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Values in Psychotherapy is a work by Charlotte Buhler, Ph. D., now a practicing psychoanalyst on the West Coast. As Associate Professor of Psychology in Vienna, she founded an internationally famous department of child psychology. The book represents an attempt to integrate what is known and generally practiced in regard to the problems of values in psychotherapy.
Buhler attempts to define, explain, and differentiate values, and in so doing she brings into the discussions her own theory of personality development and a number of case histories. Her theory is a vigorous attempt at integrating the functions of acculturation in relation to the genetic and psychic growth of the individual, and it includes values which are the warp and woof of any cultural system. Many contemporary psychoanalysts feel that psychoanalytic practice is a social institution as well as an experiential, or existential, dyadic encounter.
The book begins with a critique of Freud's theoretical constructions, which leads to a logical rejection of his pansexualism and his totalitarian pleasure principle, as well as the idea which he later introduced to remedy his defective Lustprincip, i.e., the homeostatic (discharge) principle. As Horney did, Buhler integrates cultural factors into the personality by placing stress on the “positive reality” principle, thus allowing it a basic role in the development of character structure. Buhler also thinks that both the true (real) self and the distorted (actual) self direct conscious thought. A major premise of the book, and one with which this reviewer agrees, is that, whether he knows it or not, the therapist conveys to the patient some of his thinking about values. The question follows: What should be the therapeutic middle ground between the one extreme of leaving the patient to find his own values and beliefs (muddled or not) and that of actively inducing beliefs and values in him (the educative role)? The critical question seems to be: When does one introd