You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this paper* I hope to show that the conceptual structure of psychotherapy (I will consider only psychoanalytical psychotherapy) has an ethical character: that is, it contains assessments of valued and devalued aspects of human psychology. I will add to this argument the assumption that a professional field builds its identity substantially around a specialised body of knowledge and organised inquiry. It follows that its ethical character informs its structure and identity, not just through sanctions, but through knowledge, research and teaching - through the way it reproduces itself.
In the 1960s and 1970s - certainly since Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962- a paper on the relationship between the conceptual repertoire and the ethical character of a scientific field - broadly, a paper on the social character of scientific knowledge - would have found its place within an ongoing lively debate. (There is a substantial literature in this area which lies outside the main concern of this paper. I will cite only two references, which give a flavour of the issues of the time and include extensive bibliographies: Figlio 1977; Wright & Treacher 1982.) Times have changed; the political climate has changed: the recent debates on cosmogeny, artificial human reproduction and religion, for example, have been polarised and inflamed. But the moral evaluation of all that we do, whether in the form of assigning responsibility for the environmental impact of technological progress or of concern about research into human fertilisation, has nonetheless diffused into culture. There is a sense that scientific inquiry should be included within public discussion: that valuing should be part of knowing; that an interest in the nature of society should have at least equal footing with the appreciation of what that society produces, including its science.
Psychotherapy in Britain, and in Europe as a whole, is at a critical juncture: the pressures in the European Co