ABSTRACT
This chapter applies critical psychological ideas to an area which psychologists would like to claim for themselves, that of ‘psychotherapy’. Psychology today claims expertise in psychotherapy, counselling, and to an area of work that mixes up the two in a pretend-specialist domain called ‘counselling psychology’. You will know from the earlier chapters in this book that the question of ‘mental health’ was a key concern for many critical psychologists in Britain. This meant that as well as complaining about what psychiatry and medical-model psychology did to people in distress, we needed to take seriously the development of therapeutic alternatives.
The crisis drew attention not only to what ‘psychology’ is, but how it functions in the academic and professional institutions, and so here I explore the institutional constraints on developing radical alternatives in psychology in the places where it is usually taught. I look closely at the consequences of academic structures on the way that we think about psychotherapy and counselling.
The chapter outlines eight aspects of institutional practice in university teaching that are at odds with the declared ethos of therapy: the linearity of university training has consequences for conceptual and cultural issues that may be antithetical to genuine therapeutic practice; certain notions about what reality is and what counts as truth may be reinforced by university trainings; academic knowledge in universities is standardized so as to sabotage therapeutic work; the university privileges a cognitive account; the university trains therapists in ways that are antitheti 65cal to the ethos of therapy; universities keep alive hierarchies that sit uneasily with the project of therapy; university training encourages the therapist to develop an identity that is anathema to many traditions in therapy; and compartmentalization of ethics in university-based trainings would run against the ethics of therapy.
