Journal of Religion and Healtb
268
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality" as Sources of Personal Values
C. M A R S H A L L
LOWE
Modern man has to a large extent lost faith in the older systems of belief that provided meaning and psychological structure for his forebears; he therefore finds himself plunged into an experience of alienation and self-doubt. The anxiety and despair that have been the result of the loss of traditional types of faith have produced a crisis fo r man in both the religious and psychological aspects of his life. The theologian is likely to ascribe the bewilderment of modern man to the loss of traditional religious symbols. The psychologist, on the other hand, is likely to describe the so-called emancipated individual as experiencing an identity crisis, or as having difficulty in formulating a consistent and coherent concept of self. While the theologian and the psychologist use different terms to describe the inner state of modern man, theology and psychology both attempt to interpret many common aspects of the contemporary individual's inner world. Both disciplines must therefore deal conceptually with the experiTIaF. P~v. C. MARSHALLLOWE,PH.D., is Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been pastor in a Presbyterian parish in Newark, Ohio, and has worked as a psychologist at the Brecksville (Ohio) V. A. Hospital. He is a member of the Academy.
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality"
269
ence of a modern man who feels bewildered and alienated in a changing world where social guidelines can no longer be experienced as believable or reliable.
The need of the individual for a system of personal values Underlying both the contemporary individual's loss of religious belief and his psychological difficulty in discovering an identity is his difficulty in formulating a system of values that is personally satisfying to him. Elsewhere, I have described values as attempts by the individual to gain an experience of an inner psychological unity that will enable him to encompass psychologically virtually the whole of his life experience.1 It is through values (as also through rather more specific social attitudes) that man learns to impose order and structure upon the world that he experiences at birth as a blooming, buzzing confusion. On the basis of such a schema or psychological blueprint, the individual establishes for himself an implicit set of priorities, which help determine what his purposes shall be. Gardner Murphy has thus described values as canalized drives that provide anchor points for goal-seeking behavior,z It is upon these psychological anchor points that man fashions a cosmology or genera] outlook on life that enables him to find spiritual and religious meaning and significance in his existence. Man rather universally seeks to create an orderly and goal-directed life for himself. Every individual must find a system of attitudes and values that will enable him to arrange hierarchically his choices and experiences so that he can fashion for himself a schema or inner psychological core that will enable him to confront with confidence a world he experiences as being structured and predictable. It is obvious, therefore, that as older systems of faith and sources of belief cease being acceptable as sources of value, man must find a new rationale for his choice of values. Without some justification for his moral choices, it is apparent that man must experience the terror of an unstructured existence in a society so anomieally without form that the individual falls prey to the alternative forms of that existential sickness foretold by Kierkegaard of bland indifference or hopeless despair.
270
]ournal of Religion and Health
Psycbotherapy and the "near morality" as sources of values for the contemporary individual Values are (as we have seen) attempts by the individual to ereate an inner experience of his existence that is uniquely his own. But even though sueh values are both personal and individualistic, the individual is, in the learning of such personal values, never completely self-taught. As he seeks to fashion his own unique eosmology, he is inevitably influenced by the social Zeitgeist. Within the Western world, personal values have to a major extent been formulated out of various aspeets of a general Judaeo-Christian tradition. In the past, therefore, individuals have been largely dependent upon the moral practices and beliefs of a so-called Christian culture for both their religious and psychological outlook upon the world. Since modern man has to a large extent lost faith in older sourees of belief, it is evident that he must search for new sources of values. Man is no longer unquestioningly willing to give assent to authoritarian and dogmatic religious creeds. Similarly, he is increasingly likely to reject traditional soeial moralities. He seeks instead for new types of attitudes and beliefs that will enable him to find meaning and significance among the changing social mores of the eontemporary world. Contemporary man relies upon a number of different sources of direetion in his search for personal values. Many individuals still find traditional types of faith to be meaningful. Others continue to find direetion in political ideologies and other types of secular beliefs. There are, however, a significant number of individuals who find that these traditional sources of direction do not provide personal meaning and direction. W e shall in this paper eonsider two sources of values that appear to be of major current signifieanee. Because of their eontemporary importance, these new sources are able to address themselves effectively to those individuals in modern society who have become estranged and alienated from older sources of value. The first source of eontemporary values for the bewildered individual is psychotherapy. The psychotherapist has, as a moralist, taken over many of the
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality"
271
social roles once performed by the theologian and the moral philosopher. While the psychotherapist is commonly thought of as a scientist trained in psychiatry or one of the behavioral sciences, it is inevitable that his own personal values as to what is basic in human nature profoundly influence his conception of what is wrong with man, his choice of methods in treating those problems, and the definition of mental health that he sets before his client as being the goal or purpose of treatment. The second new source for values is found in the contemporary theological and philosophical movement popularly termed the "new morality." There are many individuals who, having rejected more traditional authorities, also refuse to become beholden either to the psychotherapist or to that interpretation of the nature of human life derived from the behavioral sciences. They seek instead .to find values that have personal significance from more traditional theological and philosophical sources. This attempt to replace the older creedal orthodoxies of theology and moral philosophy with open systems of thought that possess personal meaning and significance seems to be the broad common denominator for that rather diverse ideological movement called the "new morality." How psychotherapy and the "new morality" both function as sources of values
Psychotherapy and the "new morality" are the result of two rather different felds of study. They are based upon quite divergent types of thinking, and t h e i r appeal is to quite different types of individuals. While at first glance these obvious dissimilarities would appear to defy attempts at comparison, there are, upon thoughtful reflection, important similarities between these two systems of thought. Both psychotherapy and the "new morality" have become sources of values for individuals who have become distrustful of older types of moral dogma. Psychotherapy and the "new morality" share a concern for providing the contemporary individual with a value-orientation that is both meaningful and significant in the following ways.
