The Fallacy of the ‘Core Profession’

One of the most insidious fallacies about psychotherapy is that it is based on certain ‘core professions’, and that therefore people should qualify in one of these professions before they can receive further training as psychotherapists.

The three professions usually mentioned in this context are psychology, medicine and social work. It seems to me that there are serious objections to all of them. Medicine trains people to treat the person like a complicated machine, and social work is too closely tied in with issues of social control. But psychology is the one with which I am most familiar, so I will leave it to others to make the corresponding arguments in those areas.

There is of course a certain superficial neatness about the idea of a core profession. If it could be established that there was a particularly suitable preparation offered by an existing profession (or three), this might overcome the obvious objection that such an approach is extremely narrow.

Let us therefore look closely at the preparation given by psychology as taught in existing degree courses at prestigious universities.

The first thing we notice about academic psychology is that it aspires to scientific objectivity. It was a triumph of the British Psychological Association that psychology was in recent years admitted to the pantheon of true sciences in the international community of scientists.

Now the whole point of scientific objectivity, as taught in academia, is that it enables the scientist to stand well back from the phenomena being studied, and not allow subjectivity to spoil the work. The apotheosis of this approach is the controlled experiment where we know what the result means because we have strict control over all the elements involved.

All other methods of studying phenomena are regarded as less valuable than this. Only the controlled experiment gives genuine knowledge because it is only the controlled experiment which eliminates alternative explanations of the phenomenon being studie