Counselling e Psicologia Clinica

Our country has recently seen a rapid increase of interest in counseling. Before giving answers to fundamental questions about its nature and basic methodological aspects, various forms of counseling are offered to the public, avoiding to define the type of treatment performed and resuming traditions and operational models that have been imposed and developed within cultural contexts and social realities very different from our ones. At the same time, through a lot of training courses carried out in different ways and at different levels, we implicitly authorize some people to call themselves "counselors" or "experts in counseling" and create the need to claim the acknowledgment of counseling as a profession. In this situation it is of absolute importance that clinical psychology deal in depth with this argument, particularly into the Universities as institutional structures appointed to research and training. Developing the debate and confrontation, it is necessary to promote a process of sharing that clear lines of thought and dictate training criteria and standards of treatment that reflect the actual needs and the values system of our specific cultural context. This is not to oppose a process of professional development that responds to a collective need for a precise and emerging social demand, but rather to protect the quality of services offered and to ensure a precise definition of different professional roles.