Goals of Life and Therapy

This Paper Discusses How consideration of a patient's goals in life might effect the therapeutic procedure. Most therapists agree that the goal of therapy must be related to a concept of the goal or goals of life. Yet many therapists feel that it is not their task to become involved with the patient's goal in life, or else they feel that their task is to cure the patient of pathological goals; once this has been accomplished they should leave the patient to himself to find his own goals.

This conception of their therapeutic task makes it less imperative for them to clarify their own thinking on goals in life to the point of evolving a completely satisfactory theory.

Clara Thompson1 distinguished in her enlightening book on Psychoanalysis, Evolution and Development the two types or therapeutic goals: those who are satisfied, as Lorand says, to enable their patients to “get along” more satisfactorily and to cope more effectively with life on a day-to-day bais; and those who are not satisfied to see their patients “adjusted” in this way, but who, in concepts first stated by Carl Jung and later more specifically developed by Karen Horney and many members of this present group, set out toward a further-reaching goal. They want to enable their patients to live creatively and to bring out their best potentials in what has been called self-realization. This present group represents particularly the point of view that, if at all possible, the therapist should not be satisfied in accomplishing what Wolberg2 calls the “practical” goal, but that he must assist him in the clarification of the values he wants to be living for. This was stressed, for example by H. Kelman, F. Weiss, N. Ackerman and other participants in the thoughtful Round Table Discussion of this Society's meeting in 1956.3

Undoubtedly there are cases of persons incapable of thinking and living in terms of goals in life. The situation, for example, which K. Goldstein described in his famous brain-injury cases, where