This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Dueck, A. Articles by Reimer, K. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Retrieving the Virtues in Psychotherapy

Thick and Thin Discourse

Fuller Theological Seminary, adueck{at}fuller.edu

Kevin Reimer

Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary

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.

Key Words: virtues • tradition • religion • psychotherapy • ethnicity

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?