Counselling and psychotherapy as social action-systems

Abstract

The "talking cure" (Boring, 1957, p 709; Halmos, 1965, p 3), "psychotherapy" and "counselling", as presently conceptualised in contemporary Western society, evolved first from the nineteenth century medical concept of diseases an affliction of the individual, requiring individual treatment. The first significant deviation from this framework seemed to come in the 1930's when the talking cure for the "sick" individual was taken outside a purely medical context through child guidance and related areas (e.g. Rogers, 1939). While parents were often involved in the child guidance programmes, their involvement was seen as being ancillary to the basic "treatment" of the disturbed onild and thus psychotherapy was maintained with an individual focus. In the 1930's group psychotherapy emerged, but these early activities also retained an individual focus (Slavson, 1940)1 group psychotherapy at that stage could moat accurately be described as the treatment of a person in a group - it is only since the work of the "group dynamics" movement gained an acceptance in the psychotherapeutic field that the conceptual shift has been made to see the treatment of all participants simultaneously by the group (Back, 1972). In the 1950s family therapy emerged as a visible force, and this had profound implications for the manner in which psychotherapeutic activity was seen: "… family therapy introduced major problems. It was no longer clear who was sick and who was well in the therapeutic setting, nor indeed who was the patient. Further, the participants were intimately related to each other. This latter factor provided a challenge to traditional ideas of the one-to-one model, such as the development of transference, regression, lack of destructive feedback and so forth". (Pattison, 1973, p )97