About Psychology: Essays at the Crossroads of History, Theory, and Philosophy

4. Psychotherapists As Crypto-Missionaries: An Exemplar on the Crossroads of History, Theory, and Philosophy

55 Chapter Four Psychotherapists As Crypto-Missionaries AN EXEMPLAR ON THE CROSSROADS OF HISTORY, THEORY, AND PHILOSOPHY Brent D. Slife, Amy Fisher Smith, and Colin M. Burchfield THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES an intriguing case of the “crossroads” of history, theory, and philosophy. As we will attempt to show, there is simply no meaningful way to understand the role of values in contemporary psychotherapy without these crossroads, and understanding this role is now sorely needed. Never has there been more tension or tumult surrounding the issue of values. For years, therapists have been taught to eliminate, suspend, or at least minimize their own values while conducting psychotherapy : psychoanalysts recommended that therapists be “blank screens” (Franklin, 1990; Freud, 1912/1963); behaviorists advised they be “objective” (Wilson, 2000); and humanists suggested they be “interpersonal mirrors” (Rogers, 1951). 56 About Psychology Recent developments, however, make clear that therapists cannot escape or even minimize their values (Beutler and Bergan, 1991; Kelly, 1990). Therapists have long known that certain professional values were unavoidable , such as caring for and protecting their clients. Still, recent empirical and theoretical work has shown how deeply these inescapable values go—even to the level of personal moral and religious values (Tjeltveit, 1986). Researchers have shown that therapists not only use such personal values in therapy but also urge their clients to use them (Beutler, 1979;Tjeltveit, 1999). Therapists may not be completely aware of this persuasion process, but it is occurring nevertheless (Beutler,Arizmendi, Crago, Shanfield, and Hagaman, 1983; Smith and Slife, in press). In this sense, therapists may be, as Paul Meehl (1959) once feared long ago,“crypto-missionaries” (p. 257) attempting to convert their clients to their own value system. Needless to say, this situation has put practicing therapists into a quandary. What are they to do with their values? There are clear ethical injunctions against imposing personal values on clients (American Psychological Association, 1992), but if such values are inescapable—both in using and in urging clients to use them—then what is the most effective and ethical course of action? Here we submit that this pivotal question cannot be answered without the simultaneous consideration of history, theory, and philosophy. As we will contend, the original discomfort of therapists with their values is not comprehensible without the context of history, indeed, a history that goes back to the Middle Ages. Recent conclusions that values are inescapable cannot be understood without the theoretical developments that spawned them. And finally, as we will argue, the solution to this therapy dilemma involves a dramatic change in the philosophy that undergirds psychotherapy. We review each of these aspects of the values issue in turn. HISTORY: ACCOUNTING FOR THERAPEUTIC VALUE SENSITIVITY Why are so many therapists uncomfortable with and confused about the use of their values in therapy? Much as good scientists are assumed to be objective and value-free observers of psychological facts, good therapists are assumed to be objective and value-free observers of therapeutic facts. Indeed, if therapists do not strive for objectivity and value-freeness, they are considered unethical (Wilson, 1995).That is, if they do not value being value-free, then they are thought to violate the values of the discipline—for not being sufficiently value-free.The obvious paradoxical nature of this ethical injunction —to value being value-free—was never really questioned until relatively recently. Why? As we will see, psychotherapy was conceived in an era that Psychotherapists as Crypto-Missionaries 57 reacted to perceived value abuses of the past—abuses that supposedly date back as far as the premodern era. “PREMODERN”VALUES The reason for the scare quotes around the term “premodern” in the section heading is that our modern,Enlightenment-based understanding of the premodern era is not necessarily the way the premodernists viewed themselves. However, this understanding is itself the issue (Bartlett, 1993; Gadamer, 1995; Jones, 1969b), because psychology—born of the modern era—has implicitly adopted a particular view of the premodern era that we should explore here—the view that premodern values were both subjective and absolute. The terms “subjective” and “absolute” may seem contradictory. However , many premodern values are considered subjective because they were without objective foundation. That is, these values seem arbitrary and unjustified through our modern lenses, though they were certainly not arbitrary and unjustified to the people of premodern times (Jones, 1969a; Leahey, 2000). Indeed, premodernists viewed such values as universal...