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A Developmental Approach to Counseling Adults

Boston University

The author enunciates basic tenets of developmental theory and shows their application to work with adults. Counseling intervention is conceptualized as mobilizing resources to facilitate growth. Implications for the future of counseling psychology are considered.

Counseling psychologists working with adults have usually traced their origins to two sets of ancestors. One, the medical psychiatric tradition, is oriented to a treatment model. Correction of abnormalities, adjustment to disabilities, restoration of function are talismen of this approach. Educational guidance, the other ancestral tradition, takes as its hallmarks providing information and recommending courses of action.

These historic influences have in recent years been effectively challenged, by phenomenology and by behaviorism. Even as controversy between these seemingly incompatible parents rages on, a new generation of advocates has arisen, growing its own branch on the family tree. This latest influence, the developmental approach, languished for as long as it remained a psychology of childhood. Now that developmental psychology is expanding in scope to cover the entire life span (Pressey & Kuhlen, 1957), its relevance for counseling psychology is becoming more explicit. To explore the relevance of developmental theory in working with adults it is necessary to review some basic tenets inherent in the developmental perspective.

The Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 6, No. 1, 37-40 (1976)
DOI: 10.1177/001100007600600108


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