Troubled People, Troubled World: Psychotherapy, Ethics and Society

Abstract

Ethical issues are the stuff of psychotherapy, and in fact Freud envisaged the process as one in which an unexamined, irrational and oppressive conscience gives way to one more benignly rooted in reason.

Therapists endeavour to be non-judgemental and, indeed, are no more qualified to pass judgement on others than anyone else; do they nevertheless learn anything about ethics from their disciplined listening?

The same question was asked after the war about the persecution of the Jews and other minorities, and it’s a very live issue again, faced as we are by movements like ISIS, or Putinism in Russia, that cause great suffering in the name of religious or moral regeneration - a bewildering paradox that David Astor, former editor of The Observer called ‘the scourge’.

Can psychotherapy throw any light on it, or contribute any ideas as to how we might contain, if not prevent, the barbarism it sanctions? Can it offer any insights into a different, more inclusive kind of ethics, and if so, can we glean any guidance from it as to how we might further it?

These are the questions the author explores, drawing on psychoanalytic thinking on these issues for over a century and illustrated by his work with individuals over four decades.