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Article Excerpt
Discovery and creation are significant elements of experience within the counseling process. These terms can also serve as metaphors for modern and postmodern epistemologies. These dual meanings for discovery and creation are exploited to examine the intersection of counseling and philosophy, particularly in terms of the timeless nature of the helping encounter.
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There are innumerable ways to conceptualize counseling processes. Over the past century, hundreds of theories have been proposed to understand the rich and complex interactions that occur within the counseling relationship (Corsini & Wedding, 2005).
Traditional theories of counseling generally presume a modernist epistemology, which posits that clients possess objective essences (Hansen, 2002; Speed, 1991). A counselor must correctly ascertain these essences for healing to occur. For example, humanism posits that counselors should strive toward "accurate" empathy of the experiences of their clients (Rogers, 1957). Similarly, for classical psychoanalysis, healing is dependent upon counselors ascertaining unconscious client conflicts (Gabbard, 2004; Hansen, 2000). Therefore, counseling theories that have modernism as their epistemological foundation presume that clients possess preexisting characteristics that counselors can come to know.
Recently, particularly within the past 20 years, alternative epistemological assumptions have begun to influence counseling theorizing (Sexton & Griffin, 1997). These assumptions have been called postmodern, as they represent challenges to the modernist version of knowing (Hansen, 2005b, 2006; Kvale, 1992; Rosenau, 1992). For example, one variant of postmodernism, social constructionism, begins with the assumption that experience is created by human interactions (Gergen, 1999). Rather than lying in wait to be discovered by a perspicacious counselor, as in modernism, client experience is constructed within the counseling dyad. All postmodernist perspectives reject the possibility of accurate knowledge and emphasize human construction as an inherent part of the knowing process (Held, 1995).
Both modernism and postmodernism have a rich set of traditions and assumptions, which have been overviewed by various counseling theorists (e.g., Mahoney, 1991; Sexton & Griffin, 1997). However, for purposes of this paper, these epistemological systems will be represented by the metaphors of discovery and creation. Although it may seem intellectually simplistic and overly reductive to collapse modernism and postmodernism into such abbreviated metaphoric expressions, creation and discovery are terms that adequately capture the spirit of these epistemologies, at least for the purposes of this discussion. That is, a core assumption of modernism, and the scientific method, is that there is a fundamental truth about the object of study to discover (Erwin, 1999). Alternatively, postmodern epistemology presumes that human knowing is an intrinsically constructive, or creative, act (Leary, 1994).
Aside from the fact that these metaphors accurately represent the epistemological spirit of modernism and postmodernism, creation and discovery are also reflective of vital components of counseling processes. That is, counseling is experientially contextualized by moments of self-discovery and longings to create anew. Therefore, creation and discovery are metaphors that can potentially create a bridge between the intellectual insights of philosophy and the rich, multi-layered experiences that unfold in the counseling room.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of creation and discovery as epistemological metaphors for counseling process and to propose some novel ways of integrating these concepts, both philosophically, with the phenomenological concept of time, and as core experiences within the helping encounter. These goals will be accomplished within the following organizational structure: (1) Discovery Metaphor, (2) Creation Metaphor, (3) Reconciling Discovery and Creation with Phenomenology, and (4) Discussion and Conclusions.
DISCOVERY METAPHOR
Traditional counseling orientations have been founded upon the epistemological metaphor of discovery. To illustrate, consider the following counseling interaction:
Client: I hate my brother.
Counselor: From listening to you, it seems like your hate may be a result of your envy of him.
Client: You're right (crying). I envy him and that makes me hate him.
I have chosen this, rather typical, counseling interaction because the response of the counselor is conceivably consistent with a variety of traditional counseling orientations. That is, the vignette is consistent with the humanistic goal of accurate empathy, the psychoanalytic objective of identifying underlying feeling states or conflicts, and the cognitive aim of fleshing out experience to identify distorted cognitions. Thus, this example can serve as an illustration of the discovery metaphor across various orientations. With regard to this vignette, traditional counseling models would have presumed that the feeling of envy had been discovered, or accurately identified, by the counselor. Within the discovery metaphor, the client's affirmative response to the remark would have served as validation that the counselor had been correct.
This discovery metaphor is probably most vividly expressed in classical psychoanalysis by Freud's archeological model of the psyche (Gay, 1988), which implies that the counseling task is to sift through experience to unearth buried psychological relics. However, the goal of accurate discovery is also foundational to the cognitive metaphor of mind as computer (Gergen, 1988) and the humanistic metaphor of the holistic self and the authentic encounter (Rogers, 1951).
Because the discovery metaphor is foundational to traditional counseling orientations, it warrants further examination. Specifically, the metaphor dictates that healing is dependent upon accurate identification of particular pre-existing elements of a client's psyche. However, upon reflection, this assumption is somewhat counter-intuitive and perhaps even completely arbitrary. That is, given the evidence, why should it be presumed that human change is completely dependent upon accurate discovery?
Consider that human change is caused by a variety of circumstances and events that do not involve discovery (e.g., Frank & Frank, 1991; Keeney, 1983; Mahoney, 1991; Torrey, 1972). Rather, change is frequently due to sudden and inexplicable inspiration, a refusal to continue to engage in harmful ways of being, the acquisition of faith, pressure from loved ones, sudden flashes of insight, identification with a charismatic leader, commitment to a cause, or simply as an escape from boredom. Discovery of some hidden, intrapsychic essence, then, is clearly not a prerequisite to human change. Why, then, are all classical counseling models founded on the discovery metaphor?
The idea that accurate identification of an inner essence will somehow activate a dormant will to change has it origins in natural science models that were applied to the helping situation (Sexton, 1997). All classical counseling models were introduced during an age when the scientific method was idealized as a means to acquire truth and, ultimately, as a vehicle to jettison humankind into a utopian state (Rosenau, 1992). Incredible advances in the natural sciences during the twentieth century, and concomitant improvements in quality of life, fortified this idealized vision of science (Anderson, 1990). It is no wonder, then, that emergent theories of human change, such as psychoanalysis, humanism, and cognitivism, were all founded on the epistemological metaphor of discovery. That is, like a scientist, it was the role of the traditional counselor to objectively discover something about the client.
The discovery metaphor of helping, however, has not lived up to the idealized visions of its proponents. Critiques and problems have emerged that have increasingly called the utility of this epistemological metaphor into question. Three significant problems with the discovery metaphor, as applied to counseling, are contamination anxiety, the inherent limitations of a...
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