there is no real distinction between professional and lay knowledge.... professional knowledge too is deeply embedded in wider cultural stories.
(Parker et al. 1995: 63)


Along with many humanistic practitioners I have become increasingly concerned in recent times at the intemperate and uncritical stampede into the 'academicisation' of counselling (and psychotherapy) trainings. The distasteful and unedifying spectacle of training organisations falling over each other in the scramble to ally themselves with the burgeoning university sector surely has little if anything to do with the promotion of higher standards of counselling practice, and everything to do with a practitioner- and 'training-business'-centred trend towards monopolistically institutionalising therapeutic help, thereby '...locking out unlicensed competitors while guaranteeing a steady flow of clients and high fees for themselves' (to quote psychiatrist Peter Breggin, cited in Mowbray 1995: 142). It is quite frankly just plain disingenuous to argue that the didactic professionalisation process is fashioned in the interests of clients (House 1996) - for a close examination of the arguments, logically and evidentially, indicates that far from being beneficial to the client interest, the current professionalisation process may well be detrimental to clients compared with the pre-professionalisation situation.

What prompted me to write this brief article was a thought-provoking piece in a recent issue of The Observer newspaper by Melanie Phillips (1996). The target of her article is our current 'national obsession with university degrees', and the concomitant neglect of vocational training. Although Phillips make no specific reference to the fields of counselling and therapy, her basic argument has enormous relevance to our field. What her article helped me to realise is that recent trends towards academicising counselling and therapy are in fact part of a much wider cultural Zeitgeist afflicting the UK, which favours the socio-professional status of a university degree over the craft-based values of vocational learning, training, and, above all, apprenticeship.

Thus, Phillips describes the obsession with higher/university education as a 'contemporary shibboleth', whereby 'the expansion of the universities has meant degrees are increasingly being substituted for essential craft or skills training on the job'. And furthermore, people 'are being funnelled towards qualifications which mask their vocational deficiencies by increased social status'. And most damning of all, Phillips writes that 'the drive for "professionalisation" means that the craft base is replaced by abstract theorising'. Phillips invokes the case of nursing to illustrate her concerns, but a very close parallel can surely be drawn with counselling and psychotherapy that in any sane world should have the professionalisers wincing: she writes, 'The trend towards degree-based training equips nurses to be managers and bureaucrats, while on the wards rolled-up sleeves nursing care leaves much to be desired' (my emphasis).

Similarly, while degree-based training will no doubt give students some theoretical understanding of how to 'manage' a counselling relationship, whether such 'objective' knowledge has anything like a decisive, or even a significant, influence upon practitioner competence in real counselling relationships is at the very least open to severe doubt.

I'm sure I can't be the only person who has overheard trainees talking enthusiastically about their training being conferred university degree status (and of course, paying through the nose for the privilege!) - leaving me with the abiding impression that the (chimerical?) social status conferred by printing 'MA' on one's business card seems to be given more weight than are the specific craft-based capacities and competencies in intimacy and relating that working in our field requires. As Adam Phillips so poignantly writes, 'It is part of the mystique of expertise... to believe that because a person has done a recognised or legitimated official training they are then qualified to claim something more than that they have done the training....' (1995: xiv).

What Melanie Phillips's provocative and perceptive discussion illustrates is that the academicisation of the field is in fact just one manifestation of a wider cultural trend that privileges and fosters the illusion that degree-based qualification necessarily produces professional competency, leaving vocational training in what she calls a 'low-status ghetto'. The deep psycho-social forces that are driving these disquieting developments are beyond the scope of this article and really require a detailed sociological analysis. What needs emphasising here is that we work in a field in which a central leitmotiv is critical self-awareness; and it is deeply disturbing, even alarming, that our field seems to be quite uncritically embracing an academic and didactic ideology of 'professionalisation' with little if any public debate, and with virtually no self-reflexive examination of the dynamics driving these developments. Perhaps the notable reluctance to engage with these issues is a classic case of ostrich-professionalisers sticking their own heads in the sand, and expecting and hoping that no-one else will notice the practitioner self-interest that surely underlies these practitioner-centred changes. Perhaps what is most disturbing in all this is the movement by stealth towards a US-style system in which to be 'a licensed psychotherapist you effectively need an M.A. or Ph.D. or to be a psychiatrist' (Courtenay Young, quoted in Mowbray 1995: 72). There seems to be widespread agreement even amongst those who favour professionalisation that such a system is entirely inappropriate for therapeutic work, yet this is precisely the direction in which the UK professionalisation process is moving - with, until quite recently (Mowbray, 1995), barely a murmur of dissent or critical appraisal.

There is of course a quite fundamental question in all this about what kind of practitioner development path is most appropriate for our field. If counselling and psychotherapy are seen as fundamentally concerned with the capacity for intimacy and relatively non-neurotic relating in a milieu in which both counsellor and client co-create together and transform each other, then it follows that the becoming of a practitioner must surely be a craft that is learnt experientially and through practice-related experience, rather than a knowledge-based profession which privileges theory over practice, external didactic assessment over self and peer validation and empowerment - in short, head over heart. As Guy Gladstone has so strongly argued (quoted in Mowbray, 1995: 135), 'becoming a therapist is a personally transmitted craft for which no amount of academic course work can substitute'.

As Phillips's article makes clear, there is a fundamental and irresolvable tension in any training system which attempts to fit what is a quintessentially experiential and subjective experience into the objectifying didactic academic framework of university education. Indeed, the tragedy is that the only way in which this process can 'successfully' be effected is through the fundamental betrayal of the core values of humanistic, non-medical-model counselling practice - in short, by 'mechanising' what is a deeply individual, subjective and humane undertaking. In this way, academicisation, professionalisation, objectification (making clients into 'objects' to be 'cured' rather than co-creating subjects) and medical-modelisation of the counselling process are inevitable by-products of this insidious process, whose unacknowledged and previously unconscious driving force is far more to do with the creation of a privileged professional elite of therapeutic 'experts', thereby minimising the anxiety and economic insecurity of practising practitioners, than it is to do with protecting the client interest. And anyone who pretends otherwise is either into major self-delusion, or else is cynically envoking client well-being as a front for their own self-interest - and wantonly ignoring the mass of logical and empirical anti-professionalisation evidence amassed by Richard Mowbray and others in the process.


References

House, R. (1996) 'The professionalization of counselling: a plausible case
against?', Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 9(4), pp. 343-58

Mowbray, R. (1995) The Case Against Psychotherapy Registration: A
Conservation Issue for the Human Potential Movement, Trans Marginal
Press, London

Parker, I. & others (1995) Deconstructing Psychopathology, Sage, London

Phillips, A. (1995) Terrors and Experts, Faber and Faber, London

Phillips, M. (1996) 'When education fuels the class war', The Observer,
26th May (Review, p. 5)