ABSTRACT
As the counselling and psychotherapy profession becomes more academic, research oriented and regulated, there has been a drift towards a genre of knowledge which treats it as something to be grasped, fixed, known and demonstrated. In this chapter I wish to explore some conversations about what counts as knowledge, epistemology, in an attempt to refresh our understanding of ‘what and how I know’ in the PCA. This will be explored in relation to cultural and philosophical modalities including structuralism, deconstruction and negative theology. Locating our understanding of the organismic valuing process in these epistemological debates can help us to negotiate between prioritizing inner experience and valuing outer presentations of knowledge. This can be linked to thinking about ‘locus of evaluation’ and to our relationships with the profession as a whole.
