Abstract
Western religion’s propensity to stultify holiness and the sacred is eclipsed in the profession of counselling. With its fundamentalist enthralment with the individual self, this poster-girl of liberalism, through its central modusoperandi, language has achieved a privileged rhetoric thereby relegating itself to the dustbin of history certainly in Western society. It is less a “sigh of the oppressed soul” (Marx, 1978) as the empowerment of an opportunistic harlotry that energises the profession in a neoliberal marketplace with discourses of social justice routinely cheapened and ideologically hijacked. The author designates a genealogy of this ascendant plummet learnt through retrospective insight. Counsellors have not only unconditionally accepted tablets of stone around truths but also binaries of truths. Interrogating several sacred cows in the profession including the concept of burnout, the should/need dichotomy and the parallel process he apprehends a trajectory chronicling nodal points and concluding that many undertakings within counselling serve increasingly to perpetuate a political-non-political conflation with marketplace morality idealised as liberalism morphs seamlessly into neoliberalism. What descends from a neoliberal paradise are reconfigurations of dichotomies not” of our choosing” (Marx, 1978) but of our own choice. Willingly with the anesthetising of any coherent Judeo-Christian impulses we opt for the sanctity of a vacuous Starbuck spirituality as liberalism or religion in its “degutted” version (Eagleton, 2009: p. 41) enacts the comfort of the afflicted but never the affliction of the comfortable.
Highlights
The Upwards DescentThe research aim in this article is to interweave micro and macro illustrating how the minutiae of counsellingHow to cite this paper: Carton, T. (2015)
Not for the first or last time the egalitarianism which eventually culminated in democracy and universal suffrage obscured a reductionism to economy rather than the optimism provided by a vulgar Hegelian idealism
This conflation of neoliberalism and religion is best seen in eighteenth century Ireland, England’s first and most troublesome colony
Summary
In the liberal west counselling has to some extent replaced religion as a means to offer solace. In so doing it serves to anesthetize humans in the same way as Marx alleges ironically religion did in the past. Numerous studies indicated that a brief self-questioning exercise was inherently effective not so much in readying the client to receive treatment for drug abuse but to bring about change by itself. Vocabulary around disease and deficit and treatment were in the process of erasure, jettisoned off, aetiology rendered as an interesting irrelevancy (Todd, 2001) This process was empowered by the clinician’s increasing sophistry at sinking into a shared renunciation of community facilitated in various elegant means. This continued despite the fact that as many know, the idea that the intrinsic person can cure themselves is as stable as the proposition that one could tickle themselves
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