HELPING RELATIONSHIPS Basic Concepts for the Helping Professions

From the Preface:

This book was written for people entering or already engaged in some form of the helping professions. It attempts to answer these questions: "What ideas about human behavior have special value for understanding the helping relationship?" "What do these imply for effective practice in the helping professions?" This is not a psychology book in the usual sense of expounding concepts and showing how they are supported by logic and research. Instead, this book begins with principles of behavior already widely accepted among humanistically oriented psychologists and examines what such concepts mean for persons who work in the varied helping professions. In addition to the very old professions such as medicine, teaching, and the clergy, these include counselors, school psychologists, visiting teachers, social workers, nurses, play therapists, and, most recently a whole constellation of professions concerned with helping people in basic encounter, sensitivity training, and T-groups.

Each of the helping professions has emerged in response to practical human needs. Each has its own philosophy, techniques, and training procedures that are strongly defended by its adherents. Fundamentally, these professions are all alike in their basic aim - the optimum development of human beings. To achieve this goal, effective helpers need to be guided by the best we know of the dynamic of human behavior offered by the science of psychology.