Toward a Developmental Understanding of the Counseling Specialty: Lessons From our Students

Trends in professional practice and training have led to a debate concerning the need for an increasing remedial emphasis within the counseling field. Proposals for an integration of the counseling and clinical specialties have been opposed by those arguing that a specialty differentiation captures meaningful differences. This article hypothesizes that the counseling specialty is distinguished by its reliance on a developmental metatheory, which makes unique assumptions regarding distress, change, and the helping process. This metatheory is rooted in a rich theoretical and empirical tradition and has generated innovations in practice that transcend usual remedial forms of helping. It is proposed that the value of developmentalism and the counseling specialty are most evident in the developmental interventions of college counseling.     

Understanding and Counseling Gay Men: A Developmental Perspective

The author reviews current concepts and research concerning homosexuality with emphasis on understanding gay men and their relationship behaviors. Because the current focus is on homosexuality as a developmental process, counseling considerations are presented from a developmental perspective and a case example is included.     

The Trend Toward Eclecticism and the Development of Comprehensive Models to Guide Counseling and Psychotherapy

Models dealing with metatheory, group work, and client functioning level are described, and suggestions are presented for integrating the models into a comprehensive system.     

Assessment in Career Guidance: Toward Truly Developmental Counseling

The model of assessment in educational and vocational counseling is the “matching model.” It inhibits developmental counseling. A stage-theory model is proposed instead and is case illustrated.     

Feminist Developmental Theory: Implications for Counseling

This article discusses the importance of counseling guided by a life-span development model. Major developmental tasks across the life span are outlined from an Eriksonian perspective. This is contrasted with the feminist development theory of S. Conarton and L. Kreger-Silverman (1988). Issues covered include the call by C. Gilligan (1991) for counselors to assist women to reclaim their intuitive voice and the importance of connectedness for women's development in Western society. Implications for counseling are explored with reference to borderline personality disorder and anorexia nervosa.     

Holistic Health Through Holistic Counseling: Toward a Unified Theory

This article reviews the trend in health care toward increasing levels of specialization and draws a distinction between specialization and reductionism. A theory of holistic counseling is derived from social learning and transpersonal psychology.     

Battered Women: A Developmental Life-Career Counseling Perspective

The authors describe a career counseling strategy based on specific psychosocial characteristics of battered women. The approach is developmental in nature, focusing on the client's self-concept. A group format based on a pilot intervention is proposed to assist battered women in developing appropriate life and career decision-making skills.     

Toward a Constructivist and Developmental Identity for the Counseling Profession: The Context-Phase-Stage-Style Model

The constructivist and developmental metatheories offer foundations for prevention- and health-oriented counseling approaches that target the whole population. In the assessment model proposed here, the counselor is directed toward 4 specific dimensions of human construction and development. They are the following: social context, life phase, constructive stage, and personality style. It is proposed that such assessment be infused into everyday counseling practice in schools, mental health settings, and colleges while also being a ground for the counselor education curriculum.     

The Developmental Perspective in Integral Counseling

The process of making meaning is a core determinant of human experience. Understanding this process, developmentally, is a vital part of integral counseling. In this article, the authors introduce the concept of ego development stages as increasingly complex and flexible systems of meaning making. An understanding of ego development stages can help counselors to assist clients in a way that recognizes that people not only come in different “types” but also differ significantly in the level of their meaning‐making capacity.     

Multicultural Peer Counseling: A Developmental Perspective and Rationale

This article focuses on the creation and growth of a peer counseling program assisting ethnic minority college students. A brief rationale of the program is offered. Problems are described and recommendations are made for subsequent program deuelopment.     

A Perspective on Counseling Psychology in Japan: Toward a Lifespan Approach

Un survol de l'histoire de la psychologie du counseling au Japon amène à confronter cinq significations différentes du terme «counseling>>. Ces divers points de vue relatifs au counseling et à sa signification ont handicapé le développement de la psychologie du counseling. Une approche spécifiquement nippone du counseling est indispensable au développement de la professionnalisation de la discipline au Japon. On conclut l'article par une proposition de théorisation et d'approfondissement de la discipline en tant que psychologie développementale du counseling couvrant l'ensemble de la vie.
A precis of counseling psychology's history in Japan leads to discussion of five different meanings for the term "counseling". These multiple views about counseling and its meaning have hindered development of counseling psychology. An indigenous conceptualisation of counseling is required to promote the professionalisation of the discipline in Japan. A proposal for conceptualising and advancing the discipline as "lifespan developmental counseling psychology" concludes the article.     

Learner-Centered Counseling Theory: An Innovative Perspective

One of the most useful tools counselors possess is a consistent, effective theoretical orientation. Yet, counselors often experience theory as an academic-only enterprise, rather than a skill-set informed by reason and empiricism. This article presents an alternative approach to learning and harnessing the power of theory to impact clients’ lives.     

A Career Developmental Perspective on the Therapeutic Alliance: Implications for Counseling

This review explores the role played by childhood emotional maltreatment (CEM) in selecting a career in the field of mental health and the potential positive and deleterious effects of these career‐choice motives on the therapeutic alliance. The reviewed findings support the assumption that CEM may serve as a precursor for career choice of professions in the mental health field. Implications are suggested for the counselor/therapist–client relationship, also known as the therapeutic alliance, as well as for career counseling.     

Toward a General Theory of Understanding. Schutzian Theory as Proto-hermeneutics

This paper aims to explore the relations between Schutzian theory and hermeneutics. After presenting the connections between hermeneutic thought and Schutz’s work from a historical point of view, it will argue that despite its significant differences from hermeneutic theory, Schutzian theory can be utilized as a kind of proto-hermeneutics. By now, the heterogeneous movement of the interpretive social sciences has reached an established position, but with their growing reliance on the impulses coming from philosophical hermeneutics, the latent problem comes to the foreground: the former demand for an action-theoretical grounding has faded away. Currently, action theory itself is no more dominated by the work of interpretively minded authors, but by the theories of rational choice. This results in a false opposition between the explanatory models, which base their arguments on historical, cultural, and linguistic factors, and those, which focus on the plane of the decisions of individuals. Bypassing the objectivism present in both the rational choice approach and hermeneutics, Schutz’s pragmatic theory of the life-world, originating from both interpretive and pragmatic intellectual influences, may be useful to overcome this opposition, and can serve as a proto-hermeneutical point of departure: that is, as a theory which cannot alone take over the duty of hermeneutics, but which can complement hermeneutics on a fundamental level.     

Counseling Without Truth: Toward a Neopragmatic Foundation for Counseling Practice

The author presents an overview of contemporary developments in philosophy regarding the status of truth and discusses the implications of these ideas for the practice of counseling. Counseling without truth is presented as a desirable option when a neopragmatic frame of reference is adopted.