Care vs. Cure

Caring for the Soul in Counselling:
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Care vs. Cure

“The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is 'loss of soul.’”
- Thomas Moore

Background of the Psychology Field: Cure Orientation
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Much of the landscape of the Western mental health care system is generally aligned with the Western medical system (Ottens and Klein, 2005). Psychotherapy, in its attempts to be “taken seriously,” generally aligns itself with the scientific worldview that dominates the medical model (Kochunas, 1997). Many writers on the subject feel that the psychotherapy field has lost its soul due to this—in particular, due to an emphasis on the randomized control trials, audit culture, empirical research, and pharmacology that dominate the Western medical model (eg. Elkins, 1995; House, 2012; Ottens & Klein, 2005). Much of the psychology world, like the medical world, operates from a ‘diagnosis’ or ‘disease’ framework, and employs control, cure, and rationality as treatment (Ottens and Klein, 2005).

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