Introduction
The recent 'Watchdog' attack on counselling owed much more to tabloid newspaper sensationalism that it did to serious journalistic debate. I was deeply angered by the programme - not so much because of the prejudice-reinforcing effect it will no doubt have on those strands of public opinion already predisposed to discrediting what we do, but because of the knee-jerk response it will probably evoke from counselling organisations, in terms of tighter recognition and entry requirements, still more vocal calls for the statutory regulation of the 'profession', and so on.

It is my deeply held view that such professionalising developments will produce results which actually do more harm than do the alleged abuses that such changes are purporting to remedy. In what follows I will show why I believe this to be so, drawing heavily in the process on the very important recent book by Richard Mowbray, The Case Against Psychotherapy Registration.

Background to Mowbray's 'Case'
In recent years discontent has been steadily mounting at what appears to some to be an uncritical rush into 'professionalising' the fields of counselling and psychotherapy. With the publication of this deeply challenging and timely book, Mowbray has dared to question the conventional, taken-for-granted wisdom of recent trends, in the process casting quite considerable doubt on the very raison d'etre of professionalisation. What is more, a close consideration of the arguments he develops completely undermines the anti-counselling rationale of 'Watchdog'-type attacks upon our field, by decisively refuting the implicit take-for-granted assumptions upon which such attacks are based.

Some of the central themes of Mowbray's multi-faceted case for a non-professionalised field of counselling and psychotherapy are discussed below.

Inappropriate professionalisation and client infantilisation
Mowbray maintains that the model of the conventional professions is singularly inappropriate for our field, because members of the professions typically act as agents for their clients, carrying out tasks for them that their clients do not possess the knowledge to perform (p. 12). Thus, it is not appropriate to view our field as a profession 'characterised by... activities in which the practitioners act as "agents" in the sense of doing things for their clients which clients are not capable of doing for themselves' (p. 79, original emphasis). For Mowbray (following Isla Lonie), what actually occurs in therapeutic relationships is not 'a simple Newtonian "billiard ball" model of cause and effect which implies that the client is a passive recipient of the "effects" of the psychotherapist' (pp. 106-7, my emphasis).

Far from encouraging client autonomy and individuation, the modelling of counselling on the existing professions will tend to replicate the infantilising effect that those same professions have on their clientele. Illich makes a similar point in relation to what he calls the 'disabling profession' of medicine: 'ever more "ills" became "illnesses" to be treated by doctors and people lost their will and ability to cope with indisposition, or even with discomfort' (1977, p. 23, my emphasis). For Mowbray, 'Supporting the potential client's existing autonomy whatever degree of "adult" they already have..., is more appropriate than enhancing the official status of the practitioner with the accompanying assumption that competence has been assured' (p. 131).

Far from reducing the risk of client abuse, Mowbray demonstrates that the counterintuitive result of registration is actually to increase client vulnerability by implicitly encouraging them to eschew their own responsibility in the inevitably difficult and challenging task of choosing a practitioner, by encouraging them to rely upon external didactic criteria of practitioner competence (p. 131). Furthermore, there is no sense in which registration can ever guarantee competence anyway! - for 'research... indicates that the effectiveness of psychotherapy does not appear to depend upon any of the following: (1) The practitioner holding academic qualifications. (2) The length of training of the practitioner. (3) The school to which the therapist belongs. (4) The practitioner having had a training analysis.... [F]actors which UKCP is promoting... will not produce more competent practitioners' (pp. 122, 124) (cf. House, 1996b). And as Carl Rogers himself wrote, 'There are as many certified charlatans and exploiters of people as there are uncertified' (p. 113).

So how is it that a system that effectively encourages the infantilisation of clients has come to be so uncritically accepted? Perhaps at least part of the answer lies in the implicit medical-model focus accompanying the registrating mentality.

Medical-model professionalisation?
None of the defining characteristics of a medical-model approach hold in the case of emotional/psychological difficulties in any sustainable way (p. 264). Perhaps what we are witnessing here is an uncritical and pathology-driven rootedness within an old and increasingly inadequate scientific paradigm, which embraces the comparative comfort of mechanistic, rationality-based, control-oriented mentalities, and eschews a far more challenging counter-cultural emphasis on subjective meaning-orientation and holistic understanding (House, 1996a). Mowbray sees a 'holistic growth model' (p. 172) to be be far more appropriate than is a medical-model approach, based as it is on 'an underlying malfunctioning machine metaphor' (p. 180, original emphasis). For example, 'audit-mindedness' in counselling (House, 1996a) can so easily fall into the same trap of 'treating' the pathologised client in a symptom-oriented, 'bits-of-person'-centred way, falling squarely within a medical-model ontology in all but name.