272
lournal of Religion and Health
By providing man with a more individualized set of values. The contemporary individual finds it more and more difficult to derive values that have personal meaning from the customs of his culture. T h e diffuseness of modern society makes it less likely that his culture will provide him with a satisfying set of social roles. As a result, modem man is to an ever increasing extent thrown upon his own inner psychological resources. Since the fashioning of a set of personal values tends to become a "do-it-yourself" affair, the social ferment that has accompanied recent ideological and moral changes can be regarded as being the birth pangs of a more differentiated and authentic kind of individuality. The result has been an increased need for man to maintain fidelity to his own personal value-orientation. The significance of an increased individuality in personal values can be appreciated best by following historical trends. Western civilization during the last thousand years has been witnessing a forward movement from the rigidly prescribed morality of a feudal society where morals are enforced by supernatural sanctions to an open society where there is an increasing tolerance for diversity of values. The decline of the Middle Ages was accompanied by the break-up of a traditional or closed morality that forced the subjugation of the individual to the general social will. The Renaissance ushered in an age of what by almost any standard must be judged to be an era of self-reliant individualism. Nevertheless, the new individualism does not appear in retrospect to have long remained as genuine as the ideologists of the period often imagined. Instead, the spontaneous nature of the new cultural forms took on an increasingly stilted nature with the passage of time. During the Age of Reason, man sought to realize his individuality through an exaltation of his rational powers that at times approached intellectual pretense. The individual came increasingly, therefore, to nourish the illusion that he was so completely set apart from culture that he was completely self-made and rationally self-determining. As a result there was, during the Age o f Reason, a moral sameness, the basis for morality now being the shared ideology of basic truths that were assumed to be self-evident. Post-feudal individualism consequently had about it a stereotyped
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality"
273
moral imprint resembling the mass-produced character of forms stamped out by a cookie cutter. Contemporary man has suddenly become more sophisticated in his thinking about himself. Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes modern man as suddenly having come of age. No longer is the contemporary individual willing to be blindly subservient to the rigidly encapsulated system of religious belief that Bonhoeffer terms a deus ex machina. And similarly he refuses to be swayed any longer by the polemics and apologetics based upon philosophical abstractions. Bonhoeffer describes man as possessing an independence produced by new knowledge of a universe whose mastery has become a much more reasonable challenge. As he has come of age, modern man has also gained insight into his place in society. He has learned that he must achieve a resolution of the need for social solidarky that dominated the Middle Ages with the need for self-reliant individualism that has more recently been the dominant social morality. Thus within our own century man has become aware of the dynamic tension between the need for the individual to experience his own personal value system and the opposing press of a social moralky imposed from without that seeks to enforce adherence to the mores of the culture. Psychotherapy can be regarded as the first vehicle that modern man has chosen in his search for a personal freedom that allows him to choose his own unique set of values. Psychotherapy can justifiably be described as man's search for a more genuine experience of selfhood. Phillip Rieff, in his book Freud, the Mind of the Moralist, uses the phrase "the psychological man" to describe the awareness of newly individualized man of his need to reconcile the seething turbulence of emotional arousal with the demand by society that he conform in an orderly fashion to the requirements of various social institutions. Rieff associates the emergence of the psychological man with the advent of psychoanalysis. Accordingly he describes the successful patient in psychoanalysis as one who "has learned to withdraw from the painful tension and assent and dissent in his relation to society by relating himself more affirmatively to his depths. ''3 He concludes, therefore, that Freud's significance lay in providing a
274
Journal of Religion and Health
