Retrieving the Virtues in Psychotherapy

Abstract

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.