Page 132 - DEDU502_GUIDANCE_AND_COUNSELING_ENGLISH

Guidance and Counseling

Notes The goal of counseling is to help individuals overcome their immediate problems and also to
equip them to meet future problems. Rapid social change brought about, by industrialization
and urbanization has led to several perplexing problems. The pace of this change is ever on the
increase, thus making adjustment a continuous process of grappling with new situations.
Counseling, to be meaningful, has to be specific for each client since it involves his unique
problems and expectations. The goals of counseling may be described as immediate, long-range,
and process goals. A statement of goals is not only important but also necessary, for it provides
a sense of direction and purpose. Additionally, it is necessary for a meaningful evaluation of the
usefulness of it. It is only in terms of the defined goals that it is possible to judge the meaningfulness
or otherwise of any activity, including counseling. It establishes a congruency between what is
demanded or sought and what is possible or practical.
Specific counseling goals are unique to each client and involve a consideration of the client’s
expectations as well as the environmental aspects. Apart from the specific goals there are, however,
two categories of goals which are common to most counseling situations. These are identified as
long-range and process goals. The latter have great significance. They shape the counsellee and
counselors’ inter-relations and behaviour. The process goals comprise facilitating procedures for
enhancing the effectiveness of counseling. The long-range goals are those that reflect the counselor’s
philosophy of life and could be stated as :
1. To help the counsellee become self-actualizing.
2. To help the counsellee attain self-realization.
3. To help the counsellee become a fully-functioning person.
The immediate goals of counseling refer to the problems for which the client is seeking solutions,
here and now. The client fails to utilize his capacities fully and efficiently and, therefore, is
unable to function efficiently. The counsellee could be helped to gain fuller self-understanding
through self-exploration and to appreciate his strengths and weaknesses. The counselor could
provide necessary information but information, however exhaustive, may not be useful to the
client unless he has an integrative understanding of himself vis-a-vis his personal resources and
environmental constraints and resources.
The long-range and immediate goals are not unrelated. There is an inter-relation between, them
as both depend on the process goals for their realization. The process goals are the basic Counseling
dimensions which are essential conditions for counceling to take place. They comprise empathic
understanding, warmth and friendliness which provide for inter-personal exploration which, in
turn, helps the client in his self-exploration and self-understanding and eventually lead to the
long-range goals, namely, self-actualization, self-realization and self-enhancement. The client
may have certain inhibiting and self-destructive patterns of behaviour which are eliminated and
overcome to enable the individual become a fully-functioning person.
Discussing the goals of counseling, Parloff (1961) distinguishes between immediate and ultimate
goals. According to him, the former refers to the steps and stages in the counseling process which
lead to the realization of the ultimate goals. Patterson (1970) suggests a third level of goals, namely,
intermediate goals, in addition to mediating and ultimate goals. Ultimate goals refer to the broad
and general long-term outcomes like positive mental health. For example, competence in driving,
as a goal, cannot be viewed as an ultimate goal. Psychological effectiveness appears to be a related
concept. When the goals of counseling are stated as ‘self-actualization’, ‘self-realization’, ‘self-
enhancement’, etc., it is often difficult to find a meaningful and suitable criterion to evaluate the
achievement or otherwise of the goals. These concepts appear to be meaningful as ultimate goals.
Self-actualization and the like refer to the general goal of life. Since life is not static, self-actualization
as a goal of life cannot be static—it is a continuous process.
Goldstein (1939) states that an organism is governed by a tendency to actualize as much as
possible its individual capacities, its nature in the world. In the words of Rogers (1951), “the

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