Values, Interests, and Psychotherapy

We say, with reason, that we “practice” psychotherapy. But what does it mean to practice something? Are we talking of the logic of professionalism-that we are the licensed masters of a body of technical knowledge; that we rent space and apportion time in a contractual relationship with someone called a patient, who is to receive the benefit of that technique; and that we obtain a fee, or, in increasing numbers of cases, a salary or a reimbursement, for the application of our technique, which fee we then exchange for the things of our life? No one would dispute that this definition of practice has application to the real world. But we may be talking of something else when we talk of practice-something wider, more universal and seemingly more abstract, but just as real nonetheless. For is not “practice” another way of defining that human essence enunciated by the young Marx in his first thesis on Feuerbach: “sensuous human activity,”1,^{p. 400} or praxis, or labor itself?

Labor, or practice, here should not be reduced to actual work-in-the world, although it contains such work, including the work of psychotherapy. More generally, however, it is the active encounter of humans with nature, an encounter which transforms both the person and the object of her/his labor. Praxis therefore is transformative human activity. It includes the play of children as well as the work of adults. And since it is transformative, it is purposive. “The meaning of labor,” writes Sartre, “is provided by an end, and need … is in fact the lived revelation of a goal to aim at.”2,^{p. 90} But this goal, the future, does not exist yet: it must be made by us. The future will depend upon what we practice today, i.e., how we build it; and what we build will depend upon what we envision and how we direct our activity toward it.

There is a vector between immediacy-what is now, or what we are thrown into-and the conscious, purposive, transforming qualities of labor or praxis; and this vector deserves a name: t