Al Dueck

Retrieving the Virtues in Psychotherapy Thick and Thin Discourse

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.

INTEGRATION DISCOURSE: MODERN AND POSTMODERN

Psychologists and theologians are culture bound beings whose construals take place within history such that traces of the social context flow into their scholarly dialogue. The authors argue for the legitimacy of diverse voices –- modern and postmodern –- as they emerge in a sample of theologies and psychologies. It is proposed that conscious and unconscious precommitments to modern and postmodern assumptions shape the dialogue between psychologists and theologians. Three criteria will be used to differentiate discourses: epistemological foundationalism, autonomous individuality and the universality of scientific knowledge. While each discourse may limit the way spirituality is expressed, the authors argue that the differences in discourse should be recognized and explored.

Community, Spiritual Traditions, and Disasters in Collective Societies

This article posits a deeply contextual and communal therapy as the best path to a victims reconstruction of a sense of ‘home.’ The authors take seriously the recent call of Zhang Kan, chairperson of the Chinese Psychological Society, to consider the localities and heritage of China in the construction of psychotherapy for Chinese. The article follows Walshs four ways by which reconstructed communities are a resource for detoxifying the effects of trauma and disaster: shared acknowledgement of the traumatic events, shared experience of loss and survivorship, reorganization of the community, and reinvestment in relationships. It is argued that spirituality can also play a positive role in the recovery of meaning and community after disaster when honored rather than instrumentalized. Examples will be drawn from the communal/religious reconstructive efforts of Ukrainian Mennonites in communist Russia, the ways in which Chinese responded to the 5.12 earthquake, and the work of the Catholic diocese with Guatemalan indigenous peoples in honoring the dead in rebuilding communities.

Culture, Language, and Integration

Conversation between the Christian community and the dominant culture involves the use of language. However, culture is implicated in the language used as we think. This essay follows the model of Native Americans who wish that their indigenous culture flourish in a context of political powerlessness. It is suggested that this applies to Christians in psychology as well and calls for decolonizing psychological insight, a recovery of our indigenous Christian anthropology and engaging culture in nuanced ways.