The Pastoral Counselor as Ethicist: What Difference do we Make

Abstract

Uses as a modern parable the notes of a feminist psychotherapist to demonstrate how the therapy reveals ethical and moral principles. Suggests that the therapeutic materials contain many premoral perspectives such as the goodness of emotions, the centrality of personhood, the value of personal assertiveness, and the place of self-sacrifice in growth and development. Draws particularly on the contemporary works of Robert Kegan to show how it is possible for psychotherapy to be seen as simultaneously a psychodynamic and a moral process.