PLACE OF THE COUNCIL: Content-oriented And Process-oriented Modus Of Psychological Assistance

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Some authoritative psychotherapists (for example, M. Erickson, V. Frankl, I. Yalom) sometimes did not shy away from giving advice in their work. Along with this, psychologists insist that a specialist in no case should take on the role of an advisor. Most often, the primary reason that a psychologist (psychotherapist) does not give advice is the provision that a person must independently make a decision and make his own responsible choice, and advice deprives him of responsibility for making a decision. At the same time, the saying “Advice is given to us for free, therefore it is valued accordingly” demonstrates that the received ready-made advice does not necessarily lead to the fact that a person will follow it, even if he received it from a professional person. Therefore, when it comes to advice, F. Ye. Vasilyuk pointed out, “psychotherapists should not be given advice not because there are some mystical dangers in this, and not even because we thereby deprive the person of responsibility, we will accept his decision, which he himself must make. It cannot be done. Try to advise one of your friends and deprive him of responsibility - most of the time you are unlikely to succeed. We cannot give advice because we have no wisdom."

Indeed, there is nothing unnatural or illegal in the fact that one person, wise by life experience, offers another, by this experience not wise, a solution or a program of action. But this requires wisdom, the wisdom that Frankl had, who went through the Nazi concentration camps. Thus, it is an "exchange of experience", which has nothing to do with psychotherapy, and for which there is practically no place in it. I say "practically", since the variety of psychotherapeutic situations can dictate a change in any paradigm, yet the main value and concern in psychotherapy for the psychotherapist is not the "purity" of the approach, but the person and his well-being. And if the mental well-being of a person suffers, then the advice or recommendation will just become a manifestation of care, and not at all a manifestation of a mentoring position. Therefore, to say that it is strictly forbidden to give advice is not true for psychotherapy, because a lot is allowed in psychotherapy (except for what the code of ethics prescribes), however, not everything is useful and safe.

If you set a goal and refer to dictionaries, you can give a description of the "differential diagnosis" advice and recommendations. You can offer ready-made formulas how to give advice or recommendation, and suggest the grounds on which these concepts, realized in verbal formulations, can be divorced and give a lot of examples of professionally "correct" recommendations during problem-oriented counseling. Such attempts can be found in the psychological literature. However, the fact is that in the real practice of consulting and live communication, conceptual explanations and the basis for the separation of "advice" and "recommendation" lose their distinctive outlines, merging into a single conglomerate. Thus, we are talking about the exchange of experience between a sophisticated and an inexperienced person about a way out of a difficult situation. All of this is characteristic of problem-oriented counseling. At the same time, there are such problematic requests in counseling, which can be resolved in various ways that the counselor can suggest to go. So, working with the girl's request "which of the two suitors to choose", one consultant focused on "solving" the problem and obtaining results through "exchange of experience" will offer the "famous" technique "+ / -", as a result of a simple calculation of which, on the advice such a consultant, you should choose the one that gets the most "+". While the other, looking through the eyes of a phenomenologist, seeks in the same situation to find ways that allow the client to listen to her inner intention and methods that facilitate the implementation of direct reference to the experience and its felt meaning. This orientation of the consultant contributes to the fact that the person turns to his inner foundations - to "what this event in my actual life means to me." With this approach, the consultant sees a free subject in a person and seeks to comprehend the subjective and unique meaning of the experiences and judgments of this person; to comprehend the meaning that is generated by this particular person himself from within his own living experience. Finding a "method" is not the most difficult task, creatively synthesizing your knowledge at the right moment a new method and method can be born, which opens up the possibility for a person here and now to express himself in its entirety, to treat experience as self-sufficient - one that can to be understood "from within oneself", without resorting to external explanation. The completion of this kind of experience can be birth, "at the point of the experience itself," immanent in the very experience of meaning. Guided by a phenomenological cognitive strategy, the consultant refuses an external explanation of what he is dealing with and ready-made recommendations; but it carries out an opening movement to release a certain force of the whole, with the help of which this whole establishes itself. The dialogue, built on the basis of a phenomenological cognitive strategy, allows the client to discover his feelings and experiences and see new aspects and new connections that he was not previously aware of. That is, in a dialogue of this type, the possibility of "phenomenological movement" remains. All the questions of the consultant in this dialogue are addressed to the living experience of a person, which allows the latter to constitute meaning through a personal criterion that is absolute in accuracy and reliability - his own internal response.

