Power in the Helping Professions

Power in the Helping Professions is a work by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig (1971).

Core claims

• Guggenbuhl-Craig’s central move is not to critique bad practitioners but to reveal that the very structure of helping — the split into healer and patient — is an archetypal dissociation that destroys the healing it claims to perform.
• The book reframes the wounded healer not as a biographical credential (“I’ve suffered too”) but as an intrapsychic polarity that must remain alive within the helper; when the wound is projected entirely onto the patient, the helper becomes a power-wielder wearing the mask of compassion.
• By locating the shadow of the helping professions in their institutional architecture rather than in individual moral failure, Guggenbuhl-Craig anticipates and grounds Hillman’s later critique of the clinician as secular savior, making this slim volume the structural foundation for archetypal psychology’s entire critique of therapeutic practice.

Related questions

• How does Guggenbuhl-Craig’s structural analysis of the healer-patient split deepen or complicate von Franz’s account in Psychotherapy of the four stages of the analytic relationship, particularly her discussion of the power shadow in the first and second aspects?
• Hillman in The Myth of Analysis argues that the helping professions “must see sickness in the soul so that they can get in there and do their job” — how does this claim extend or radicalize Guggenbuhl-Craig’s diagnosis of power in the helping structure?
• Patricia Berry’s essay “The Shadow of Training / The Training of Shadow” in Echo’s Subtle Body references Guggenbuhl-Craig directly — what does Berry’s argument about institutional uniformity add to Guggenbuhl-Craig’s account of how the wounded healer archetype is systematically dismembered by professional credentialing?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/guggenbuhl-craig-power-helping-professions/

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