Psychology and Counseling

To a Psychologist is where you go if you want to find out what is wrong with you. To a Counselor is where you go if you want to know what’s right.

This ‘rightness’ is what people are missing from their lives. We have been given a bill of goods as soon as we become conscious citizens in and of the world, and this bill weighs on us even as society sends us the massage that it is ‘Natural and human’, that nothing is really wrong and “just get over it”. Psychology is the modern apology for the anxiety which lay at the heart of its systems of repression, an attempt to correct what is systemically incorrect, but by putting the blame effectively upon the individual.

Counseling, on the other hand, is toward the emancipatory, the “freeing” and not just the identity which is supposed to be free. Counseling says that an assumption of wrongness is itself an incorrect manner of assessing the mental health of the person. Hence, counseling is more an act of enlightening the person to their modern subjectivity but without the need to instruct them to its proper language. For, the proper language is found already in the individual through its own innate intelligence and existence. Counseling is about empowerment.

Posted

24 Oct 2020

philosophy

landzek

Tags:

counseling, freedom, mental health, psychology, repression

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2 responses to “Psychology and Counseling”

microglyphics

8 Nov 2020

Responding here instead of the thread started on my blog.

I don’t have any first-hand experience with counsellors, but I don’t know that people (patients? clients?) make this distinction. It certainly makes sense from a branding perspective: ‘We counsellors are the good guys’—not those Debbie Downers on the psych side.

As a Foucauldian, the notion of normalisation of human behaviours is a powerplay. The discipline of psychology feeds on this notion. As Upton Sinclair said and I often repeat, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And so, we’ve got an entire industry seeking legitimacy with the upper hand because it is, on one hand, a tool of power and on the other hand a profession with the wherewithal to declare someone outside the boundaries of normalcy by criticising it.

In my understanding psychoanalysis is supposed to be emancipating—with a goal of helping one to find one’s self: “And the truth shall set him free.” I’m interested in exploring how counselling emancipates and how psychology doesn’t (typically).

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1. landzek
  
  8 Nov 2020
  
  Well. Psychology is about seeing what is wrong with you and then correcting it.
  
  Whereas, the way I understand counseling is that there’s nothing wrong with you. Lol
  
  I involve myself with clients under the presumption that they already know the answer. And I’m just helping them find it or come to terms with the situation.
  
  As a counselor, I only have to diagnose because of the big psychological machine, similar to what you said about Foucault.
  
  But, my philosophy on things doesn’t interfere in the fact of all the rules I have to play by in order to be a counselor. For sure there is the reality of all the diagnoses and everything that science says. It doesn’t matter what I think about it. It doesn’t matter if I think it’s a bunch of hogwash because I’m not there to impose upon the client my philosophy of things.
  
  I am there to help the client come to terms or find a solution that already exists in the client themselves.
  
  Psychology has a bunch of assumptions which stem from the medical model, which Foucault expounds upon. Psychology is totally about imposing ideas upon someone. It’s totally about a person of ignorance coming to someone else who has all the knowledge who then implement solutions to this person‘s problem.
  
  But as a counselor my philosophy on existence does not enter into counseling someone. In fact my philosophy on existence is utterly meaningless, because I’m just helping the client facilitate their own experience, their own solution to whatever problem they are bringing to me.
  
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Psychology and Counseling

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