negative community that limits the power of the culture to strangle the individual's quest for personality. In his recent book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff traces modern concern for this psychological man as it has evolved with various post-Freudian therapeutic systems. He describes this triumph of the therapeutic in general terms "as a profound effort to end the tyranny of primary group moral passion by learning to live more distinctly from one another. TM Different therapeutic processes seek a more genuine type of individuality in quite different ways. Amidst the broad diversity of a proliferating number of different types of psychotherapy there is, however, a broad common denominator: the enhancement and enrichment of the individual personality. Such a concern is seen in the Rogerian or client-centered concern for an increasingly positive self-regard. In client-centered therapy, the individual is encouraged to express his own individual feelings in what is classically described as a hothouse atmosphere in which the enhancing personal warmth of the therapist is an antidote to the coldness of an impersonal society. Concern for the enhancement of individuality is even more obvious in the newer existential therapies. Here the therapist is much more overt in focusing the client's attention upon the individual responsibility he must take for asserting his freedom in a responsible fashion and finally, an enhancement in individuality can be seen as a basic goal in behavioral or learning theory therapies. By freeing the client from the inhibitions produced by anti-therapeutic types of social learning, behavioral therapies enable the individual to gain a greater degree of self-control over his environment. It is also the aim of the "new morality" to increase man's sense of individual freedom in his choice of values. Such an emphasis seems to be equally prominent in both theological and humanistic interpretations of the "new morality." The "new morality," as it has been embodied within Christian patterns of thought by such theologians as Fletcher ~ and Robinson, 6 has placed emphasis upon a Pauline interpretation of Christian freedom: Man is freed from subservienee to the law to gain spiritual freedom. When so justified by faith, the individual is freed from legalistic and moralistic concerns so that he may ful-
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality"
275
fill the Augustinian admonition to love and do what he pleases or (as Hetcher translates the phrase) "to love with care and then what you will, do. m Theological efforts to establish an agape or love ethic that guarantees a respect for individuality finds an echo in secular interpretations of the "new morality." While secular new moralists seem less concerned than their theological counterparts with transcendental aspects of human personality, they are equally opposed to a conventional morality that judges individual human worth on the basis of degree of adherence to social conventions. Henry D. Aiken thus describes the primary attitude of secular "new moralists" as believing that "moral experience is something wholly real, but its reality is wholly personal. ''s He describes these "new moralists" as being dissatisfied with the social game as it is conventionally played, and therefore as being concerned with replacing conventional morality with a moral code that is more experientially derived. Instead of being based upon the expectations of others, Aiken sees the "new morality" as being built upon what he terms "first-person responsibilities." Morality in this way becomes a personal discovery, as moral principles become first-person precepts for the guidance of one's conduct through the maze of one's life.
By belping the individual find an identity and sense of selfhood. W h e n the individual is uncertain as to what set of values he should espouse, he finds it difficult to know who he is. Some theorists have conceptualized this inability to find a stable identity as being due to a failure to discover a coherent system of social roles. Others have described such a failure in terms of the inability of the individual to develop a concept of self that is able to draw the different aspects of his behavior into a consistent pattern. Rather recently existential thinkers have described the problem as one of finding meaning and significance so that one is able to experience a freedom of choice over one's destiny. Those sources of identity that have in the past supplied individuals with a sense of meaning and significance are lacking in contemporary Western culture. In a traditional society, man was able to define the nature of self through his membership in the tribe or the clan. Since he could identify with a social
276
Journal of Religion and Health
group, the individual hardly found it necessary to look within himself for the meaning of life. Instead, he gained a sense of significance from the strength of a group whose destiny transcended his own. Similarly, man experienced little problem in finding meaning and a sense of significance during the recent period of history in which his values were greatly dominated by his faith in reason. The individual now sought to gain a substantial amount of detachment from his culture, but instead he gained a sense of significance through the achievement of those values that were sanctioned by the Protestant ethic. Man now to a large extent could evaluate himself by the values of the marketplace, the result being what Erich Fromm describes as a marketing orientation that has required the individual to judge his own worth in terms of the value placed upon his abilities by the marketplace? There are among contemporary youth signs of an increasing dissatisfaction with an identity dependent upon recognition by others. A reaction against the values of economic achievement appears to be occurring, and new sets of values that emphasize being rather than doing are emerging. As modern youth seek to become more genuinely individualistic, they seek an identity based upon neither the values of an achievement-oriented activism, nor recognition by others. Instead, they seek an identity based upon their own stabilizing sense of wholeness or inner coherence as part of what Erikson terms a search for fidelity. Both psychotherapy and the "new morality" can be regarded as attempts by contemporary man to replace a moral code based upon the expectations and demands of others with a more personal morality that is more personally meaningful. A broad common denominator that unites what would otherwise be highly divergent types of therapy is, however, the task of helping the individual find a satisfying value-orientation that will help him to gain an enriched experience of his nature. As divergent as different schools of therapy are in both goals and methods, the aim of virtually every method is to help the individual gain control over his life. Psychotherapy does this either by helping the individual grasp his identity or sense of inner selfhood or by teaching him
