Mary Kilborn Lecture 2026

The Mary Kilborn Lecture is an annual event hosted by the Counselling Unit of the University of Strathclyde. This year's lecture will be given by Dr David Murphy of the University of Nottingham. It will be followed by a wine reception. For more details, see FAQs below.

From Treatment to Transformation: Toward a Pedagogical Understanding of Person-Centred Therapy

Psychotherapy, and especially person-centred therapy has long existed in uneasy relationship with the medical model and healthcare practices that surround it. Contemporary understanding of psychotherapy is being reorganised. Concepts such as diagnosis, treatment, and clinical intervention are now represented through a set of coded symbols such as formulation, personalisation, goals and preferences, that merely serve to maintain the underlying concepts of the medical model and healthcare treatment. But the language and philosophical foundations of the person-centred approach point in a very different direction; toward growth, meaning-making, and the inherent capacity of persons to learn from experience within facilitative relationships.

This keynote invites us to reconsider what it is we are doing when we meet with those who seek our help. Rather than understanding therapy as a form of healthcare practice, I am proposing a pedagogical reframing: therapy as a collaborative process of learning in which individuals come to new understanding of experience, freshly symbolise, and author their lives. In this view, the therapist’s role is not to address pathology but to participate in a transformative relational encounter that enables new understanding and new possibilities for being.

Reclaiming this educational orientation is not a departure from the person-centred tradition but a return to its radical roots. By further loosening the grip of medicalised assumptions, practitioners may find a clearer articulation of their values, a more coherent account of their work, and a renewed confidence in therapy as a deeply human, relational, and developmental practice.

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Host or Publisher Counselling Unit, University of Strathclyde