Counseling

Counseling can be defined as a human service that enhances personal and interpersonal functioning across the life span and addresses emotional, social, vocational, educational, health-related, developmental, and organizational concerns. The focus is typically on healthy aspects of the client, personal and environmental characteristics (including culture, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and physical ability), and the role of career on individual development and functioning. A brief description of the historical foundations of the counseling profession follows.

The industrial revolution (early 1900s) created a large number of jobs, and it became clear that young people had more career choices than their predecessors. Frank Parsons was a social reformer who identified the need to help people learn how to make these new career choices. He opened a career counseling service in 1908, and his work spurred the vocational guidance movement. This movement continued to flourish during the two World Wars because of the need for occupational classification of the men who were part of the military campaigns (Gelso & Fretz, 2001).

A second historical development that influenced the emergence of counseling was the psychometric movement. Psychometrics is essentially the science of measuring human behaviors and psychological processes. This movement began in the mid-to-late 1800s with Sir Francis Galton, who was interested in trying to understand differences between people by using mathematics. Alfred Binet, along with colleague Theodore Simon, published the first intelligence test in 1905. This further legitimized the measurement of individual differences. The psychometric movement also equipped vocational guidance counselors with the tools needed to gather information about individual aptitudes, abilities, and interests.

Counseling also has its roots in E. G. Williamson's goal-oriented counseling approach to help students adjust in large universities. Also, Carl Rogers created the client-centered approach to counseling that emphasized counseling and growth of individuals (rather than the diagnosis and assessment of psychopathology). Both of these developments occurred in the late 1930s and early 1940s and shifted the focus of treatments from long-term therapy, emphasizing diagnosis and remediation, to more short-term counseling focused on growth.