Académique Documents
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1: January 2005
Abstract
This paper reviews notions of responsibility relating to the provision of
counselling and psychotherapy. The British Association for Counselling
and Psychotherapy Ethical Framework for Good Practice in Counselling
and Psychotherapy (2002) speaks of ethics that should consider ‘values’,
‘principles’ and ‘personal qualities’, and that ‘principles direct attention to
important ethical responsibilities’; but in what way are these constituted as
a responsibility in the therapeutic encounter, and how or why are they
framed as ethics or morality? It is argued that responsibility infers an
‘other’ to whom one is responsible. In so far as responsibility is a
formulation of value, it is circumscribed by considerations of ethics,
morality and power, all of which can impinge on the therapeutic encounter.
It is therefore important to trace the development of these elements as we
practice them in the therapeutic encounter.
Introduction
What is responsibility? It is a strange notion and a relatively new way of
speaking in English, developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. It derives
from an older word ‘responsiveness’, as a quality of participation in
dialogue (Oxford English Dictionary 2000, 742).
Responsibility is ‘relatively late-born in the family of words in which
duty, law, virtue, goodness and morality (post-modernism would also
include power relations) are its much older siblings’ (Niebuhr 1963, 47-8);
it posits ‘the continuity of a self with a relatively consistent scheme of
interpretation of what it is reacting to …[and] a continuity of agents to
which response is being made’ (Niebuhr 1963, 65). This definition
highlights the dilemma of responsibility in that it ranges from the
relationship between two people, to a broad sweep of social
‘universalities’; a range of relationships that encompasses both micro and
macro-interactions. There is also an inference that there is a coherent ‘I’
relating to an ‘o/Other’ on the basis of ‘consistency of values’.
Herein lies a further difficulty, as the assumption of a coherent ‘I’ and
‘o/Other’ is open to discussion in both philosophical and therapeutic terms.
On closer examination, a fragmentation sets in that at worst may mean that
we are not responsible, and at best that we do not know what that
responsibility is. At root is the nature of our being and how we relate,
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Post-Modern Perspectives
These axes of debate are polarities within what in post-modern terms may
be regarded as privileging a dominant (or superior) against a recessive
(inferior) discourse. However, it is worth being mindful of the view taken
by Angus (2000, 187) that ‘the search that looks for meaning in (or
through) the human sciences has experienced a historical disruption of
community such that it seeks to establish community on the ground of
knowledge and/or ethics’.
This puts into question the Human or Enlightenment Project (the rational
deductive scientific enterprise) as it simply disrupts community and then
tries to restore it through knowledge and ethics: ‘There is a splitting within
the human subject into knower and known …Humanity is doubled’ as
Nietzsche and subsequently Foucault put it, and the project of our-self-
knowing is suspended in this double. Understanding humanity [also]
requires understanding of the social condition – the intersubjective
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meaning of human life. This is another double… the self and the other … a
question of knowledge but also of the foundation of ethical community’
(Angus 2000, 186-7). Ethics and morality are seen here as a stratum of the
drive to knowledge conceived as a Logocentric system of culture (Fiumara,
1990).
In post-modern terms these reflections are metaphysical meta-narratives:
‘an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one’s thinking, something into
which everything can fit, independent of one’s time and place (Rorty,
1995)’. They are open to deconstruction.
We are faced with Levinas’ opening comment in ‘Totality and
Infinity’(1969, 21): ‘Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest
importance to know whether we are duped by morality’. We will consider
later, what Levinas may have meant by this comment.
As Williams (1993, 197-8) comments: ‘These various versions of moral
philosophy share a false image of how reflection is related to practice, an
image of theories in terms of which they uselessly elaborate their
differences from one another’. In an earlier chapter titled ‘The Linguistic
Turn’, Williams discusses the uses of language and the way we use
language in arriving at philosophical conclusions. The question raised is: to
what extent can a philosophical conclusion, a ‘value’, be made into an
‘ought’? This process mirrors the empiricist/reductionist scientific process
that extracts a ‘fact’ from an ‘is’. However, a value (an ought) differs from
a fact (an is) as between a prescriptive and descriptive form of philosophy.
Do we, then, use language objectively to discover philosophical truths
(reformulating both as and when necessary), or is it the language that pre-
empts the form and content of the search we undertake? In essence, do we
speak language, or does language speak us?
There are several directions this answer can take (see Rorty 1967, 33-9),
but the least common denominator of these positions is ‘philosophy as
proposal, versus philosophy as discovery’ Williams (1993, 120-31). This
applies equally to therapy and counselling where the common denominator
position would then be ‘counselling/therapy as proposal versus
counselling/therapy as discovery’.
Rorty (1980, xi and 12) comes to the conclusion that a philosophical
problem is a product of unconscious assumptions built into the vocabulary
in which the problem is stated. It is pictures, rather than propositions,
metaphors rather than statements, which determine our philosophical
convictions.
What becomes of responsibility in this strange landscape?
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with a use value (what the money can buy), or a signified object that has a
reality that is ‘out there’.
Baudrillard, however, dismantles the separation between numerator and
denominator as falsely structured divisions, and concludes that both sides
of the divide say the same thing in what is effectively a circular argument.
