Being All Things to All People Just Doesn't Cut It

Reviews the book, Foundations of Ethical Counseling by Donald Biggs and Donald Blocher (1987). This book exemplifies the malaise of counseling/counseling psychology, two (or one?) disciplines often viewing themselves as being all things to all people, so broad and imprecise as to loose their defining qualities. Despite stating in their preface that this book refers both to counseling and to counseling psychology, the authors never define these areas and seem to use them interchangeably. The situation only becomes more confusing when the term clinician gets thrown in also. This book is clearly deficient in the very important intersection between the law and professional ethics. In sum, this is not a useful book for psychologists and I would question whether it has general usage for counselors. Parts of the book are misleading and stale; the goal and the audience of the book are too vague and too broad for the book to have usefulness in the field. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)