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LICHTENBERG INTRODUCED THE PANEL BY DEFINING a value judgment as "the assertion of a belief in the guiding virtue of a principle or a belief in the existence of a concrete entity for which substantiating evidence is either lacking, incomplete, or opposed by facts." To give an example of this definition, he used the statement: "Jehovah is the one supreme god," which is impossible to substantiate because evidence is lacking. He then referred to Freud's concept of specific forms of psychic energy and noted that, analogously it is impossible to validate or invalidate this theory. He showed how such a concept could progress, because of adherence to authority, from being a working hypothesis to being a value judgment which, by virtue of repetition, becomes dogma.
After discussing a number of areas of both practice and theory where he feels value judgments enter, Lichtenberg presented his belief that the negative influence of value judgments derives from two factors: the seductive assumption that none exists; and the disguising effect of clinical success, resulting from different therapeutic approaches.
The assumption that value judgments either do not exist or do not require in-depth exploration may derive from the belief that by virtue of training and discipline, psychoanalysts are free from making value judgments. This would follow the credo that psychoanalysts