Psychotherapy Training and Ethics: A Liberatory Response to Ideology for the Clinic and the Classroom

The discipline of counselling psychology sits at a contentious point. On the one hand, mental health counselling is increasingly considered to be a matter of medicine, falling under the purview of medical, insurance, and other oversight bodies. Simultaneously, psychologists contend with the widespread recognition of counselling psychologists' longstanding participation in the subjugation of marginalized groups. Prominent critiques from historical, liberation, and decolonial psychologists have linked the medicalization and standardization of psychology as a decontextualized science with said oppression of marginalized groups. As such, pressures to standardize counselling contest with calls for psychologists to be responsive to context, diversity, and the political implications of their practice. These pressures converge on the training and regulation standards of new therapists. This manuscript-based thesis is comprised of two stand-alone yet interrelated manuscripts. In the first manuscript (chapter two), I demonstrate how these pressures relate to the question of ethics for psychotherapy. Employing the critical hermeneutic philosophy of Miranda Fricker and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, I problematize ‘checkbox’ approaches to ethics. Specifically, I contest the prevalent notion that ‘justice’ and ‘the good’ of therapy is therapy with all the ‘injustice’ removed. In the second manuscript (chapter three), I take an autoethnographic approach to illustrate how these historical and political pressures emerged in my own training. Employing a critical hermeneutic lens, I demonstrate how these tensions are representative of broader and often insidious ideologies that impede the discipline’s turn to social justice. In keeping with critical hermeneutics, I also draw from liberation psychology, wherein I offer dialogical pedagogical approaches that may better afford a coherent turn to social justice.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science (MSc)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education Graduate Program – Educational Psychology

Grantor

Werklund School of Education

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Strand, Dawson Tolleiv

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lacerda-Vandenborn, Elisa

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Lacerda-Vandenborn, Elisa
• Pape, Kathleen
• Zhao, Xu
• Cresswell, Jim
• Kassan, Anusha

• Counselling Psychology
• Ethics for Counselling Psychology
• Critical Hermeneutics
• Ideology
• Theories of Psychotherapy
• Psychotherapy Training

Statement dc:rights

• Unless otherwise indicated, this material is protected by copyright and has been made available with authorization from the copyright owner. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/48511

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ucalgary.scholaris.ca:1880/120921