Morality in Therapy

Do therapists have the right to bring morality into treatment? Do they have an obligation to?

I believe they do. And one of the reasons therapy is dead now is that morality has been banished from therapy.

For a number of years now, all therapy training programs, including analytic ones, have instructed trainees to resist the urge to make value judgments about the content brought into therapy sessions. Pointing out good and bad is an “imposition” of one’s own belief system on the therapy. This impedes the therapeutic process and hampers natural growth for the patient. 

This is nonsense. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite. Therapy divorced from good and bad, right and wrong, is nothing other than an echo chamber. Given the prevalence of narcissistic and borderline personality-disordered patients in today’s America, withholding value judgments about bad behavior and even bad thoughts is an abdication of ethical responsibility. When a woman sadistically torments her boyfriend for failing to adhere to her delusional expectations of his behavior—expectations born out of pathologic narcissism—this is not a moment for the therapist to explore her motivation to act cruelly. He must step in and say, “What you are doing is not only destructive but wrong.”