Specialists without Spirit, Sensualists without Heart: Psychotherapy as a Moral Endeavour

Abstract

Over the last few years I have come to question the centrality and value attributed to the ideas of ‘analysis’ and ‘interpretation’ in the psychotherapies in general and the analytic traditions in particular—ideas which draw on the prestige of the natural sciences.The lecture develops the reasoning behind the shifts in my thinking and practice. With the help of the moral philosopher Raimond Gaita I will build on my prior thesis that the psyche is constituted by power-relations, to argue that it is also constituted by moral-relations. Gaita’s understanding of morality has affinities with Winnicott and Bowlby, and is also deeply congenial to the group analytic sensibility. I will show how these ways of thinking contribute towards the ethical constitution of our inner lives. I will then touch on some of the consequences of this way of thinking for the practice of psychotherapy (whatever the school or modality), in ways that do not entail a collapse into emotivism nor a rejection of the rational.I conclude that because psychotherapy is a moral endeavour, it requires the therapist to take up ‘an attitude towards a soul’ (Wittgenstein) rather than that of the detached clinician, and that therapy is better described as a very particular kind of embodied conversation rather than the scientistic conceptions of ‘analysis’ or ‘treatment’.