Published 2022-05-12
Keywords
- Counselling room; psychological counselling; psychotherapy; environmental psychology; clinical psychology.
How to Cite
Copyright (c) 2022 Pietro Mosca, Vincenzo Paolo Senese, Daniela Cantone
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The counselling room is the physical space in which counseling or psychotherapy service takes place. Despite it is necessary to provide any psychological support or care service, this topic has not been widely discussed in psychological research. First studies about the counselling room are analytic: Freud describes the analysis room by defining the role that the presence and position of the analytical couch plays in analytic practice. Even in child psychoanalysis, the room will be described in detail as an element that allows children to produce material for analysis.
The counselling room has been the subject of experimental and health psychology works. With this in mind, we could identify some thematic cores to which particular attention has been paid, specifically the effects that characteristics of the counselling room exert on communication between occupants, and on the perceptions and feelings of users and psychologists have been investigated. Furthermore, more recent works have attempted to define the ideal characteristics for counselling room. These works have shown an evolution in involved methodologies, revealing a greater awareness in research of the holistic effects of this space on the occupants.
We believe that knowing the effects that environmental variables have on the counselling or psychotherapy process is extremely useful both in public and private contexts, to provide adequate psychological services.
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