Hi Joseph,
This is not a direct reply to the comments below. I've never been a fan of
Freud! I've always been extremely concerned about where the power lies in
counselling psychology and related areas. Although not all counselling
psychologists are the same, it is nevertheless the case that training
courses continue to develop curricula that actively pursue medicalised
approaches to both 'madness' and disability and most have a culture of how
the profession 'ought' to be practised. This is is part because most
training courses are developed and run by 'experts' in the field who have
been around a long time and have had the opportunity to develop very
entrenched attitudes.
Obviously courses that are orientated towards clinical training will be
more problematic in this respect. Having said that, when I first started
training in person-centred and then eclectic approaches to therapy (because
I believed that these approaches were more aligned with social model
perspectives) it was not uncommon for people to say that deaf people can't
be consellors because they can't hear .. in other words the Freudian 'the
ego wears an auditory lobe' or something to that effect. Although this
attitude has changed in some quarters, there is, as you have experienced, a
very great resistance to change at the level of the culture of practice -
listening is still highlighted and even though there is 'talk' about
different levels of listening, I find that most people still focus on
auditory information. When I trained Deaf people as counsellors, who are of
course 'visual', I found there was very little information and vocabulary
to describe 'visual' listening and of course 'auditory' listening still at
the core of the course. This doesn't surprise me because vision occupies
hegemonic status in the hierarchy of senses so we take it for granted and
we don't need to analyse it or understand it - Wittgenstein's 'a picture is
a fact'! But the lack of vocabulary disadvantaged Deaf trainees, who had
already been encouraged to start at a lower level of training than their
hearing counterparts. I fought this both through dialogue and through
developing materials (unpaid), and became so burnt out by fighting that I
lost my effectiveness as a trainer. I guess I learnt something about
balance, but I still feel I failed those trainees.
What this is saying of course is that it doesn't matter what impairment we
are talking about - the culture of training will always find a way of
locating impairment/disability in the sphere of 'mental health problems'
even to the point of denying that actually it doesn't have certain core
values (some of which are unstated). This is about oppression, but what it
means, as Beth emphasises indirectly, is that a lot of disabled people
receive inappropriate counselling where they are seduced by the possibility
that the solution to their problems lies in the internalisation of a
'negative' identity. That being said, and again this comes back to
activism, how many disabled users of counselling services insist on a
disabled counsellor? And if they don't is this simply because their 'mental
health problems' are already so exacerbated by the lack of appropriate
services that they have no energy left to insist on their rights (I think
they do have rights as counselling is a service under the DDA). I note that
DAN picketed the Directors of Social Services conference to liberate our
brothers and sisters from a life of institutionalisation, but that is
'reactive' action. What we're talking about is something more proactive,
and yet activists won't touch it as far as I am aware.
Sorry to go on
Best, Mairian
>Hello John,
> Thanks for such a prompt reply.
>
>I appreciated your encouraging comments, but have to say that
>despite the "fact" I do enjoy life in general, I do not like being
>oppressed by blinkered and indifferent attitudes.
>
>I think perhaps that much of the Establishment of psychology has become
>moribund in its own old theories which by their very nature reflect an
>historic and retrospective understanding, of
>behaviours.
>
>Psychology's old positivism still lingers on. Until such times as they
>waken up to the fact that counselling which is theory led becomes more
>aware of social and cultural change then it can be really no more than
>another form of social control, as oppose
>d to change, and a gatekeeper to ensure that the status quo remains
>unchanged.
>
>
>I also found Phyllis's comment about academics from within, fearing that
>they might upset their colleagues, an interesting point.
>
>Does anyone remember Freud's reversal of his seduction theory? Well
>perhaps not actually remember it, but remember reading about it?
>
Mairian Corker
Senior Research Fellow in Deaf and Disability Studies
Department of Education Studies
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
Address for correspondence:
111 Balfour Road
Highbury
London N5 2HE
U.K.
Minicom/TTY +44 [0]171 359 8085
Fax +44 [0]870 0553967
Typetalk (voice) +44 [0]800 515152 (and ask for minicom/TTY number)
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"To understand what I am doing, you need a third eye"
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