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Article Excerpt
The counseling profession has a rich and diverse history. During the course of this history, various schools of thought have emerged, diverse realms of helping have been established, and the profession has gradually embraced a defining set of values. In particular, the counseling profession has placed an extraordinarily high value on the construct of self-awareness.
There are multiple indications that self-awareness is highly valued by the counseling profession. For instance, the construct of self-awareness has permeated multiple realms of the counseling profession, including mental health (e.g., Jennings, Sovereign, Bottorff, Mussell, & Vye, 2005), multicultural (e.g., Richardson & Molinaro, 1996), group work (e.g., Donigian, 1993), career (e.g., Bernhardt, Cole, & Ryan, 1993), school (e.g., Varhely & Cowles, 1991), and training and supervision (e.g., Borders, 1990). Furthermore, in their most recent standards, the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP; 2009) recognized the importance of self-awareness, going so far as to state that the presence of self-awareness is a fundamental prerequisite for counselor fitness (CACREP, 2009). Clearly, the construct of self-awareness is deeply valued by the counseling profession.
Although the counseling profession has placed a high value on practitioners and clients becoming self-aware, there has been virtually no critical appraisal of the construct of self-awareness. Perhaps this construct has not been subjected to evaluative scrutiny precisely because it is woven into the fabric of the profession and has, thereby, been taken for granted conceptually. Whatever the reasons for the lack of critical attention to self-awareness, there is ample evidence to suggest that this construct needs to be revisited. New developments in philosophy and counseling theorizing have called into question the foundational assumptions that support the possibility of self-awareness.
The purpose of this article is to critically evaluate the core theoretical assumptions that support the construct of self-awareness in light of various counseling and philosophical systems of thought. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the version of self-awareness that has been adopted by the counseling profession is theoretically arbitrary and should be replaced by a construct that has more utility for counseling practice.
* Core Assumptions
The construct of self-awareness is only tenable if certain underlying assumptions are presumed to be true. Specifically, the following four conditions are relevant to the viability of the construct of self-awareness: (a) the self must exist, (b) this self must be available for introspection, (c) the self must have an enduring essence, and (d) the self must be able to be represented by language. A discussion of the logical rationale for each of these conditions follows.
First, if the self did not exist, the idea of self-awareness would be nonsensical. Although it may seem bizarre to question the existence of a self, the whole, consolidated self that is generally presumed by the humanistic counseling tradition has been called into question by alternative ideologies. From the fractured, conflicted self of psychoanalysis (Flax, 1990) to the outright "death of the subject" (Rosenau, 1992, p. 45), which has been announced by skeptical postmodernist philosophers, the assumption of an internal, consolidated self-structure has been increasingly challenged. Therefore, a reassessment of the construct of self-awareness certainly needs to consider these alternative versions of self.
Second, self-awareness presumes that the self is available for introspection, that it can be scrutinized by an inner eye. Thus, even if condition one, the existence of a consolidated self, is accepted, it does not automatically follow from this first assumption that self-awareness is a possibility. Indeed, psychoanalytic thought, as an example, posits that vast realms of self are completely inaccessible to introspection (Gabbard, 2004; Hansen, 2000).
Third, the construct of self-awareness would lose much of its vitality if the self did not have a certain degree of stability. To use a natural science metaphor, it would be pointless to draw final conclusions about the properties of a physical compound if the basic nature of the compound changed continually. With regard to self, certain ideologies posit an entrenched, solidified self (e.g., psychoanalysis and humanism), while alternative conceptualizations presume a fluid, socially constructed self (e.g., postmodernism). The version of self that is endorsed, solid or fluid, has important implications for the construct of self-awareness.
Fourth, self-awareness would have no meaning unless the vehicle used to describe the self (i.e., language) was capable of accurately representing the self. The representational function of language has been taken for granted for most of the history of the counseling profession. However, 20th-century developments in philosophy have challenged the traditional assumption that language corresponds to the objects it signifies (Chessick, 1987; Gergen, 1999; Hansen, 2005b; Rorty, 1999). These challenges have wide-ranging implications for the tenability of the construct of self-awareness.
These four assumptions, then, are fundamental pillars upon which the construct of self-awareness is founded. Various ideologies take different stances regarding these assumptions. Of the many systems of thought that have influenced counseling theorizing, three stand out as having particularly rich foundational assumptions about the self and self-awareness: (a) humanism, (b) psychoanalytic thought, and (c) postmodernism. Each of these systems is reviewed, in turn, in terms of the four criteria for self-awareness.
* Humanism
Psychological humanism emerged in the mid-20th century (DeCarvalho, 1990; Hansen, 2005a). Philosophically, humanism represents a hybrid system that comprises phenomenology, existentialism, and American optimism about the human condition (DeCarvalho, 1990; Halling & Nill, 1995; Hansen, 2000, 2005b). The specifics of the humanistic self and the possibilities this self creates for self-awareness are examined in terms of the four criteria necessary for self-awareness to occur.
Existence of Self
The existence of the self is a hallmark assumption of humanism. Indeed, a vital theoretical component of humanistic theory is self-actualization, which refers to...
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