1

In Search of Value and Meaning1 (1979)

The word ‘counsellor’ is open to such misunderstanding that I feel it necessary at the outset to quote from the literature of my own professional association so that the word can be more adequately understood in its educational context:

Clients consult a counsellor because they are in difficulties and hope that by discussing their concerns with the counsellor they will gain fresh insights and move towards a more creative response to their problems. The professionally trained counsellor is seldom an advice giver … Instead he will try to assist a person to see his own situation more clearly and then provide the opportunity for looking at ways of behaving differently or of arriving at decisions … The client himself is the primary judge of what is or what is not an appropriate concern to take to a counsellor. Counsellors should be prepared and equipped to respond to a wide range of personal, emotional, social and educational difficulties … All counsellors observe a code of professional confidentiality and information is not divulged to others unless the client gives specific permission for this to occur. Often a single interview with a counsellor may be enough to point the way forward. On the other hand, where someone is experiencing more serious difficulties it is possible for him, if he so wishes, to maintain contact with a counsellor for longer periods of time, in which case counselling may continue over many sessions. (Association for Student Counselling, 1977)

This, then, is the nature of the work in which I have been engaged for a decade and during that time I have met with increasing frequency the intelligent man or woman who can find no value or purpose in living. For me such an encounter constitutes a challenge and a threat, for each time it happens I am faced again by the task of re-examining the purpose of my own life and the nature of my own beliefs. In short, it calls for the kind of faith which risks its own extinction by offering intimate companionship to pointlessness and absurdity.

Many years ago now, a student I knew uttered words which I have never forgotten: ‘I feel I am adrift on a limitless ocean of relativity.’ He was not a person who was overtly struggling – on the contrary he was sociable and articulate, he had friends of both sexes and he was an above-average student in academic performance – in short he possessed many of the distinctive features of the successful young man.

More recently Penelope, a young woman of 23, entered my office and collapsed on the floor after indicating that she had taken a mild overdose – a mixture of her mother’s and her grandmother’s sleeping tablets. It was only later that I discovered that, by putting herself to sleep in this way, she had successfully avoided a consultation with her GP with whom she was to have discussed contraception at the insistent request of her boyfriend who wished her to go on the Pill.

An American therapist, Clark Moustakas, in his recent book Creative Life(1977) tells of Don, an adolescent who during the course of therapy changed from an inhibited, restricted individual to an outgoing, socially effective person. His parents and teachers regarded the change as a blessing, but Moustakas himself became alarmed when Don began to boast about his conquests and achievements over peers to whom he had once felt distinctly inferior. He was troubled even further when Don told him gleefully of the strategies by which his mother was twisting money out of an insurance company with the help of lawyers and accountants who were only too happy to connive at covert dishonesty. When therapy ended – abruptly and prematurely in Moustakas’s eyes – it was deemed highly successful by Don’s parents in that the problems which had brought the boy to the clinic were now resolved. Moustakas himself was conscious of letting loose on the world a young man who had learned to be assertive and autonomous, but who remained totally divorced from any knowledge of the moral core of his being.

These three people were confronting or failing to confront the task that constitutes the individual’s stiffest challenge in his search for identity – the task of establishing value and meaning or, as I should prefer to define it, of being rooted in the knowledge of what is good and just and true. Moustakas puts it well: ‘Being free to be is the right of every human being. Freedom is necessary to maintain one’s humanity; the denial of freedom is equivalent to giving up an essential human characteristic. Freedom within the framework of ethical and moral value means not simply the will to choose but choice growing out of a knowledge of the good and a willingness to choose the good’ (Moustakas, 1977, p.75).

It is important to say more about this sense of moral and ethical value for it is not the same as a value system.The latter refers to beliefs, hopes, expectations, expressed preferences which can offer direction to a person and influence his or her decisions and choices. Such a system may indeed be grounded in the sense of moral and ethical value, but it need not be. Hitler had a value system. The sense of value to which I refer is the dimension of the self which unites and integrates. Without it there can be no wholeness. With it there is a commitment to life and to the enrichment of life in its highest forms. With it, too, there is meaning. It is the highest sense of identity and it is the most crucial of all in the development of the individual and in the evolution of a civilisation. Furthermore, I believe it to be much neglected in our society. Neither in education nor in counselling do I see it as a primary concern, let alone the central force. And so it is that much that happens in education and in counselling is destitute of enduring value and that even freedom, knowledge and autonomy are sometimes bereft of meaning. Shortly before he died, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow gave an interview to Professor Willard Frick and at one point, with great emotion, he cast an ominous shadow over the theory of human needs which he had himself so painstakingly evolved.

I’d always assumed … that if you cleared away the rubbish and the neurosis and the garbage and so on, then the person would blossom out, that he’d find his own way. I find especially with young people that it just ain’t so sometimes. You get people who are in the … beautiful … ­need-gratifying situation and yet get kind of a value pathology. That is, it’s possible to be loved and respected, etc., and, even so, to feel cynical and materialistic, and to feel there’s nothing worth working for … Especially in younger rather than older people you can see this. It’s sort of a loss of nerve, and I think we’re at this point where the traditional culture has broken down altogether, and for many people they just feel, ‘My God, there’s nothing’. (Frick, 1971, p.27)

In the face of such an existential vacuum – and how immediately recognisable it is to any counsellor working in higher education – it becomes clear that we cannot be content with education which focuses primarily on knowledge, skill and professional competence, nor can we place trust in a therapeutic process which is concerned primarily with change towards self-confidence, social effectiveness and realness in expression. Maslow himself had indicated the answer to his own dismay when a decade before he had insisted that education and therapy reach into the moral realm and enable the individual to encounter the inner experience of value from which comes the will and the strength to become more honest, good, just and beautiful.

It is perhaps hardly surprising that teachers are slow to engage in a battle for moral truth and that counsellors shy away from encountering their clients in the area of moral and ethical value. The spectre of meaninglessness haunts this battlefield and the fear of drowning in the limitless ocean of relativity is never far distant. But what, after all, is the point of teaching anything or counselling anyone if there is no moral value and thus no meaning to life? What kind of counselling success is it if my client feels loved and autonomous and utterly futile? What kind of satisfaction is it for a teacher when his student gets a first-class degree but sees no point either in his success or in his life ahead? What more natural, then, that counsellors and teachers alike should remain indifferent to the moral realm in order to cherish a false sense of accomplishment? If I do not seek to enter the world of my client’s futility or of my student’s pointlessness, I can congratulate myself on my effective performance – see how independent he is after my counselling, or what a brilliant examination script he has produced after my teaching!

The ocean of relativity was partly induced by my student’s university education. The development of a critical, enquiring mind has often been acknowledged as the primary aim of higher education and such an aim has a long and honourable history. Students are required to examine their basic assumptions and to reject them if they do not stand the test of rigorous intellectual scrutiny. There is no doubt that, through such a process, many individuals are delivered from ignorance and prejudice and from false and lazy thinking. However, the very same individuals can be confronted simultaneously by a world where everything seems to depend on a point of view and where there are no longer any certainties. Such apparent relativity can often be the herald of meaninglessness. In a...