History and founder of "Counselling Psychology"

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I need to know this for a school project, who is the founder of Counselling Psychology and can you give me a brief history of it.Thanks

-- Chase Charney (hooter_girls_dig_me_69@hotmail.com), September 12, 2002

Answers

Donald Dewsbury has edited a multi-volume history of the APA divisions. Counseling Psychology is Division 17.

Unification Through Division: Histories of the Divisions of the American Psychological Association, Volume III (American Psychological Association, 1999) contains the chapter A History of Division 17 (Counseling Psychology): Establishing Stability Amid Change by Naomi M. Meara and Roger A. Myers

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), September 12, 2002.


The first and second editions of the handbook of counseling psychology have chapters devoted to historical aspects. So do various issues of the journal named The Counseling Psychologist run by Division 17 of APA. I have my own take. Historically, after WW2, the VAs had clinical psychologists doing psychoanalytic work with inpatients, and counseling psychologists focusing on Rogerian or vocational development work with outpatients. These were significant traditions when I did graduate study in both fields. Subsequently, early counseling psychology researchers found their work in prevention and behavioral health (subsets of the walking wounded outpatient population) filtered out of counseling psychology publications by myopic Division 17 editors; the vacuum was filled by clinical researchers. Indeed, clinical psychology even extended its influence into normal elementary school classroom management as the leadership of counseling psychology continued its restricted focus. The influence of Wolpe and Ellis after the mid 60s eroded the Freudian/Rogerian distinction between clinical and counseling psychology further. Today the boundary is quite permeable. Counseling psychology's one proud distinction is that if nothing else, it owns the career development literature. And despite that area's lack of prestige in some clinical quarters, vocational satisfaction is one of the best predictors of mental health. John Krumboltz at Stanford University is, if not the founder, the most credible scholar in the history of counseling psychology.

-- john horan (horan@asu.edu), September 20, 2002.

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