Trainee Counselling Psychologist Prize: Joint runner-up Death and mid life: Why an understanding of life-span development is essential for the practice of counselling psychology

Abstract

The clients that come to counselling psychology do not live in a vacuum. They are located in time and space and are faced with the particular challenges presented by their contexts and their interactions with these contexts. This essay tries to show that an awareness of life-span development is essential for counselling psychologists in order to contextualise their clients’ experiences and use this understanding as a resource for therapeutic work. It argues in particular that the existential theme of finitude needs to be considered as impacting on life-span development. It starts by introducing the life-span perspective and its implications for practice and goes on to exemplify this view by focusing on the subject of death – particularly on death awareness and death anxiety – and its influence on people’s lives, especially during what has been called ‘the mid-life crisis’, before applying some of the ideas to the fictional character of Ivanov from Chekhov’s eponymous play. It tries to show that death assumes special significance in mid life and that this is not merely a challenge in counselling psychology practice but also an opportunity for growth.