ABSTRACT
One of the most interesting articles on counselling written over the past couple of years is called ‘Let’s do away with counselling’ by Harris (1987). In it he argues that counselling has replaced benzodiazepines as the major panacea for all ills, that it is difficult to understand what counsellors have to offer apart from ‘time, sympathy and a willingness to help’ and that these qualities appear to be more important in the counselling relationship than the theory or method of counselling. With no common understanding of what counselling means, there is no way in which its value can be assessed. ‘We smile at old quack remedies which claimed to cure baldness, kidney stones, stammering, poor appetite, the ague, female complaints and dropsy, but the analogy is pretty close.’ Harris thus concludes that ‘we can…do very well without counselling’.
