Both Gestalt and person-centered therapy share a respect for the client's subjective experience and a trust in the client's capacity to make positive and constructive choices. Both therapies emphasize a vocabulary of freedom, choices, values, personal responsibility, autonomy, purpose, and meaning.

Significant differences are present. Gestalt takes the position that humans are faced with the anxiety of creating a never-secure identity in a world that lacks intrinsic meaning. In contrast, humanistic therapists stress self-actualization.

The person-centered counseling of Carl Rogers is grounded the goal of self-actualization, which is the innate predisposition to develop all of one's capacities for the maintenance and growth of personality. Assuming faith in the client's problem-solving abilities, the therapist uses the "if- then" principle. If a client believes in the counselor's genuineness, empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard, then the client will approach positive change and self-actualization. To convey genuineness, Rogerian counselors draw upon their inner experiences during counseling.

An empathetic understanding of the client's feelings comes through the counselor's genuine experience of his/her own feelings. Unconditional positive regard is acceptance of and respect for the client's individuality, stemming from trust in the client's self-directing capacity for positive change. Since present experience provides the means to personal growth, the person-centered counselor serves as facilitator, helping the client to find meaning in inner experiences. By freely showing responsive warmth, meanwhile avoiding evaluative judgments and probing questions, the therapist encourages a permissive atmosphere without pressure or coercion.

Person-centered counseling often refers to the counselor as "helper" and the client as "the other". The therapist assumes that a client has potential to develop self-regard and to differentiate between positive and negative inner experiences. Affected by the reactions of others and by introjection of external conditions, an individual encounters conflict when personal needs and desires run counter to the needs and desires of significant others in the environment. Intervention is needed when environmental needs routinely eclipse self-regard needs. Person-centered counseling seeks to allow conflicted individuals to incorporate these negative organismic needs, once denied, into their self-concepts.