The choice of therapy as late-life career change: an adventure in choice and change
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- Title
- The choice of therapy as late-life career change: an adventure in choice and change
- Creator
- Patricia. S. Ochs
- Date
- 2013
- Abstract
- This paper is an attempt to view the experience of the choice of therapy as a late life career, both from my own perspective and from research participants who had also chosen therapy. In this paper, the treatment of life stage and choice as concepts evolved from an examination of Eriksonian categorizations that are based on developmental stages and of an abstracted and somewhat deterministic Jungian perspective, to a preference for the more subjective, dynamic realm influenced and inspired by Kierkegaard. This process entailed a wide review of available literature, a choice of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis as a methodological approach and an engagement with the research participants for this study whose accounts depict their own notions of life stage and a process of choosing therapy. It was a step-by-step process only in retrospect, appearing logical only after the process was established on paper. The process of choice and change for myself and the research participants tended to go back and forth from one to another in a rather ragged and multifaceted process, with limits and endings actually beginning the cycle, and with searching, leaps of faith, discovery, shifting to new identities all overlapping or circling back and relating themselves to a striving for a sense of self attunement and quality of choice. What resonated the most within the specific choice of therapy age and sheer amount of life experience became less important as the research deepened was the Kierkegaardian sense of an ethical realm, with spheres of existence that are qualitative, subjective, dynamic. The spheres include doubts, fears, uncertainty and ultimately faith as the fabric of choice and change. They are pertinent not only to the choice of therapy, but also to the very nature of the work therapists do as they aid clients engaging with 5 their own processes. They work to allow for the emergence of subjective truths over externally accepted ones, for truths that are ongoing and question always."
- Subject
- Career changes|Psychotherapy--Practice||
- Psychotherapy and Counselling
- Extent
- 98 pages
- Format
- Publisher
- Regent's University London
- degree
- MA in Psychotherapy and Counselling
- Language
- English
- Date Issued
- 2013
- Type
- Thesis & Dissertation
- Rights Holder
- Regent's University London & Patricia. S. Ochs
- Item sets
- Theses or Dissertation