, he notes that both clients and counsellors have anxieties about start of relationship, what those anxieties involve, and how they can be productively managed. He emphasizes, in Rogerian tradition, importance of empathy for what clients are feeling as they enter somewhat unusual context of counselling. The remaining chapters are devoted to craft, including such topics as how to listen to clients, counsellor's reactions to client's account of his or her experience, openness and transparency in relationship with client, identifying process issues, metacommunication, and alliance. Rennie prefers working alliance to therapeutic alliance because latter has been used where focus is on transference and counter-transference. He believes that a complete understanding of counselling requires consideration of actual relationship between counsellor and client, as well as famous transference relationship. In Rennie's view, tendency to overlook actual relationship and to cast it in more impersonal guise of transference was not just a characteristic of Freud, but was also a shortcoming of Rogers. At heart of Rennie's approach is notion of reflexivity, which he defines as ability to think about ourselves, to think about our thinking, to feel about our feelings, to treat ourselves as objects of our attention, and to use what we find there as a point of departure in deciding what to do next (p. 3). He understands problems underlying this apparent duality of subject and object, and he sketches philosophical background back to Descartes. He is also in touch with modern attempts to solve problem of dualism. In any event, he argues persuasively that reflexivity is crucial to personal change in therapy. He is as much concerned about counsellor's reflexivity as client's, placing a high value on the counsellor's demystification of his or her presence in counselling transaction through activity of being open about what he or she is up to, so long as doing so does not detract from focus on client (p. …