For example, if we consider the economic equations, it may be said that
what creates an ‘Exchange Value’ of goods is productive labour. Similarly,
what creates ‘Use Value’ is individual/social need; but this formulation
merely disguise a re-iteration of the subject/object dichotomy from two
different ends of an equation that ends up saying the same thing
(Baudrillard 2001 [1972], 66-8).
Thus ‘Exchange Value’ that is created by ‘Productive Labour’ is a case
of ‘Subject’ producing ‘Object’ and distils into a ‘Subject/Object’
dichotomy.
Similarly, but from the other end ‘Use Value’ is defined by ‘Social
Need’ as ‘Object’ needed by ‘Subject’ and distils into an Object/Subject
dichotomy.
Baudrillard concludes that ‘there is no reality or principle of reality other
than that directly produced by the system as its ideal reference’ (p.73). We
merely create signs validated by other signs where ‘all ambivalence is
reduced by equivalence’. There is no longer a rational/deductive scientific
endeavour, but one of sign, code and simulation – what Baudrillard calls
‘the political economy of the sign’. Use Value is, furthermore, ‘the
expression of a whole metaphysic: that of utility. It registers itself as a kind
of moral law at the heart of the object. …‘Isn’t this what all human ethics
is based on: the ‘proper use’ of oneself? Thus our moral exchange (Kantian
or Christian) is anchored to a final relation to a transcendent reality or a
god: ‘a providential code that watches over the correlation of the object
with the need of the subject under the rubric of functionality - …subject
with divine law under the sign of morality (pp. 70-1).
These deliberations lead to a grim conclusion regarding an ethical-moral
dimension of responsibility (as they do for the activity of psychoanalysis,
and perhaps too for therapy). Each new system of value grafts to itself a
previous phantom value set, and extends a resurrected version of the real in
a new form: from dialectics, use value, production, to the unconscious and
liberation of repressed meaning (‘At the exact point where its psychic
principle of reality is confused with its psychoanalytic reality principle, the
unconscious becomes, like political economy, another simulation model’
(Baudrillard 2001 [1976], 125).
Is it then our attempt to ‘close ambivalence with equivalence’ that
prompts our drive to create codes of moral conduct and responsibility?
Additionally, is it perhaps the cycle of foreclosure by ever-new cycles of
the utility model that obliges moral arguments to ‘uselessly elaborate their
differences from one another’ (see Williams, above)? Baudrillard’s
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(maximizing opportunity for choice). Bond also notes that while the
‘BAC(P) has made enormous progress and has acted as a national forum
for establishing standards of practice… there has been no significant
interest from moral philosophers in these endeavours.’
He cites three possible reasons for this reticence:
- A need for the counsellor role to be more clearly defined to allow
consideration of the issues.
- Rapid growth of counselling has meant that pragmatic decision-
making has run ahead of moral philosophy.
- The origins of counselling may be less sympathetic to moral argument
than scientific justification.
While Bond sees a rapid growth of counselling, Smail (in Fairbairn and
Fairbairn 1987, 31-43) sees ‘an explosion of psychotherapeutic and
counselling procedures of all kinds’ but that ‘there is no such thing as
psychotherapy’. He likens its ‘scientific’ base to technical rhetoric that has
more in common with magic. Even knowing the problem does not mean
one has the cure - an un-stated inference of therapy.
Smail regards the covertness of therapeutic delivery, saying one thing
but doing another, as a dangerous ethical dimension. Thus psychotherapy
covertly ‘fulfils a need for love, by making use of a tacit expectation of
cure (which in turn rests on a conscious but irrational faith in mechanism
and an unconscious belief in magic), and serves an ideological view of
human distress as arising out of the conduct and perceptions of the
individual… Therapy [provides] a commodity which is becoming scarce in
our society – that is love’.
The allusion to love as a commodity is interesting in view of what has
been said of ‘commodity’ and it’s roots in the economics of use and
productivity – are we to judge people’s responsibility by the same
benchmark of usefulness and productivity? The tenor of Smail’s argument
takes psychotherapy outside of its comfort zone of technique and client,
into areas of social politics and economics that cast it in a less favourable
light. The title of Rowe’s contribution in the same book (Fairbairn and
Fairbairn 1987, 231-43) describes this proclivity as: ‘Avoiding the big
issues and attending to the small’.
Is it possible that the practice of therapy is irresponsible, such that it
misrepresents the therapeutic encounter?
Pilgrim (in Dryden and Feltham (ed.), 1992, 225-43) maintains that
psychotherapy has become engrossed in political evasion, a reductionism
in the conception of the human condition, compounded by a self-interested
professionalisation of therapy. He sees these attributes in both
psychodynamic and humanistic therapies, with pseudo-medical/scientific
ideology translating into reductionism (the grand generalisations), and
associated technologies (how it’s done) providing professional status.
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Clarkson (2000, 23-6) states (as do other writers), that the weight of
evidence indicates that while the theoretical approach is not relevant to the
successful outcome of psychotherapy, the relationship is. However, this is
immediately followed by a list of conditions that have a scientific,
professional ring, but do not necessarily bear scrutiny. They attempt to
define but perhaps limit the indefinable in relationship, by the ‘knowing’ of
it.
Working alliance presumes, within the term alliance, intent and a
common end in mind.
Transferential/countertransferential relationship locates relationship in
psychoanalytic terms that are presumptive pseudo-scientific notions.
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