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This paper aims at clarifying the concept of morality in current ego psychology and its application to the practice of psychotherapy. Morality is a word that usually appears in disfavor in the vocabulary of the psychotherapist. It is often taken as a taboo word or epithet. At best morality is generally viewed as irrelevant to psychotherapy, at worst it is taken to be a destructive antitherapeutic attitude.
Yet in the face of these negative connotations, there is a swelling literature of books and articles dealing with the nature and role of morality in psychotherapy:
(For recent reviews see 88, 117, 138, 156; major commentaries include 12, 25, 30, 33, 36, 53, 64, 80, 88, 122, 146, 160.)
The tenor of past attitudes about morality in psychotherapy may be summed up in four general assumptions:
1. Morality has been primarily the concern of cultural religion, which in turn has been an oppressive force inhibiting rather than promoting human welfare.
2. Morality has been an illusionary self-deception that has prevented man from facing himself.
3. Morality has not been a concern of psychotherapy, which has been essentially an amoral scientific enterprise.
4. The psychotherapist has played a nonmoral role, he has not transmitted his morality to the patient, nor has he attempted to change the patient's morality.