Commentary: some thoughts on difference, the ‘profession’, and transcending the ideologies of late modernity

Abstract

This commentary takes up many of the prescient arguments about 'difference' in Chris Oakley's preceding paper to suggest an overarching consciousness-evolutionary framework that might help to account for human experience in late modernity. In highlighting the crucial yet neglected insights of Rudolf Steiner and Robert Sardello, the paper raises fundamental challenges to conventional, positivistic thinking about efficacy research, therapy professionalization and the 'accountability culture'; and it suggests ways in which a paradigm-transcending psychotherapy and psychoanalysis might play an important role in the evolution of human consciousness.