We have been learning about ethics from Alan Tjeltveit’s book, Ethics and Values in Psychotherapy. Last week we discussed the distinction between being an ethicist and being a moralist. In Chapter 5 Tjeltveit takes on the issues related to ways people understand “values.” He says, “We need to move beyond recognizing that ‘Therapy is not value-free’ to a well-developed understanding of the ways in which it is value-laden.” (p. 83).He then unpacks a few approaches to values (from pp. 84-85):

• values as psychological (e.g., when Skinner defines something as good based on how much reinforcement it provides; it simply describes what is valued)
• values as ethical (e.g., what ought to be valued rather than merely an account of what is desired)
• values as a means by which the powerful impose their will on the weak (an assertion, really, by those in power)
• values as choices (to be a genuine, authentic value is to have been chosen freely)
• values as authentic expressions of an individual’s nature (self-actualization)
• values as cultural and historical (context-specific)

When I first read the various approaches to values, I was struck by the variety, of course, but also what is often implicit in psychotherapy today. There are a lot of implicit assumptions about values based upon what is a genuinely free choice, what is authentic (because of our field’s emphasis on self-actualization), and, more recently, perhaps due to the influence of post-modernism, what is valued within a culture and what is imposed (by the majority, the privileged) on others (the marginalized). It isn’t always consistent, either. Nor is it taught explicitly. But these approaches to values exist in the field today and enjoy their status without having been argued for explicitly.

So what do you think? What is your definition of values? What definition of values best reflects a distinctively Christian psychology? How might one’s definition influence one’s clinical practice? Can definitions (of values) be matched with specific purposes in psychotherapy?