Counseling

About this book

In this book, we contend that the psychologist who engages in counseling can be both practitioner and scientist-that he can contribute to knowledge while helping clients. Admittedly, few counselors are theorists in the strict sense of the term, but inevitably every counselor will bring to his work with clients certain assumptions. He will have some underlying rationale (vague and implicit though it may be) for what he does, some hunches about what different clients will do in different situations, and some general ideas about the counseling procedures that are apt to be effective. If he is to make claims for the efficacy of his practice, he must be willing to subject these ideas to empirical test. Only then can he begin to find out whether what he has done works and how it works. Only as the counselor makes communicable what he does can his knowledge be imparted to others. This book begins with our argument for reconciling the dual roles of practicing counselor and researcher and proceeds to a short "guided tour" of current empirical and theoretical approaches to counseling. We do not insist upon the adoption of any particular approach to counseling. But we do urge the practicing counselor to make explicit his own assumptions and to use them in making verifiable predictions about the observable behavior of clients and counselor. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved).