Conferences, Counseling Psychology

Northwestern Conference

An early formative occurrence in the professional development of counseling psychology was the Ann Arbor conference held in 1949 and sponsored by the University of Michigan and Division 17. This conference was funded by a public health grant and had a purpose of delineating the best plan for training counselors who planned to be psychologists. A report from the conference indicated a need for clearer distinction between clinical and counseling psychology. The Ann Arbor conference was significant in this primary agenda—to articulate the distinction between these two disciplines.

While the Ann Arbor conference was critical in the formation of the discipline, the Northwestern conference is identified as the first counseling psychology conference and had a reported attendance of 34 participants. This event was held at Northwestern University in 1951, 5 years after the discipline was recognized by the APA. Nadya Fouad and colleagues delineated three themes of the Northwestern conference; these were identity, training, and political and social advocacy. However, the ambiguity of the identity of counseling psychology was central to the conference. Indeed, it was at the Northwestern conference that the term counseling psychologist was selected as the name of the discipline. Additionally, Donald Super is credited with articulating the focus of the discipline on hygiology, or the preservation of health, rather than on pathology. An additional theme was the recognition of the equal emphasis on science and practice rather than the prioritization of one over the other.

Training was another theme of the Northwestern conference. At the time of that conference, only a third of the members of Division 17 held doctorates. The participants formulated recommendations to increase the rigor and uniformity of the doctoral training of psychologists, including attention to curriculum needs, clinical training sequences, and admission processes.

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