Counselling and Class: Power, privilege and professionalisation

Class has more or less vanished from the counselling lexicon, argues Clare Slaney in this powerful collection of essays and interviews with experienced practitioners from myriad counselling and psychotherapy schools, educations and trainings. But you cannot take politics out of counselling. To be truly therapeutic, counselling relies on depth of relationship, non-judgemental attitude and an acute awareness that we are all fundamentally shaped and changed by our environments, past and present. The class we are born into powerfully influences who we are, our expectations and opportunities and our ability to (in Rogerian terms) self-actualise. If counselling is to be truly in service to its clients, the profession has to welcome practitioners who do not conform to the stereotype - White, middle-class, degree-educated, comfortably affluent and female. But the drive towards professionalisation, led by market forces and operationalised in the form of increasingly rigid hierarchical standards and manualised practices, has made counselling all-but out of reach to working class folk and those without a reliable income, both as a profession and a therapy. Its training has become unaffordable and its culture increasingly hostile to anyone other than those who conform to the stereotype. Thought-provoking, challenging, confrontational and angry, this collection fills a gaping void in the professional literature and makes essential reading for every counsellor and psychotherapist, supervisor, tutor and academic researcher.