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.
This broad survey of the literature on values in psychotherapy is too cursory, unfortunately, to be instructive to the uninformed. There is, however, a bibliography of one hundred eighty-three titles which should be useful to anyone studying this subject.
Although the author pays lip service to psychoanalytic concepts, the issues are presented in mechanistic terms and the clinical case studies are superficial. Values are seen in exclusively relativistic terms and seem to depend entirely on what best fits in with the patient's drive toward 'self-actualization', whatever that may be. No effort is made to differentiate between values as they emerge in the mature adult in service of the reality principle and goals which are only remotely related to values and are more properly understood in terms of infantile neurosis.
The following case history quoted from the experience of one of Dr. Buhler's colleagues best illustrates the superficiality of the approach to the problem. This case is presented as an instance in which a therapist felt it necessary to express his own value judgments in order to further the therapeutic process. The adolescent patient believed he had seen his father driving with a woman not his wife and proposed to blackmail him.
'Now, from my own value orientation, blackmail is personally repugnant to me, even if it worked! My decision in that particular value situation was to directly express to Mortimer my own feelings about blackmail as well as to explore with him the possible repercussions to this act. I indicated that in my judgment blackmail was