My Basket 0 item - £0.00

Therapeutic Ethics in Context and in Dialogue

Author(s) : Kevin R. Smith

Reviews and Endorsements

"A pleasure to read from start to finish, this short book is packed with interesting insights and arguments. A compelling case is made for thinking of psychotherapy as a set of social practices in Taylor's sense, shaped by ideals whose capacity to empower and give meaning to life often escapes notice. By making these ideals explicit and placing them in the history of the modern identity, Smith helps us to see what's fundamentally at stake in psychotherapy and in disputes between the various schools. Smith cuts through the fractious polemics typical of those disputes and points the way forward to a more constructive debate." - Nicholas Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Macquarie University, author of Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals, and Modernity

"How can we better understand psychotherapy's ethical visions when therapies-drawing on particular pictures of human flourishing-deny that therapy involves ethical visions? In this very perceptive book, Kevin Smith links psychotherapy's ethical visions to the intuitions and stories told by therapist and client, to therapists' gentle interrogation and "improvement" of clients' ethical visions, and to the history of Western thought, in which Euro-American psychotherapy's contemporary ethical visions are rooted, visions rooted so deeply and implicitly they may not even be recognized as ethical. To address the diversity of extant ethical visions, he encourages a deep level of respectful, open-minded conversation among differing views. Therapeutic Ethics in Context and in Dialogue provides invaluable resources for the crucial task of developing richer, more sophisticated understandings of therapeutic ethics." - Alan Tjelveit, Professor of Psychology, Muhlenberg College, author of Ethics and Values in Psychotherapy

"All too often our contemporary landscapes, be they international, national, social, ethnic, or professional, are torn asunder by relentless divisiveness and claims of rightness and superiority. Among the varied approaches to psychotherapeutic efforts, while the diversity of disciplines could well foster mutual learning and maturation, far too often the advocates of these models collapse into divisiveness and competitions that impoverish our opportunities to learn from one another. In these two volumes, Kevin Smith places ethics at the heart of these professional debates, examining and critiquing the values that divergent models of psychotherapy hold, both explicitly and implicitly, arguing that each represents a practice that promotes a particular vision of the good life. As a psychotherapist often drawn quite passionately into taking sides in these theory wars, I found in Smith's book a quiet, deeply resourced perspective that allowed me to take a more reflective stance with regard to both the differences and the commonalities of contemporary models of psychotherapy. These books will be of great value to practitioners, researchers, scholars and teachers who value the reflective practice of the art, the science, and the philosophies of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy." - William F. Cornell, author of Self-Examination in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy