PHILOSOPHY AND A CAREER IN COUNSELING

William Angelette

William Angelett is a crisis counselor for Turning Point, Foundation in Ventura,

California. He received his BA, in Philosophy from California State University, Dominguez
Hills, continued his graduate study at The University of California Riverside and intends to
complete his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

I. INTRODUCTION

I have, for the last several years, been struggling with the problem of integrating

training in philosophy with everyday practical concerns. My initial efforts were in the

direction of curriculum development. I was asked to serve on the curriculum development

committee of Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, California. Here the challenge was

to find ways to tie together the many disciplines that had found their way into the Center,

while at the same time making sure not duplicate services provided by educational

institutions in the area. In addition, the committee was being called upon to structure the

program such a way as to expose the Center to the greatest number of funding sources.

A Humanities certificate program offering specializations in the various artistic

disciplines represented proved to be the best solution. The proposed certificate stressed an

interdisciplinary approach tied together by philosophy courses signed to address problems

peculiar to interdisciplinary studies. As a result of teaching these courses, I have become

particularly sensitive to the ubiquity of problems of inter-paradigmatic Hermeneutics in

American society.
 Several years ago I was fortunate enough to be awarded grants by the American

Philosophical Hermeneutics Foundation and Mid-Counties Mental Health Dept. of

Riverside County to develop a workshop to address communication problems arising from

differing world views of mental health professionals and their clients. I had mental health

professionals and their clients sit together to discuss their respective opinions about

perception. This proved to be an exceptionally revealing project. It was a difficult task to

address the real life concerns of schizophrenics and bi-polars who’s accounting of their

personal experience of non-veridical perception was literally a matter of life and death.

On the other side of the isle, I found I had to cut through the cocky self-assuredness

of the mental health professionals who found it difficult to believe that there could be more

than one right answer (that is, any answer that was not their own). In the end it was a matter

of finding a neutral vocabulary from which to launch a dialogue: no small feat. These two

projects led to what I now call "Ontic Therapy."

I take seriously Wittgenstein'

s proposal that Philosophy is a sort of illness from

which we must be cured. The symptoms are found on both sides of the conventional

therapeutic fence. And it is on the therapist side that I find the most resistance and denial.

Philosophy is greeted here with alternately a sort of distrust on the one hand and awe on the

other. Most therapists have at one time or another in their training taken a philosophy

course. Unfortunately, philosophy courses and philosophy instructors can vary widely both

in course content and style of instruction. The net result is that no two therapists share the
same concept of philosophy. So, a first step in making the adjustment to non-academically

related philosophy was to make clear to my co-workers and clients all the things I don'
t do.

I don'
t do Ethics. Sometimes I am expected to be the moral conscience of agencies

or clients with whom I work. Sometimes this is a warm expectation. Sometimes, it is

greeted with suspicion. It is now common to see philosophers as consultants to private and

public concerns in the role of Ethicist. But, I explicitly reject such a role for two reasons.

First, I'
m not comfortable with the role. Second, and most important, it would be difficult to

maintain the requisite connect with my clients on other fronts. I would always be guarding

against being perceived as judgmental.

I don'
t do Theology. Surprising and unique religious beliefs are common among

mental health clients. Sometimes they are weaved into elaborate delusions. Again, I have

no intent to underwrite or judge religious beliefs.

I don'
t do Political philosophy or Aesthetics or most any other traditional discipline

of philosophy. However, while I don'

t do Logic or e'extensive critical thinking, this does

begin to approach what I do as an ontic therapist.

II. WHAT IS ONTIC THERAPY?

Ontic Therapy is concerned with affecting change in the client'

s relation to the

environment by uncovering the function of certain background beliefs'relations to

experience. In particular, I concerned with those background beliefs that make up a

working theory of what constitutes existence. In addition, I look to uncover epistemological

problems.

A basic premise of Ontic Therapy is that ontic commitment provides an important

and sometimes critical component of background beliefs involved in perceptual and other

judgments. It is the job of the ontic therapist to uncover these commitments in a process of

concept clarifica1 and provide a vocabulary for the further discussion of the practical

import of these commitments.

Suppose, for instance, that a therapist is unable to make progress with a client that

he believes would benefit by positive self-affirmation. The client finds he is unable to make

such an affirmation and replies with statements like, "Yes, but it would be just hollow

words if I don'
t believe it.” Here Ontic Therapy acts as an adjunct to conventional therapist

by pursuing the client’s concept of belief and related concepts like knowledge, faith, and

truth. The discussion aims toward the discovery of the conceptual framework that under

girds the statement about beliefs. It measures the coherence of the framework using

standard philosophical techniques. Is the view uncovered reasonable? Does it, indeed, lead

to the sort of response that initiated the investigation or are alternative responses now

available for the client? If effective, the client will then be able to reengage the therapist in

a discussion that leads back to the attendant emotional states.

