Psychotherapy and Ethics

Extract

The present writer had already sent to the printer his reflections on Psychotherapy and Ethics) before the opportunity came to him of reading Dr. J. C. Flugel’s recent book on the same subject. Dr. Flugel’s approach is, naturally enough, very different from our own. He writes as a psychologist pure and simple, and with a minimum (at least in intention) of extra-psychological presuppositions. He is moreover a convinced and orthodox—though also a “progressive” and by no means uncritical—Freudian; but he is unusually open to interests and considerations outside his own professional province and writes with an ease and urbanity uncommon to his kind. Last but not least, he is gifted with a quality which, as has often been remarked, seems to be singularly rare (but, one might have thought, singularly necessary) among psychologists—a keen sense of humour.

The great value and importance of Dr. Flugel’s book lies in the fact that it presents us with a remarkably candid, thorough and comprehensive treatment, from a psychoanalyst’s own viewpoint, of the subject which has recently engaged our own attention. In certain important matters his conclusions strikingly anticipate and confirm our own. In particular we would draw attention to the frankness with which he dismisses the contention that psychotherapy, as a “pure science”, can confine its attention to the means of human conduct and disregard consideration of the ends and values which are the province of ethics (pp. 12 ff., 30 ff.) Indeed it is precisely because he believes that the analytical exploration of psychological means modifies our apprehension of these ends and values that he has written and published the book at all; in the belief, that is to say, that from psychoanalysis (notwithstanding its many candidly recognised insufficiencies) many lessons may be learned “concerning the general nature of human morality and the general lines of moral progress” (p. 240, cf. Preface).