There are some academicians who claim that counselling is completely different from psychology and should be separated from psychology even as an academic discipline. I am quite confused because I have been considering counselling as an applied branch of psychology.
Counselling has been developed apart from academic psychology, outside universities, and it is practized by people without a universitary education in psychology, but with more or less instruction in non-academic psychology. This instruction may be more or less thorough, and it may be done by academic psychologists as well as by auto-didacts. In any case, it is an example of applied psychology (whether academic or not), quite similar to psychotherapy with non-clinical clients. Its quality depends strongly on the quality and amount of the education behind it, the life experience of the counsellor, her/his intelligence, integrity, and years of experience with counselling. The same holds for psychotherapist and behavoral therapists, though.
Hi Sandesh,
I am currently a graduate student in Counselling Psychology and I believe it would be very difficult for counselling to be a discipline independent of psychology. As counsellors or counselling psychologists typically deal with humans, it would be very difficult to exclude psychology (the study of the human mind and it's functions) from their practice. It would be interesting to see what the academics you are referring to are trying to gain by separating counselling from psychology.
Kind regards,
Jeremie
Psychology is a very broad discipline, and I think that some people promote the separation between counselling and psychology because they want to distinguish counselling from mainstream psychology with its emphasis on positivism and its frequent allegiance to a medical-model approach to human distress. Counselling psychology, at least as I understand it, is more aligned with critical psychology and certain strands of social psychology, and it embraces a humanistic value base, valuing the subjective and intersubjective nature of people's experience, viewing the person as embedded in a social context, thus also pointing towards the relational and socio-economic features that make up a person's world. Practice may include a focus on strengths and to be oriented towards growth and development and not merely to 'symptom reduction' as in a disease or deficit model to distress. The discipline's appreciation of diversity and pluralism also translates to its perspective with regard to science/research, embracing the multiple ways in which we can develop our understanding and knowledge, critiquing the dominant notion of evidence needing solely to be quantitatively created. Having a pluralist outlook means to also see value in positivist approaches to knowledge production but to remain aware of their limitations and be critical of their oppressive potential.
Some people see counselling as more connected with education and critical pedagogy. In that case counselling doesn't stand alone completely either, as it is grounded in a bigger and older scholarly tradition.
I am a counselling psychologist and i believe that its a part of psychology. Different therapies are used when we counsel anyone. So, for me its part of psychology.
It is just like asking the difference between counselling and psychotherapy, from my point of view both counseling and psychology are interelated domain, how can i say that well the counselling uses the same concepts, theories, techniques that fall in area of psychology however it is relatively different than psychotherapy.
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