Counseling and Counseling Psychology:
Preserving the Partnership
APC Board Member Larry Epp delivered these opening remarks at a symposium involving Counselor Educators and Counseling Psychologists at the August, 2017 conference of the American Psychological Association.
I know many on this panel and in this lecture hall fell in love with the counseling profession, as I did over 25 years ago, because of its implicit compassion and tolerance. We saw in it more than a way to earn a living but a movement to improve the human condition.
I remember the moment I fell in love with this profession. It was in the late 1980s when I was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. I had heard that Mother Teresa had come to Baltimore to visit one of her AIDS hospices and, in seeing the blown out buildings of its West side, the trash and debris cast about the streets, and the youth selling drugs on the corners at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, she was alleged to have said, “This country is the most loveless place I have ever visited.”
Her words resonated with me, because I felt the core problem of my generation, and obviously this generation if we look at the political culture of our day, is a grave deficit in our sensitivity and empathy for the suffering of others. I saw in counseling a way to build the empathy, compassion, and tolerance that were lacking at least in one person at a time.
I believe our love for this profession unites those who are sitting on this panel and is more powerful than the forces that divide us. Counseling and Counseling Psychology are stronger united in their common purpose than they are separated. If our national associations can amicably resolve this bitter split, we are living up to our most cherished ideals and proving our authenticity as healers in healing ourselves first.
We cannot deny the profound influence of Carl Rogers in our profession’s origin, who clearly saw himself as a psychologist, but whose open mindedness allowed him to draw from the thinking of social workers, psychoanalysts, and philosophers. We owe great debt to humanistic, developmental, and existential psychologists who all informed the counseling movement.
Our counseling profession was an ecumenical and inclusive movement whose followers were bound together by the passion of their quest and not the title of their degree. I am sorry that our evolution as a profession has moved from expansive thinking to insularity and turf battles.
We must recall that many of the presidents of ACA and its most admired leaders were counseling psychologists, including three of its last four presidents. The most preeminent contributors to group counseling were counseling psychologists. The founders of multicultural counseling were counseling psychologists, including my dissertation chair, Dr. Clemmont Vontress. The most seminal students of the counseling process were counseling psychologists.
Every major counseling theory derives from the thinking of at least one major psychologist contributor, including more modern approaches in evidence based practices. Counseling and Counseling psychology are so intimately intertwined that any attempt to extract counseling psychology from counseling is to hollow out counseling at its core.
Turf battles between counselor educators and counseling psychologists belie our purported ability to resolve conflict to find the higher good. In the world I envision, counseling psychologists should be able to teach in CACREP programs as core faculty and Counselor Educators should likewise be core faculty in Counseling Psychology programs.
Two disciplines, Counseling and Counseling Psychology, that have enriched each other for so long, should not divorce, but should find a way to fall in love again.