Great aspirations: The postwar American college counseling center.

Abstract

In the decade after World War II, psychologists, eager to bring the benefits of counseling to larger numbers, convinced hundreds of American colleges and universities to establish counseling centers. Inspired by the educational-vocational counseling center founded by psychologists at the University of Minnesota in 1932, Carl R. Rogers's "client-centered" methods of personal adjustment counseling, and the 400-plus college counseling centers created by the Veterans Administration to provide the educational-vocational counseling benefit promised to returning World War II servicemen under the 1944 GI Bill, these counseling psychologists created a new place to practice where important currents in psychology, higher education, and federal policy converged and where they attempted to integrate educational-vocational counseling with personal adjustment counseling based on techniques from psychotherapy. By the mid-1960s, half of America's colleges and universities had established counseling centers, and more than 90% offered students educational, vocational, and psychological counseling services, a great achievement of the first generation of counseling psychologists.

Middle class sprawl: Locating the psychologesque in the history of psychology.

“…Within psychology proper, histories of individual applied areas are readily available and have been for some time. These include comprehensive historical accounts of the emergence of applied subfields (e.g., for clinical psychology, Routh, 1994Routh, , 2010 for industrial psychology, Koppes, 2007; for counseling psychology, Whiteley, 1984) and, more recently, focused studies of the development of particular aspects of practice within these areas (e.g., McCarthy, 2014;Rosner, 2012). 2 Expanding further beyond psychology and its 2 Here also might be included the series of accounts of the histories of the Divisions of the American Psychological Association, "Unification Through Division," (Dewsbury, 1999(Dewsbury, -2000 which had extended to five volumes through the year 2000.…”

“…Within psychology proper, histories of individual applied areas are readily available and have been for some time. These include comprehensive historical accounts of the emergence of applied subfields (e.g., for clinical psychology, Routh, 1994, 2010; for industrial psychology, Koppes, 2007; for counseling psychology, Whiteley, 1984) and, more recently, focused studies of the development of particular aspects of practice within these areas (e.g., McCarthy, 2014; Rosner, 2012). 2 Expanding further beyond psychology and its dominant connections with medicine are many histories of cognate professions, again both synoptic (e.g., for social work, Dulmus & Sowers, 2012; for special education, Osgood, 2008; for adjunctive therapies [in this case, physical therapy], Moffat, 2003) or focused on specific episodes.…”

“A backdrop for psychotherapy”: Carl R. Rogers, psychological testing, and the psycho-educational clinic at Columbia University’s Teachers College (1924–1935).

“…His stay at Teachers College has been completely omitted from most historical reconstructions, whether on the history of clinical psychology (Benjamin, 2005; Reisman, 1991; Routh, 2000), on the history of psychotherapy (Cautin, 2011; Taylor, 2000), on the history of humanistic psychology (Watson et al, 2011) or on the history of the client-centered therapy (Raskin et al, 2011). Indeed, historical scholarship on Rogers or his school of thought has focused on his later work (Barrett-Lennard, 2012; McCarthy, 2014). But that is not the whole picture.…”

The intersection of counseling pychology and the prescriptive authority for psychologists movement

“…Counseling psychology, a unique specialty within professional psychology, has always distinguished itself by its response to change (Gelso, Nutt Williams, & Fretz, 2014;Lichtenberg, Goodyear, & Genther, 2008). At its point of origin, counseling psychology embraced the Progressive Era of the early 20 th Century United States, an epoch epitomized by the application of new scientific findings to problem solving and helping those in need (McCarthy, 2014).…”

“…Counseling psychology culminated as a specialty during this period, coalescing around principles inherent to the vocational guidance and mental hygiene movements (McCarthy, 2014). The specialty later recognized the immense socio-political implications of the Civil Rights movement in the middle 20 th Century and adopted the philosophy of multiculturalism before any of its professional peers (Constantine, Miville, & Kindaichi, 2008;Ponterotto, 2008).…”