Why are Moral Qualities so Important in Understanding Ourselves?

Abstract

This article presents a paper by Alsou Samoilova and Ekaterina Verezhan at the online student conference Transactional Analysis in the 21 st Century, which was organized by the MIR-TA (World of TA) Institute and took place on July 1 st and 2nd, 2023. The topic of the paper is Maria Teresa Tosi's (Italy, PhD, TSTA-P) article Personal Identity and Moral Discourse in Psychotherapy (Tosi, 2018).This paper analyzes an original text by Maria Teresa Tosi on the definition of personal identity in relation to person's moral values. It is suggested that personal identity can be viewed as having two basic dimensions, which are autobiography and moral values. As the research cited in the paper shows, it is moral values that are recognized as the most important part of a personal identity. Moral values are linked to the general development, which means that a new perspective for psychotherapeutic work is needed. Despite the common belief that the moral discourse is not a part of the field of the therapeutic work, it may be the time to reconsider this tendency. Maria Teresa Tosi emphasizes the need to incorporate the moral discourse into the psychotherapeutic practice. Bringing the discussion of moral values into therapeutic conversations can help to build an alliance and promote personal growth and social responsibility in patients, which in the long term has healing implications for the participants in the therapeutic process. In these aspects, spirituality can be seen as a framework for the development of a Parent Self in order to bring positive values and moral principles into personal identity.