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Key Qualities in a Good Counsellor, Psychologist or Therapist

1. Compassionate, kind and caring

2. Empathic and understanding

3. Accepting and non-judgmental

4. Emotionally stable and non-reactive

5. Predictable, reliable and dependable

6. Sensitive and patient (allows the client to set the pace of counselling)

7. Introspective and self-aware

8. Flexible and open-minded

9. Excellent communication and interpersonal skills

10. Ethical in their personal and professional lives.

“Language, rather than being merely descriptive, is ultimately constitutive of our sense of self. If we allow them to be, our day-to-day verbal slips, mishearings and bungled actions can be a welcome clue to the mysterious, flawed, contradictory, crazed idiosyncrasies of our own character and history. They can challenge and change us. In locating a ‘something more’ inside us, we keep desire alive, rather than mortified in the illusion that we could ever be masters of ourselves and our image.”

—Jay Watts – Freudian slips

“Meanwhile the blacks, and the young men who must die in wars, and the "irrelevant" humanities majors on campuses, and more and more women, and those who accept themselves as homosexual, will become angrier and angrier. Their actions will become increasingly desperate. Their violence will, paradoxically, offer comfort to the Establishment because they can be isolated and labeled as "crazies." And the validity of their critique and intent of their social vision will for the moment be lost and discredited. Therefore psychoanalysts must not only come to understand the ways in which the structure of their profession perpetuates the inequalities of the status quo, but also resist the strong pull to become the unwitting handmaidens to the forces of repression and exploitation by allowing themselves and their theory to be used, with an aura of scientific respectability, to quiet those youth who scream out that there is something terrible going on in this country, and set out to change it.”

—Radical and Militant Youth: A Study of Columbia Undergraduates. Robert S. Liebert.

“Fantasy is not the opposite of reality: it is what plugs the void in our being so that the set of fictions we call reality are able to emerge. The Real is rather the primordial wound we incurred by our fall from the pre-Oedipal Eden, the gash in our being where we were torn loose from Nature, and from which desire flows unstaunchably. Though we repress this trauma, it persists within us as the hard core of the self. Something is missing inside us which makes us what we are, a muteness which resists being signified but which shows up negatively as the outer limits of our discourse, the point at which our representations crumble and fail.”

—Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others. 

“An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility [and] distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton"..."Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself”

— Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)
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