Counseling Theories Within a Postmodernist Epistemology: New Roles for Theories in Counseling Practice

Summer 2006 ■ Volume 84 291 © 2006 by the American Counseling Association. All rights reserved. Theoretical understanding is an essential part of effective counseling practice. Theories help counselors organize clinical data, make complex processes coherent, and provide conceptual guidance for interventions. The overwhelming barrage of information with which practicing counselors are regularly confronted would be a bewildering array of random, disparate happenings without the aid of organizing conceptual tools to make sense of it all. Traditionally, counseling theories have been considered accurate reflections of the phenomena they purport to describe (Hansen, 2002; Speed, 1991). For example, pioneering cognitive theorists proposed that cognitive theory was a true mapping of the key elements of the psychic terrain (Mahoney, 1991). Likewise, psychoanalysis, humanism, and other core counseling orientations were originally offered as accurate depictions of human psychological processes (Corsini & Wedding, 2000). All traditional counseling theories, then, were conceived in a modernist epistemic context (Hansen, 2002); that is, there was an assumed correspondence between the theoretical map and the actual psychological territory. Particularly within the last decade, however, postmodernist assumptions have begun to influence the counseling profession (Hansen, 2004; Sexton, 1997). Unlike modernism, which assumes a knowable reality, postmodernism assumes that observers create realities (Hansen, 2004; Hayes & Oppenheim, 1997; Leary, 1994; Rosen, 1996; Ryan, 1999). In other words, so-called “reality” is a human construction, not something that can be objectively discovered. Instead of the modernist notion that the theory map reflects the territory, postmodernist assumptions imply that “it is the map that precedes the territory” (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 80). That is, theories determine what individuals see, not the other way around. A postmodernist epistemology, therefore, has profound implications for the role of theory in counseling practice. However, a consideration of the ways counseling theories are used and considered within a postmodernist epistemic context has received little attention in the counseling literature. The purpose of this article, then, is to thoroughly elaborate the implications of a postmodernist epistemology for the role of theory in counseling practice. I accomplish this by (a) contrasting modern and postmodern epistemologies, (b) discussing implications of postmodernist epistemology for counseling theories, and (c) drawing conclusions about the new role of theories for the counseling profession.