Current Trends in Counselling Psychology

Abstract

The title “current trends” implies diversion from some known and established body or movement. In many ways, counselling psychology is still an unknown discipline in this Society and in Britain itself. In 1990, Ray Woolfe called it “an idea whose time has come” and went on to refer to the process as one of “an infant growing up”. Less encouragingly, there is a tendency for counselling psychology to be seen as a derivative compromise, without respectable historical roots within applied psychology, or a home for failed clinical psychologists. Counselling psychologists hotly dispute this myth, and have spent some energy in searching for clear definitions of their speciality. I should like to quote from Sheelagh Straw-bridge’s paper, presented at the Second Annual Conference of the (then) Special Group in Counselling Psychology (1991): “Counselling psychologists are not … professionals with knowledge to dispense, however caringly, on behalf of others … [but] in a process of coming to know, with another person, something of that other’s world”. It is difficult to avoid the temptation to define this new movement entirely by comparison with other established subsystems of psychology, psychotherapy or counselling. Such an approach can lead to defensive and somewhat aggressively phrased definitions, which rely implicitly on criticism of the “grown-up”, established organizations. Here, then, is my own attempt of a definition of the unique nature of counselling psychology in Britain.