Comic and Tragic Sides of Career

The early development of the field of vocational psychology and, later, career psychology, was all about how careers play out successfully: how to choose a vocational that is right for oneself, how to implement a career plan, how to adjust to one's job and succeed in it, how to achieve everything possible within one's career trajectory, and, finally, how to retire with grace into a well deserved retirement. When Parsons, Kitson, Roe, Super, Holland, and others wrote about their research in vocational psychology, the general message was clearly one of implementing the plan and being a success. People generally entered the field of vocational psychology and its various applied manifestations because they were kindred spirits. They liked the idea of helping others to identify their strengths and interests and values, and then translating these qualities into a rational strategy to have a wonderful career.

Many early vocational psychologists wrote about both career development and the achievements of highly talented individuals; for example, Donald Super (Super & Bachrach, 1957) wrote on eminence and achievement in high-level science. Some of John Holland's earliest research examined the interest patterns of young adults identified through the National Merit program. But it was Anne Roe (see Roe, 1956) who in particular examined characteristics of successful adult workers across a variety of fields, including their life histories. Her most fruitful research in this regard were her studies of the development of leading scientists (Roe, 1953).

Although several psychologists continue to study the development of talent when things go "right," such individuals often do so from specialties beyond "vocational psychology". Some of the leading researchers of the development of successful careers include Dean Keith Simonton, Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg, Anders Ericsson, Mihaly Csikszenthmihalyi, and the late Benjamin Bloom.

If approaches based on this essentially optimistic and positive view of did not invariably result in career success for the client, it did not for these theorists signal a flaw in the underlying theory. It could be chalked up, perhaps, to poor implementation of the counseling intervention, or perhaps just bad luck. It seems likely that counselors drawn to this sort of counseling have an optimistic view of life, and like to see things work out toward happy endings. They appear to view the world through rose-colored glasses with uncorrected lenses.

The past two decades have witnessed a boom in research on aspects of vocational psychology dealing with the forces arrayed against the easy progress of the individual's career development. There has been concern with social justice (or rather injustice), prejudice and its effects, sexism, agism, racism, poverty (especially poverty), and recently weather (Hurricane Katrina). One sees efforts to organize counselor reaction on a massive scale to help individuals cope with storms, tsunamis, earthquakes, and so on. Because there is almost always a group somewhere in the midst of tragedy, such an orientation can easily consume all of one's time and interest. Although somewhat less in the crisis response vein, concerns with institutionalized prejudice, sexism, or heterosexism, or ageism, or poverty, and so on can still become the end-all for some career counselors, where all difficulties become translated into Telethon-friendly causes.

Traditionally, such concerns might have been grouped under the category of career "barriers" research, but the current preoccupation extends more widely and digs more deeply into the welter of things that can go wrong with and disrupt the otherwise successful unfolding of talent across a career. It would seem that counselors interested in the field as it stands today must be oriented to unpleasant outcomes despite the best laid plans and intentions. In short, they have an orientation toward vocational difficulties.

Much of this trend toward vocational failure dovetails with the increasing focus within Division 17 (Counseling Psychology) of the American Psychological Association (APA) on multiculturalism, discrimination, and social justice (or again, injustice). Many North American vocational psychologists--and practically all such vocational psychologists not primarily concerned with work adjustment--are also members of APA Division 17. And much of the current trend as regards vocational psychology may be traced to one counseling psychologist, Mary Sue Richardson, whose 1993 article "Work in People's Lives" served to refocus the attention of many of her colleagues--and a generation of graduate students--away from what can go right in a career, and towards what can go very wrong, perhaps doing away with career per se and leaving only work.

It strikes me that these twin preoccupations in the study of career development and career interventions bear similarities to the traditional aesthetic concepts of comedy and tragedy. As much has been made in recent postmodern theories of career development of the application of the metaphor of narrative or discourse to career development, it seems to me appropriate to extend this metaphor to considering those aesthetic qualities of narrative art traditionally associated with comic and tragic sensibilities.

For much of the last two decades, the pendulum in vocational psychology has been decidedly in the tragic direction. When in 1990 I interviewed for an assistant professor position in the counseling psychology program at Teachers College, Columbia University, and mentioned that I admired the research of Anne Roe (with so many of her subjects from the New York area), and that I anticipated that my research would focus on the intersection of career development of gifted education, my host dismissed my focus, saying that Columbia would be much more interested in a program concerned with homelessness and poverty and career development than one interested in careers of successful bright people. I remember thinking to myself that clearly a new and very different generation of New York vocational psychologists had replaced the likes of Donald Super (at Columbia) and Roe (at New York University). And this was a few years before Mary Sue Richardson's article; Richardson was on the NYU faculty. Thus, the major vocational psychology training programs in New York City had swung far over to tragic concerns.

Yet the current field has not been wholly given over to those concerned with career tragedy. (Or perhaps the tragic group of vocational psychologists is simply beginning to retire.) The influence of positive psychology on vocational psychology specifically and counseling psychology generally has been striking. The current issue of The Counseling Psychologist (January 2006) provides evidence that the pendulum may finally be swinging back towards comic aspects of career development. However, both the traditional comic approach as well as its old wine in new bottles updating through positive psychology fail, on their own, to support the development of effective individual strategies to cope with what I might call the evils of the workplace. Overly positive counselors gloss over too much in the way of real-world difficulties likely to be encountered by their clients. They too often come across as unrealistic, and may inadvertently place too much guilt on the heads of their clients, for whom failure may to too exclusively attributed to qualities such as effort or poor planning.

On the other extreme, excessive concern with career barriers and obstacles, coupled with failure to assist clients to link their strengths to imagined opportunity, creates self-fulfilling prophecies of thwarted dreams. One may wonder, after a point, "why bother?" Counselors that are too concerned with career barriers and obstacles may in advertently teach their students to avoid taking responsibility for their career difficulties. Instead, reasons for failure to reach one's vocational dreams arise from factors outside of the self.

I suggest that both the comic and tragic approaches to career development, if applied reasonably to the assistance of any individual seeking career assistance, will prove inadequate. Neither approach works at its best alone.

References

Richardson, M. S. (1993). Work in people's lives: A location for counseling psychologists. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 40, 425-433.

Roe, A. (1953). The making of a scientist. New York: Dodd, Mead.

Roe, A. (1956). The psychology of occupations. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Super, D. E., & Bachrach, P. B. (1957). Scientific careers and vocational development theory: A review, a critique and some recommendations. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.