"Counseling" or "psychotherapy"?
The terms are used more or less interchangeably and both can have unfortunate and misleading implications. The root "therapy", for instance, is often associated with medical processes, conjuring up images of disease or injury. Counseling (to me, at any rate) implies at least some advice-giving from an expert. The process we are attempting to name addresses the normal challenges of the essential human condition and generally does not involve curing a disease or the giving/taking of advice.
So, alas, I'm not really comfortable with any word to describe my own profession.
Since psychotherapy has a richer tradition in the literature and most of the writers I admire identify themselves as psychotherapists, I usually use that term.
More thoughts to come...
Thoughts
David K. Donlon, LCSW
Psychotherapy
