Background: This article documents the intellectual contributions of the psychologist David Rennie to the fields of psychotherapy research, qualitative methods and humanistic psychology by tracing the central position of reflexivity across these bodies of work. This work had a profound influence on his field and led to his viewing the fostering of clients’ reflexivity as the central task of psychotherapy.

Aims: It follows his path as a researcher, beginning with his advancement of grounded theory methods and their application within psychotherapy research. His development of a humanistic experiential person-centred approach to psychotherapy is described as an extension of this valuing of reflexivity and the recognition of the role of clients’ agency within sessions. In addition, the paper reviews the innovative methodological research that led him to propose a model of inferential processes that underlies qualitative research methods and that is rooted in the process of embodied reflexivity. His contextualising qualitative methods within a form of methodical hermeneutics permitted a unifying framework for understanding the logic of qualitative methods.