In 1910, Sigmund Freud set out to legitimize and standardize psychoanalysis. In response to what he called “Wild Analysis”, he founded the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), drew rigid theoretical boundaries, and demanded strict methodological loyalty from his peers.
If you didn’t fit his clinical parameters, specifically his insistence on the sexual origins of neurosis, you were out.
The goal was to make the work uniform, clinically controlled, and scientifically unassailable. His institution existed to police the boundaries and enforce compliance in an unregulated field.
This sounds eerily similar to what we often hear in professional coaching today.
Carl Jung was a highly credentialed peer and the very first president of Freud’s institution. He actually began his career with rigorous empirical science.
However, Jung ultimately realized that reducing the human psyche to measurable, biological data destroyed its essence and that the reductionist machine missed the deeper complexities of human development.
In 1914, he resigned his presidency, walked away from the institution and abandoned the clinical constraints of what was then seen by the insiders as hard science. When he began integrating mythology, alchemy, and concepts like the collective unconscious and synchronicity, he crossed a permanent line.
The Freudian establishment branded him a mystic and an “unscientific” outcast. But for individuals seeking meaning beyond clinical symptom-management, Jung’s broader approach became the foundation for deep psychological integration.
Today, the historical irony is self-evident. Freud’s clinical models are largely dismissed as unfalsifiable. Jung’s framework is equally unfalsifiable by empirical standards, yet by shifting his focus from the pretense of hard clinical science towards phenomenology, his exploration of shadow work and archetypes continues to inform practitioners due to their usefulness.
After Freud and Jung split, psychology as a field fractured into two different economic and functional tracks. The institutional track – still seeking the hard, scientific legitimacy that Freud originally desired – eventually doubled down on measurement over the next few decades. It embraced highly structured, symptom-reducing clinical models, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). When managed care ultimately took over, insurance companies demanded standardized rubrics to justify payouts, officially scaling this track into a mass-produced utility.
The independent track was first forged by early pioneers like Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, who rejected the rigid clinical machine. Decades later, this same sovereign ethos was carried forward by the humanistic and existential psychology of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and Rollo May.
While the corporate and medical institutions eventually stripped their theories for parts, mass-producing concepts like personality types and hierarchy pyramids, the actual depth of their clinical practice could not be industrialized.
Because this work prioritized self-actualization over symptom reduction, it defied clinical rubrics and could not be quantified in a standardized sprint. The practice of this work was pushed out of the managed-care system entirely and moved into private-pay.
I studied Freud’s work when I was fourteen years old. The Interpretation of Dreams, The Ego and the Id, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
At fourteen, the mind craved legible structures and determinate rules. But maturity eventually reveals the limits of reductionist interpretations.
Jung’s collective unconscious came into my understanding only much later when I was in University, because grasping it required the capacity to hold what cannot be measured or turned into an instruction.
I have experienced both the quick results of CBT, and the qualitative impact of the deeper work of Adler, Jung and Rogers in my own life, and have an appreciation for their unique usefulness.
If we look at what happened to psychology, it can provide a prophetic view at where the professional coaching industry is heading.
The current tension between standardized coaching and sovereign practitioners might not be a phase the market will move past. It could be the permanent dividing line for the profession.
The standardized track will probably continue to scale, even more with AI replicated features. Driven by market forces, it will become increasingly algorithmic, metric-driven, commoditized, and democratized.
It serves a purpose: helping leaders be functional and compliant within a system. It is this track of Behaviorism that will be most adopted by coaching professionals. There will be academics focused on providing the research to legitimize this, and narratives framing this as evidence-based and therefore superior to other approaches. There will be a whole economy built around validating practitioners who are functional and compliant within its boundaries. Functional and compliant practitioners helping other leaders be like them.
The sovereign track will remain unscalable, operating strictly in private containers driven by subtractive work. It exists for a different purpose: helping a leader master the system and transcend it altogether. This will be driven by the insight that the leverage does not live in the frameworks, but entirely in the ontological weight of the practitioner. This track will consist primarily of independent practitioners who have themselves transcended the boundaries of their institutions.
To me, this is the end of the debate over professionalization, what coaching is, and what it ‘should’ be. The institutional factory and the frontier will likely continue to use similar vocabulary to describe what they do. They might share the same titles, and serve leaders in similar organizations. But beneath the shared language are entirely different paradigms and professions.
I made my choice a long time ago.
