Abstract

The discipline of Mental Health Counseling, referred to in this essay as Counseling, has no substantial philosophy. In the United States, much of Counseling philosophy is rooted in the American Counseling Association’s code of ethics. However, this is a code of material conduct, not a substantial Counseling philosophy, and by this orientation the distinction between doing and the knowledge that informs activity is not understood important. Counseling theories thereby adhere in a third principle that is left to disseminate in foreign powers. This is to say, Counseling is commonly understood as a name for a loose set of theoretical practices bound by ethical standards, that these practices are reckoned to lay apart from one another while all referencing or otherwise answering to psychology. Due to this deferment, the apparent rise of mental health issues could be attributed to a weakening of intentional focus, since psychology, by its own scientific standard, is less a standard of care than an experimental method oriented in discovering and implementing an objective reality through which it then offers corrective protocols. This essay draws upon philosophical efforts more rigorous than a granting of epistemological deferment to propose that Counseling is a practice unto itself, in-itself, of a true substance, concerned, involved with, and related to psychology but not subject to it.