Article Title:Retrieving the virtues in psychotherapy thick and thin discourse - Thick and thin discourse
Abstract:
This article considers the possibility that democratic liberalism is a virtue tradition. Given the centrality of the liberal tradition in American psychotherapy, the clinician risks imposing a particular set of virtues on the ethnic or religious client. A review of the historical and philosophical foundations of liberalism suggests that psychotherapy is a moral encounter based on its handling of virtue language. Liberal psychotherapy may, when it displaces the client's tradition, contribute to a departicularized self. Drawing on the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Walzer an argument is developed that the meaning and cultivation of virtue is context dependent. Suggestions are offered for a tradition-sensitive psychotherapy that functions emically within the client's own virtue grammar A concluding case study illustrates tradition-sensitive, virtue psychotherapy with a conservative Jewish seminary student.
Keywords: virtues; tradition; religion; psychotherapy; ethnicity
DOI: 10.1177/0002764203256948
Source:AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST
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