Читать книгу Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling - Kenneth S. Pope - Страница 29

The work we do as therapists is complex, difficult, and emotional. Yet, as a mental health profession we have often struggled to capture with words exactly what we do and even what we profess to do as therapists. The challenge of describing what we do has been debated from the start of our profession.

In 1949, the Boulder Conference tried to define psychotherapy in a way that it could be used to train clinical and counseling psychologists. Carl Rogers, then president of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1947, appointed David Shakow to chair a committee on defining and teaching psychotherapy. The Shakow Report, adopted at the 1947 APA convention, resulted in the Boulder Conference two years later.

On August 28, 1949, the recorder for the Boulder Task Force for defining both psychotherapy and the criteria for adequate training provided the following summary: “We have left therapy as an undefined technique which is applied to unspecified problems with a nonpredictable outcome. For this technique we recommend rigorous training” (Lehner, 1952, p. 547).

Since the Boulder Conference, other conferences and various groups have tried to define psychotherapy and the practice of psychology. For example, the 2002 Competencies Conference: Future Directions in Education and Credentialing in Professional Psychology (Kaslow et al., 2004), identified competencies in professional psychology and discussed effective strategies for teaching and assessing these competencies (Kaslow, 2004; see also Belar, 2009; Fouad et al., 2009; Hatcher, 2015; Hatcher et al., 2013; Rodolfa et al., 2013). Similarly, the European Association of Clinical Psychology and Psychological Treatment (EACLIPT) Task Force on Competences of Clinical Psychologists (2019) developed “a list of competences that should be acquired during regular studies of psychology with a clinical specialisation” (EACLIPT Task Force, 2019; see also Prado-Abril et al., 2019).