A Situated Practice for (Re)Situating Selves: Trainee Counsellors and the Promise of Counselling

Abstract

Geographies of care and welfare have neglected to consider a group of interrelated practices including counselling, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis, which are found in many different settings within modern welfare systems. In a number of influential studies, these psychological therapies have been described as self-oriented, narcissistic, and intensely individualistic. However, these commentaries fail to consider the specificity of particular practices. Counselling, for example, is a situated practice, shaped by particular contexts and values. The views of people just beginning a counselling training programme can be read as describing the practice as a relational means to individualistic ends. However, analysis of their stories about themselves suggests more complex understandings of self as shaped and reshaped in relation to others and as illustrating the feminist concept of relational autonomy. Their accounts suggest that counselling offers the promise of a practice through which both practitioners' selves and clients' selves may be reshaped and resituated.