A philosophical hermeneutic inquiry into mid-career counselling professionals’ experience of wisdom in practice

This research explores how mid-career counselling professionals (counsellors, psychotherapists and psychologists) experienced wisdom in their practice with clients. Practice wisdom typically emerges as practitioners’ knowledge and experience becomes more complex and integrated. A philosophical hermeneutic inquiry utilising a web-survey, one-to-one interviews and focus-groups was conducted. Wisdom was seen as relevant and important to, and was apparent in, the practices of counselling professionals with an average of 15 years of clinical experience, rendering wisdom relevant to a large group of counselling professionals. Wisdom in counselling and psychotherapy practice might be viewed as a pan-theoretical, bi-directional, embodied process that is ontologically based.