Thus, the conventional wisdom that problem-based counseling is not true without advice and guidance. It all depends, of course, on the type of request, but is even more determined by the "ideology" of the consultant. The same is true in psychotherapy. The point is not so much in the names "counseling" or "psychotherapy" as in their content-oriented or process-oriented mode. The content-oriented modus often penetrates into psychotherapy, being realized in considering the internal content of the problem (as opposed to the external one, which is traditionally what problem-oriented counseling is doing - conflicts at work, family, etc.). The content of the problem, internal in relation to the personality, is understood as the peculiarity of a person's attitude to a traumatic situation. At the same time, focus on the content of the client's problem is a kind of "spoken" genre and replaces psychotherapy with counseling. The idea of the procedurality of therapy is associated with those of its models that focus on the living experience of experience here and now. In connection with the above, I will quote the words of J. Bujenthal: “Psychotherapists differ from each other in the same way as specialists in any other field, but an even greater difference is found in their art. And yet those who have practiced "intensive" or "deep" psychotherapy for many years, often even differing in theoretical issues, in the way it is carried out, are more similar to each other than to those who share their clan name and have with them common academic roots”. Likewise, in my opinion, problem-oriented counseling (or short-term psychological assistance) can be both content-oriented and procedural. And it’s not so much a “request,” but a focus on process or content.

I will return to the beginning of the issue under discussion, in connection with the ideas of the content or the procedurality of psychotherapy. Where is there more likely to be a place for "exchange of experience" (advice, recommendations) in a meaningful or process-oriented mode of psychotherapy or counseling? In the 20th century, the third, meaning, invaded the fundamental concepts of classical philosophy "truth" and "error". So the question arose: what does this mean for me? What is it? What gives me? A different understanding should now not be unambiguously regarded as a delusion, since it may make sense for a person. The desire to understand a person in all his completeness and integrity led W. Dilthey to criticize "explanatory psychology" with its attempts to reduce the unknown to the already known, the complex to the simple; where to understand means to explain, looking for the cause of what is happening. Instead of the causal principle, which is based on external speculative constructions, W. Dilthey proposed a completely different methodological principle - understanding. To understand is to turn to inner reasons - to what this event of my actual life means to me. Understanding, thus, turns out to be associated with the extraction of meaning. Such an approach to a person sees in him a free subject and seeks to comprehend the subjective and each time a unique meaning of the experiences and judgments of this person; to comprehend the meaning that is generated by him from within his own living experience.

Thus, advice is more likely a "child" of the content-oriented vector of psychotherapy, it has a place there, since there is no place for "the unique meaning of the experiences and judgments of this person." This lacuna of the experience of experiencing and extracting one's own meaning is intended to fill the advice, the recommendation of a specialist. The need for a recommendation becomes urgent and demanding, persistently asserting itself as a result of a certain "shortage", a deficit. At the same time, procedural therapy, in which the deepest innermost experiences of a person are revealed, opening up the possibility for a person here and now to express himself in full and to relate to the experience as to self-sufficient - such that can be understood “from within himself”, without conversion there is simply no room for external forces, advice. In this space (here) and time (now), the experience of a consultant is inappropriate, since an event happened: the inner being began to move (albeit to an insignificant extent) and this fact turns out to be more real and important than any recommendations of an authoritative specialist. The notorious "boots" of the therapist are out of place, reuniting with their productive capabilities and, accordingly, understanding themselves, based on their own living experience, the client constructs his own patterns.