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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Valuable book, July 12, 2001
Philosophical Counseling is a paradoxical new field that purports to help people with life's problems by engaging them in philosophical discussions. This is paradoxical in a couple of ways. On the one hand, providing assistance with life's difficulties was one of the roots of philosophy, so how can this be a new field? On the other hand, many people, especially many professional philosophers, consider philosophic problems in the year 2001 to be very far removed from the problems of life. Smug within their ivory towers, philosophers have long ago immunized themselves to the charge that their studies are of no earthly use. It brings a smile to outsiders, and causes a commotion among the philosophers, when a philosopher hangs out a shingle offering a useful service for a fee.One of the central issues that Raabe examines in his book is: How can that fee be ethically justified? In the process of examining this, Raabe provides a broad survey of the field of Philosophical Counseling. Since the field is new, there is little general consensus even as to it's definition. Many of its practitioners use widely differing definitions of Philosophical Counseling in their own work. Raabe offers a critical survey of these various conceptions. Strikingly, Raabe is critical of the "Beyond Method Method" of the movement's founder, Gerd Achenbach. One man with whom I discussed "Philosophical Counseling - Theory and Practice" said in mock horror, "This is about counseling, not philosophy!" It is about counseling, explicitly and didactically so; the book could serve as an introductory text on counseling, I think. But the book is about philosophy too, for one of Philosophical Counseling's main ideas is that many of the stresses and upsets that people feel grow out of philosophical mistakes or misconceptions. Philosophical Counseling has a very broad overlap with psychological counseling. Many methods of psychological counseling, such as Cognitive Therapy and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, deal extensively with philosophic ideas in their practice. Part of Raabe's task is to find something that would in fact distinguish Philosophical Counseling from other already well established forms of counseling, and also to find a task that Philosophical Counseling can perform better than psychological counseling. Very broadly, the divide that Raabe finds is the one between therapy and education. Sometimes something is wrong with us; our leg is broken, we're attacked by germs, chemical structures in our brains are upset - these are all clearly medical problems. At other times, we just don't understand right, or we just don't know how to do something; we get wet feet because we don't know the tide is rising, we can't cross the water because we can't find the bridge. These are clearly educational problems. One might imagine a boundary between medicine and education; a place where the influence of the structure of the body blends with the influence of ideas to determine things like our various capabilities, aptitudes and attitudes, as well as our experience of happiness with our existence. One side of that boundary is the terrain of the psychologist, the other side of that boundary is the terrain of the philosopher. I'm not a philosopher or a counselor, but I found Raabe's book both an interesting read and a wealth of information. I'm not an insider to the growing Philosophical Counseling movement, but I understand that the challenges that Raabe has raised are controversial in many quarters. But as Raabe says, unless the movement can properly and ethically establish just what it's practice is, it will be threatened by charlatans.
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