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Professor Raziel Abelson (1978) has posed what would, if sound, be a fatal conceptual objection to the fundamental undertaking of all forms of psychotherapy. The argument is an important one, but I believe it is mistaken. Abelson poses the comprehensive dilemma that, “from the standpoint of psychotherapy, either there are no persons to benefit from anything, or else there is no specific benefit that psychotherapy can provide [persons].” The charge is linked to, but not directly derived from, the conception of a person Abelson (1977) develops in his new book, Persons. There, he advances the “notion of the self as the ideal person one wants to become, the incarnation of his prudential and moral values.” He adds instructively (I quote at length):
That one has such an ideal of self follows from the concept of a person. Since being a person entails having authority to avow one's reasons for action, and the exercise of this authority involves appeal to prudential and moral rules in justifying a course of action, it follows
Professor of Philosophy, Temple University, Philadeiphia, pa
Page 217that, when our actions are inconsistent with our avowed reasons and intentions, we must attribute them to an agent other than that to which the avowals are attributed, an ‘alter-ego’ which, if it could be consulted, would give different and more consistent reasons. So arises the notion of an unconscious self as the grammatical object of reflexive description, the person who actually did what I did, but not my ‘real self’ which disapproves of what was done. A split between the actual and the ideal self is necessitated in order to preserve the authority of avowals. If I cannot avow reasons consistent with my actions, then there must be, within me, some other T that can. In brief, where the authority of self-knowledge seems to break down, it is preserved by distinguishing between two different sources of authority, the actual and the ideal self. When one identifies himself with the former, he is