COUNSELING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

Father Curran regards counseling, as he regards education, as the process of determining a system of values and of factors which are likely to result in personal maturity, and of establishing the means to pursue them. The first section of his book is an attempt to justify these definitions; the second section considers the techniques of counseling; the third is concerned with educational methods and systems in their implications for counseling; the final section sets out guidelines, in the light of what has been said in preceding sections, with respect to ""value investment."" ""authentic involvement,"" and the discernment of the nature of reality. Two things strike the reader: first. Father Curran's concept of psychotherapy as a parasitic relationship between counselor and client seems more likely to be symptomatic of, rather than curative of, psychological disequilibrium; second, Father Curran has a communications problem, which manifests itself in a devotion to such obfuscatory words as ""convalidate,"" etc. These two phenomena may be related, since the use of words is the means par excellence of establishing a relationship, but neither of them is of sufficient interest, either conjunctively or discretely, to portend much of a market for the resoundingly dull book in which they are embodied.