CHAPTER 17
Counseling Psychology
DAVID B. BAKER
357THE MODERN AGE 357
THE GUIDANCE MOVEMENTS 358
A Plan for Guidance 358
Guidance in Education and Psychology 358
THE RISE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING 359
WAR AND THE TRAINING OF PSYCHOLOGISTS 360
AN IDENTITY FOR COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY 361
Diversification 362
The Question of Identity 362
Moving Ahead 363
SUMMARY 363
REFERENCES 364Beginnings, for the most part, tend to be arbitrary. Whether
chosen for historical precision, maintenance of myth, conve-
nience, or necessity, beginnings tell us something of how we
want our story to be told. For the purposes of this chapter, the
genesis of counseling psychology is viewed through the con-
text of the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. For
purposes of convenience the chapter will start at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century; the reader is asked to consider
that the substantive story of the history of counseling psy-
chology is a story of the twentieth century.
THE MODERN AGE
America in 1900 was embracing the modern. There was no
longer a frontier but rather a growing industrial base that
drove the economy. The technology of travel, the making of
fuel from oil, and the building of structures from steel trans-
formed the continent and the culture. The national industrial
machine cleared a path east and west, north and south, trans-
forming native lands and displacing and frequently extermi-
nating wildlife and native peoples.
The culture of change brought many to the new urban cen-
ters of the industrial Northeast and Midwest. City life amazed
with a dizzying array of new technologies, including tele-
phones, radios, movies, electricity, and automobiles. Most
believed these would improve individual lives and the collec-
tive good. Information, goods and services, and people could
move more rapidly, and processes could be mechanized.
Progress was synonymous with precision and efficiency, a
belief that became associated with the Progressive political
movement (Mann, 1975; Watts, 1994).
Achieving precision meant avoiding waste, a concept that
could be applied to products as well as people. In industry,
efficiency was embodied in the work of Frederick Taylor,
whose scientific study of jobs was designed to streamline
human performance and increase production. Taylor believed
his system would benefit management and the worker. The
better-trained worker was likely to be more productive, thus
increasing the possibility of promotion and improved wages.
Gains in productivity would translate into greater profit for
management, and at the end of the cycle, the consumer would
benefit from a better and more cost-efficient product (Taylor,
1911).
Alongside industrial efficiency was a belief in the per-
fectibility of the individual and society. The search for per-
fectibility began with the young, and America, a young nation
itself, became increasingly concerned with the promise of
youth as the hope of the nation. Child saving, as it came to
be known (Levine & Levine, 1992), was a movement that
worked to protect children from the ravages of poverty, abuse,
and neglect. The impulse toward child saving propelled the
beginnings of the vocational guidance movement, a major
precursor to the development of counseling psychology.
The city, while offering modern conveniences, was also
a place of wretched poverty and deplorable conditions.
Millions who sought refuge in America could find work in
the industrial city, although it was low paying, low skilled,
and frequently dangerous. Immigrants new to the culture and
the language could easily be exploited, and this applied to all