Re-Thinking Therapy with Taylor: Beyond the Therapeutic

Abstract

ABSTRACT In his critique of the therapeutic, Taylor argues that therapy fails to engage with the ethical and spiritual significance of human suffering. Therapy’s denial of ethics is representative of a wider modern difficulty with accommodating Taylor’s view of ethical discourse as the articulation of the qualitative distinctions of worth implicit in our strong evaluations. In the case of therapy, this rejection of ethics stems from the claim to offer a set of scientifically based techniques of psychological change, and from protections for patient autonomy that are derived from a negative conception of liberty. Taylor’s critique of negative liberty demonstrates the inevitability of strong evaluation and serves to highlight how therapy covertly offers ethical proposals while denying that it is doing so. A psychoanalytic case vignette illustrates how it would be possible to give an ethical frame to therapeutic aims. To locate standard conceptions of psychological health in the context of Taylor’s history of the modern identity would emphasize their ethical significance and open the possibility to move therapy beyond the therapeutic.