Fifty-Five Books That Shaped Rehabilitation Counseling

As a science-based discipline, rehabilitation counseling does not take kindly to inexplicable events, but one happened to me. About 20 years ago, I received an unsolicited package in the mail, containing a faded green paper-covered booklet with three words printed on the cover: Rehabilitation Counselor Preparation. Tucked inside the cover was the bottom half of a standard government-issue transmission slip on which was written, “This is a classic. Guard it. It originally belonged to Corbett Reedy—who served as a Region III Commissioner long ago.” In the FROM box, it was signed “D. Columbus.” Although I knew Dorothy Columbus was on the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) staff, I had never met her and do not recall having heard from her before or since this instance. As the TO box was missing from the transmission slip, I wondered if this package was really meant for me and what I was supposed to do with it, beside “Guard it.” Finally, I think that I may have figured out the task that she was implicitly setting for me. That task is to be found in the title of the booklet she sent me, to chronicle the books that most cogently shaped the field of rehabilitation counseling over the field’s first half century, that is, its formative years. As this year marks my 55th year as a rehabilitation counselor educator, starting in 1966 at Illinois Institute of Technology and ending up, currently, at University of Massachusetts Boston, I set that number for the books I would include. Probably this list says more about me than about the field, but having been set this task, I am obliged to see it through as best I can.

Like Venus in Greco-Roman mythology, rehabilitation counseling emerged at birth (in the 1954 Vocational Rehabilitation Act Amendments) as a fully formed adult. Both these creation stories include prenatal influences and eventful postnatal histories. For rehab, those formative influences and subsequent history can be largely traced through the seminal books that initiated or documented significant developments in the field. A prototype for these books (and the first concerned with rehab counselor preparation) was Corbett Reedy’s copy of Hall and Warren (1956). A limitation of this approach is that it omits authors of equally seminal journal articles or book chapters who did not produce any qualifying books (e.g., Harlan Hahn). Nevertheless, it offers a perspective, albeit a subjective one, that seemed worth trying.

In assembling this list, I was guided by several ground rules. First, with one amazingly prophetic exception (Davis, 1943), all books on disability and rehabilitation had to be published between 1953 and 2006, that is, from the start of the legislative process that produced Public Law 565 (the 1954 Vocational Rehabilitation Act Amendments, in which the term rehabilitation counselor was legislatively formalized), until 15 years ago, to permit time for historic perspective before assessing more recent books’ impact. Second, no individual could be listed as author or editor more than twice. The list consists of three broad categories: (a) underlying theories and principles of human behavior, vocations, and counseling; (b) disability; and (c) rehabilitation. Books in each subcategory are listed in chronological order, to reflect the evolution of the field. Finally, if a book on disability or rehabilitation had multiple editions, the first and last one before the 2006 cutoff date were cited. For underlying theory books, only the first edition in English is cited. The underlying theory category intentionally omits the traditional “Greats” of behavioral science (e.g., Freud, Bandura, Frank Parsons) and limits itself to those who directly addressed issues of disability or rehabilitation and whose ideas shaped the developing field. My editorial comments on particular books are added parenthetically.