 A second basic premise of Ontic Therapy is that the process of concept clarification

is a dialogical and semantic adventure conducted at a level of discourse that is not

addressed by many conventional therapies. In the preceding example, some therapists are

liable to miss the conceptual problematic and might dismiss it as merely tangential

thinking, avoidance behavior, or the flight of ideas. They are neither prepared nor trained to

unfold the intricate relations and implications of these complex ideas. I hold that sharing in

this level of discourse, though outside the domain of many conventional therapies, is by

itself a valuable and important therapeutic activity. I measure its value by the extent to

which I am able to locate the dynamic links between philosophical issues and the specific

and current mental states of my clients.

III. DOING PHILOSOPHY WITH THE CLIENT

Philosophy can be an imposing and intimidating subject for even seasoned

philosophers. So, I use some well tested techniques to cut through the rhetoric. First, I

identify the subject matter by having each client provide their own definition of philosophy.

This usually provides a broad range of answers. I then attempt to unify our inquiry by

suggesting a working definition of philosophy as "The broadest possible questions that still

make sense," where "making sense" is delimited by our current and near future concerns.

Consequently, I tell my clients an appropriate response to any philosophical query is simply

"So!"
 At this point my clients now have several effective tools for furthering their inquiry.

The definition with which I provide them is an engine for discovering presuppositions.

Faced with any question, they can move the question into philosophical territory by

broadening its scope. They can put on the brakes by asking, “Does it still make sense to

ask such questions?” And they’ll know when they’re onto something when they can

respond to a retort of “So.”

In my work with mental health patients, a major and recurrent problem is the fear

and isolation created for clients by their inability to describe their sensory experiences in a

vocabulary that be responded to intelligibly and non-judgementally. Typically, confusion

arises for no other reason than that a therapist and a client disagree on the status of shared

experiences. How, for example, should the client and therapist talk about what a client

reports as "seeing bugs scratching at the window" when the status of the subject of that

visual experience is in doubt. Perhaps the therapist is confused. Is this the report of a

delusional state, a hallucination, an illusion or a veridical perception? The client, perhaps,

makes none of these distinctions and is frightened when the therapist refuses to

acknowledge what is for him "real bugs."

I am not so much concerned to find general answers to specific questions such as,

"Are there really bugs" or "Was it a real voice?'as with finding a suitable vocabulary for

sorting through the levels of ontic commitment and their consequences in the dialogue
between the client and therapist. With this in mind, we explore connections between

various theories of knowledge, truth, ontology, and methods.

In the interest of furthering communication and defusing unnecessary

disagreements, another elementary philosophical tool is provided by the question, "Why

would one want to believe that?” This question is an effective tool for exposing roots of

commitment to particular expressions used to describe the status of experiences.

One explicit goal of Ontic Therapy is to facilitate the therapist-client interaction.

But it would be misleading to suppose that this is the limit of Ontic Therapy. In fact,

sometimes Ontic Therapy increases the difficulty of communication between therapist and

client; for it is often the case that therapists hold cherished ontic commitments that impede

their own communication skills. Therapeutic techniques that rely on such commitments can

be crippled by incommensurable insights gained by clients. Thus, considerable care must be

taken to ensure that clients’ relations with their therapists are likely to benefit from the

process. Clients with whom I have had the most success are in general high functioning but

not necessarily of extraordinary or even great intelligence. Prospective clients with thought

disorders that prevent them from moving from one set of ideas to another are not usually

appropriate. The client selection process includes case review with the primary therapist,

and personal interviews.

 IV .CONCLUSION

My graduate and undergraduate study in philosophy covered a broad spectrum of

problems many of which continually recur in the application of Ontic Therapy. But,

graduate study did little to prepare me for the practical concerns of my work. It is only

through trial and error that I learn what doors to knock on to appropriately market my skills

in the carefully guarded domain of therapists, counselors, and social workers. One of the

most successful ways of gaining clients has been through word of mouth passed from

workshops and conferences. A well produced letter of introduction from a therapist,

together with promotional literature has also been productive. Another technique that I am

currently pursuing is publication in professional psychology journals. I am still finding new

avenues for the application of Ontic Therapy. The counseling field is still growing and

offers opportunities for other qualified philosophers to develop private practices in a similar

manner.

I find my work richly rewarding, exciting, and interesting. I recommend that

prospective philosophers wishing to pursue a career in close association with mental health

professionals seek a graduate school that is willing to work with the psychology department

to develop an interdisciplinary study that includes an internship in the field.