The myths and the realities of licensing
On close inspection, the view that registration will necessarily protect the public does not stand up to scrutiny: 'Studies of disciplinary enforcement in professions in the USA have revealed that disciplinary action is extremely ineffective as a means of protecting the public' (p. 81, original emphasis).

Furthermore, there are strong arguments pointing to the conclusion that licensing is actually harmful, due to such factors as: '(1) unnecessarily restricting the supply of practitioners [by introducing monopolistic factors into the market];... (2) inflating the cost of services;... (3) stifling innovation....; [and] (4) discriminating against minorities' [by raising market entry requirements, particularly in terms of training costs] (p. 86, quoting Daniel Hogan's 1979 study). Mowbray lists a series of preconditions that should demonstrably obtain for licensing to be justifiable (pp. 89-91); and he shows that the requisite preconditions necessary for licensing to be appropriate in the counselling/therapy fields are notably lacking.

Viable alternatives to licensing
Mowbray's discussion is by no means exclusively negative or oppositional - for he sets out very clearly some humanistic principles for practitioner competence that stress qualities like the capacity for empathy, intuition and wisdom. He approvingly quotes Guy Gladstone, that 'becoming a therapist is a personally transmitted craft for which no amount of academic course work can substitute' (p. 135).

Mowbray examines the various alternatives that exist, detailing the role of educating the public; the fuller application of existing laws; a viable system of what he calls 'non-credentialed registration' and associated full disclosure provisions; and finally self and peer assessment and accreditation (Chapter 28). In general, the concerns that are claimed to be driving the professionalisation process can adequately be met from within existing frameworks and structures - thereby honouring Occam's Razor, rather than elaborately fixing that which doesn't need mending.

Conclusion
So what are the implications of these arguments for the types of media attacks typified by the 'Watchdog' programme? Rather than responding to such attacks by being panicked into knee-jerk procedure-tightening and contrite apologies that seem much more to do with our public-relations persona than with truth and justice, organisations representing counselling and therapy would serve our cause far better by going on to the offensive in the public sphere by showing how such programmes are founded upon a total (and even wilful?) ignorance about the nature of counselling. (Just how the 'Watchdog' team can justify the extraordinary spectacle of 'our expert psychiatrist', steeped in the medical model, arrogantly pronouncing upon 'the things that can go wrong' with counselling is quite beyond my comprehension.) Part of such an offensive would ideally include a careful teasing out of the motives (both conscious and unconscious) driving those who make such outrageous programmes, and a wider psycho-social critique of the deep paranoid dynamics underlying the anti-counselling hysteria that has swept the media and our culture in recent years.

One thing seems clear: a panicked response to such assaults will merely add legitimacy to those whose fear-driven paranoia fuelled the unwarranted attacks in the first place. If counselling is about anything, surely it is about truth; and the truth should be fearlessly pursued whatever the media hostility and abuse that is heaped upon us in the process. Anything less will lead to a betrayal of the foundational values upon which our practice is based.

And part of this 'truth', according to Mowbray, is that:
„ empirical evidence does not support the view that the risk of client harm from incompetent or unscrupulous practitioners is so significant as to warrant remedial legislative action;
„ there is no significant causal correlation between ever-more-stringent training standards and levels of practitioner competence (cf. House, 1996b);
„ and the introduction of tighter systems of licensing and registration will actually do more harm than good to our field as a whole.
Such arguments terminally undermine the rationale underpinning the kinds of virulent attacks we have been exposed to in recent years; and anyone concerned with the future healthy development of the counselling field will most certainly learn infinitely more from Richard Mowbray's Case than they will from Goebbels-like attacks masquarading as responsible journalism.

Richard Mowbray has dared fundamentally to question the shape and direction that current professionalising developments are taking. And it is only now that this book has been written, and the 'anti-registration' case set out with such force and authority, that a genuinely open and honest debate on the future healthy development