Abstract
Before exploring counselling psychology ‘approaches’ to sexuality or gender, it is important to clarify that we are writing from a stance that considers identities and selves as multiple and dynamic, and contingent on relational factors, socio-historical contexts, and the political climate for recognition or constraint. Therefore, the professional identity of the counselling psychologist should be considered no more fixed, predetermined, or universally agreed upon than any sexual or gender identity we may encounter in a clinical context. As a result of this, counselling psychology may be interpreted very differently by individual psychologists. Textbooks which attempt to define our discipline are often replete with constructions of counselling psychology’s difference from or similarity to other applied professions, most commonly clinical psychology (Pugh & Coyle, 2000). Oversimplifications of this difference once suggested that clinical psychologists tend to look at what may be ‘wrong’ and how to ‘treat’ it, while counselling psychologists tend to look for what may be ‘right’ and how to ‘use’ it (Super, 1977). However, such simple comparisons bring forth questions concerning how we might decide what may be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the problematic notion of formulation, and do not sit comfortably within the values of a pluralist discipline such as ours. These notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ may also be somewhat more pronounced in the areas of sex, sexuality, and gender, and perhaps our first ‘approach’ in counselling psychology should be asking ourselves why.
Once a body-world relationship is recognised, there is a ramification of my body and a ramification of the world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside and my inside and its outside.
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 136)
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Clark, D., Loewenthal, D. (2015). Counselling Psychology. In: Richards, C., Barker, M.J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Psychology of Sexuality and Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345899_17
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