Re-evaluation Counseling - History

History

Jackins is said to have developed Re-evaluation Counseling after observing a troubled friend change through being patiently listened to while he cried. Curious about the effect of this crying, he worked with others to develop a method of peer counseling based on the recollection of psychological traumas (or "hurts") accompanied by various types of emotional catharsis (or "discharge"). He came to believe that discharge led to clear thinking (or "re-evaluation"). He held that repeated discharge through co-counseling, in which two people counsel one another in turn, could remove the accumulated effects of past hurts and bring about re-evaluation, a process called "re-emergence". The objective of RC became the dissemination of this method of creating rational thinking. Re-evaluation Counseling later put more emphasis on the removal of "oppression", which it considers to lie at the root of many of the world's problems.

Jackins systematized re-evaluation counseling during the 1950s and 1960s. From the late 1960s, Jackins spread RC beyond Seattle by means of workshops, and in the mid-1970s traveled outside the US, teaching in the UK, Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. RC is now practiced in most countries.

After Jackins' death in 1999, the leadership passed to his son, Tim Jackins.

Read more about this topic:  Re-evaluation Counseling

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”
    —Imre Lakatos (1922–1974)

    “We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
    —Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)

    “The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
    —Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)