Terapia centrada em pessoas com demandas de imagem corporal e autoestima: pesquisa-ação

Abstract

Carl Rogers was a psychotherapy scholar and researcher who established personality change (reorganization) as an object of study and intervention, pioneered the design and application of clinical research, and coordinated such research based on a quasi-experimental design. Rogers concluded with his interventional research that an individual, when going through a process of psychotherapy, has the possibility that his personality characteristics are constructively modified, in the form of personal adaptation and in the way the people close to him see him. In addition, the individual himself is able to perceive changes in himself during and after experiencing this process. Based on this, this dissertation, based on three complementary studies, had as main objective, through the action research method, to develop a person-centered intervention practice that would provide changes in body self-image and self-esteem. Study 1 organizes a re-reading of the Rogerian theory of personality in order to make it possible to understand the phenomena of body self-image and self-esteem, based on the organization, disorganization and reorganization of personality. It is not a study that is a literature review, given that there are no productions of this scope in the national field of research on Rogers, but an exercise of theoretical construction on the meaning of the objects of study and intervention from a Rogerian reference. With this study, it was possible to affirm that the Rogerian theory offers a satisfactory lens that provides sufficient ideas and notions to explain these phenomena and offers the look, listening and clinical relationship of professionals who receive clients with demands that go through issues of dissatisfaction. with body self-image and low self-esteem. Study 2 uses versions of meaning developed by the proponent of this dissertation to describe and analyze a therapeutic practice centered on three clients with demands for body self-image and low self-esteem. Here, it was possible to perceive that: these demands were linked to other contents and could be manifested in different ways that involved self-criticism of the body in each client; the discrepancies between the real self and the ideal self distanced clients from the self-actualization process; The support of Rogerian attitudes, although necessary, was not enough to provide deep and permanent changes in the clients' personality, however, there were insights that allowed certain therapeutic reorganizations of the client's perceptions about himself in relation to self-image and self-esteem from the constitution of a therapeutic atmosphere in which they were welcomed and were able to examine their experiences of self-image and self-esteem in their positive and negative aspects based on their own judgments. Study 3 evaluates the effects in affective terms of the processes experienced, based on the senses apprehended by the clients attended about the practice and the therapeutic process. In this study, it was noticeable that the process of personality reorganization occurs throughout the psychotherapy period and after. It is considered successful from the moment the client realizes that he feels accepted as he is. In this way, it is clear that person-centered therapy produces significant affective impacts that enable personality reorganization, helping clients who go through the process to deal in a real way with their experiences of body image and self-esteem. Finally, with the development of this work, it was possible to apprehend that there are several constitutive factors of the personality that enable the individual's views about himself and from this perception, and the importance of living the conscious experience in a genuine and healthy way. With this, it is clear that the practice of the clinical method based on Rogers' theory can have implications, explanations and applications in psychosocial phenomena and experiences beyond what he developed.