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It Is A Double Honor to be asked to speak before your Association, first, because of my deviant professional identity as a clinical psychologist and, second, because it is a privilege to pay my personal respects to your great leader. It was Dr. Karen Horney whose observations on patients from different cultural backgrounds brought into focus the question of the role of values in psychotherapy. Understanding the whole person means understanding the value matrix in which he is embedded. Because of the dyadic relationship between patient and therapist, the therapist's value system must also be understood as crucial in the transaction.
The importance of the therapist's personality for the therapy he conducts has been a bone of contention ever since the beginning of psychoanalysis. Freud early recognized countertransference as a source of difficulty in analyzing. Since Freud's time there have been a number of attempts to distinguish between the influence of personal and technical factors in the therapist's interaction with his patient. In these studies, the therapist's values have usually been included as a part of the personality variable. In his pioneer survey of members of the British Psychoanalytic Society, begun two decades ago, Glover1, 2 found the majority admitting that the therapist's personality played a “considerable part” in conducting an analysis. At the same time, they maintained that they did not communicate to the patient their personal opinions on political, social, or other issues which involved values. In another approach, Werner Wolff3, interviewed leading therapists from different analytic schools in the New York area. He reported that the large majority regarded the therapist's values as an important influence on his therapeutic work.
Other studies using more precise methods of quantification5, 6, 7 have also indicated the importance of personality factors in the therapist as distinct from his technical interventions. According to Fran