You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is difficult to know what to say about this book. Having read it through from the beginning to the end, I feel I now want to start at the end and read it backwards to the beginning. Perhaps this is largely because, as the author puts it, ‘This is not a text book on counselling, but more a case history of myself as a counsellor during the difficult period of pioneering.’ Her work and her life are interwoven although, as she says in the last section, not entirely, and one wants to read the beginning in the light of her developments at the end.
Regarding her life task, she says, ‘Everything that happened, both positive and negative, seems to have been used to urge me along’, as happens to people who are ‘willing to be lived’. But this is not to underestimate the rôle of her conscious ego in discriminating and making decisions, and in this book she shows herself clearly capable of both.
She starts with her childhood and adolescence, and her need to reconcile inside herself her introverted, impecunious, clergyman father with her extrovert, dominating, musical mother. She took her father's assumption that it was her duty never to marry but to look after her mother after he died—‘Your father should be sufficient for you’—as ‘a normal and acceptable commitment’. Having initially been under the sway of her musical mother, she was ‘broken’ by the constant bullying of her sadistic music teacher which she felt ruthlessly cut the bond and she gave up music to take up academic work—her father's line of country.
The chapters that follow contain alternating accounts of her pioneering work and the difficulties encountered in setting up a counselling service in the Education Department of the University College of Leicester; and on the other hand papers she gave during the various stages of this work to different organisations defining and explaining the needs, work and aims of a counselling service.
In 1967, to her great satisfaction, there was a merger between the counselling servic