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CHAPTER FOURTEEN Values
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN Values We have frequently referred in the course of this discussion to values as directive principles guiding ethical choices and actions. The concept of ethical action postulates the human person as the dynamic ethical agent, who resolves the tensions of needs and desires by selecting goals and choosing means and ends in terms of internalized values and value-systems. Claude Kluckhohn and his associates (1962) saw values as standards of action in that “actors perhaps most often think about or refer to values when they are in doubt about alternative courses of conduct: when the long-run results of the possible selections of paths of behavior are not immediately obvious or scientifically demonstrable or when pressures of personal motivation are strong on one side and social sanctions or practical expediency of some other kind are strong on the other side” (p. 395). On these terms values are critical in organizing and directing behavior, in choosing courses of actions and evaluating events (Schwartz and Bilsky 1987). Implicit is the idea that the self includes evaluative and coordinative structures and functions, integrated within an autonomous self-structure, capable of defining and directing patterns of behavior and action according to chosen and integrated values. Classical freudian superego morality is negative and lacks a positive sense of morality (Pattison 1968); but positive morality finds more sympathetic ground in the ego-ideal, particularly in regard to values and valuesystems . Morality, on these terms, is less a matter of prohibitions than of values and the norms of appropriate behavior by which we govern and direct our lives. For the social sciences and especially psychology, the exercise of weberian ethical neutrality remains an ideal, subserving scientific objectivity. The ideal is no less applicable in psychoanalysis than in any other psychological science. However, it applies primarily at the investigative , research, heuristic, and theoretical levels. Psychologists may appeal to a dichotomy of fact and value as a device to preserve a neutral stance, but 285 the same psychologists cannot avoid making choices in all their multiple roles in life, including their therapeutic role—choices that are witting or not, responsible or not, but entail unavoidable consequences. The claim of value-free science, beyond its insistence on fact over fantasy or wishful thinking, only obscures the role played by values in methodological choices and interpretive frameworks (M. B. Smith 1969). Values, willy-nilly, are integral parts of the psychoanalytic situation and process (Meissner 1983, 1996b, 2003). MEANING OF VALUES In this reflection, we are concerned specifically with ethical values that direct our actions toward morally or ethically good or bad ends. Values act as guides for decision and action in both individual and collective terms. Some values are final, that is, normative and obligatory, determined by rules, and ordered to a system of social standards establishing certain actions as good and others as bad or indifferent—these are specifically moral values. Other values are merely productive and responsive to assessment in terms of cost and gain, for instance, economic values. Ethical values that are nonmoral play an important role in psychoanalysis —resolution of conflict and achievement of psychic maturity are analytic goals and ideals toward which the process aims and the patient strives; they make the patient better as a person insofar as they approximate an ideal, but failure to achieve the goal or falling short of it does not constitute a moral fault. There is no obligation to achieve the goal, but failure to do so works to the patient’s disadvantage and makes him less successful as a human person. Achieving the goal is a good, but not a moral good. If not a moral value, I would still regard it as an ethical value. Both ethical and moral values are normative, but the relevant norms differ. Moral norms pertain to judgments of good or evil—the morally good act conforms to standards of moral behavior; ethical norms pertain to judgments of what is appropriate or conducive to the person’s well-being and betterment as a person. Morality focuses on whether the agent does good or evil, ethics on whether an action makes him a better person. Most value theorists define value in behavioral terms as that which is desirable, meaning that what one values one sees as desirable; but the valuing we are considering here is somehow antecedent to the desirability and, in fact, determines it. I desire something because I value it. Moreover, the decisive quality of moral values and value-judgments, moreover...