Psychotherapy and the "Nev: Morality"
277
new behaviors that will increase the effectiveness and the significance of the social roles he performs. Different therapies attempt to provide man with a sense of personal significance in quite different ways. Classical psychoanalysis has heeded the famous admonition of the father of psychoanalysis that where there is id, let there ego be. The purpose of psychoanalysis has accordingly been to increase the individual's control over both the emotional forces emanating from the libido below and from the social pressures acting from without through the superego. More recently, neo-Freudians have interpreted the analytic task more broadly so as to include an interpretation of the self in social terms. Erikson thus has conceptualized the therapeutic task as that of dealing with an identity crisis. Other analysts such as Karen H o m e y and Harry Stack Sullivan have described the task of therapy in terms of authenticity of self. This concern has seen further development in client-centered therapy in which the aim of therapy is to explore that deeper affect that comprises the inner core of one's experience of self. There is even more of an emphasis on the significance and meaning of selfhood in existential types of psychotherapy. For the existentialist, the purpose of therapy is to confront directly those impediments that limit man from assuming responsibility for an authentic type of selfhood. The "new morality" is also concerned with man's search for meaning. It seeks to increase a sense of personal significance by replacing blind obedience {O [ [ I C l a w W l t l l :fi I I I U I ~ ~,IIIK.~;IK; R I I U LIU~DLIOIIIII~ dttempt t o discover a system of morality that possesses personal meaning for the parties involved. Moral principles cease to be literal injunctions to be applied universally and unthinkingly. Nothing can in itself always be labeled as being wrong. Rightness and wrongness are somewhat pragmatically to be judged by their effect upon self and others. The new standard for justice thus ceases being the legal and becomes the personal. The nature of good and evil is now to be judged on the basis of the effect it has on the personality of particular individuals. The "new morality" thus can also be seen as an attempt to encourage the individual to discover for himself a system of values that is more personally
278
]ournal of Religion and Health
significant. The "new morality" can be regarded as a reaction against what Aiken calls a morality based upon "my station and its duties. ''1~ The sanctions for such an "old morality" are incurred through various obligations demanded by the various institutional relationships and practices in which his social life is involved. The "new morality" replaces the demands of so-called institutional establishments with what Aiken describes as a process that is akin to the Socratic search for self-understanding.
By relying upon the case study approach ~or understanding of the individual. The contemporary individual's heightened need for his own personal value orientation may be due in large part to his fear that, without fidelity to his own values, he will be ground down by the depersonalizing forces of a mass society whose organizational complexities constantly subordinate each member's need for individuality beneath the bureaucratic demands of institutional establishments. Indeed, many forms of contemporary social protest can not unreasonably be interpreted as attempts by individuals who feel alienated and depersonalized to confront so-called establishments with their own needs to be dealt with as individuals and not merely as atoms in an undifferentiated social mass. It is in reaction to the greyness of the commonality characterizing so much of modern life that modern man seeks the sharpened awareness of differences that occurs through a search for values. It is in this spirit that both psychotherapy and the "new morality" can be regarded as attempts at redressing a social balance that gives short shrift to individual differences. Both seek to accomplish this through awareness of the unique circumstances in each person's life. It is, in other words, possible to interpret each one as being a reaction against those dehumanizing tendencies in modern thought that depersonalize man by interpreting his behavior in terms of abstract economic, social, or political principles. The use of the case study approach has rather obviously been an essential part of the professional lore of the psychotherapist. Ever since Freud instituted the practice of psychoanalysis, clinicians have regarded the case history
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality"
279
method as essential to gathering together all the relevant variables of a patient's past that bear upon his present situation. The case study is, in fact, essential to the understanding of the underlying psychodynamics basic to every type of therapeutic procedure. Indeed, it is on the basis of the case study approach that therapy can be differentiated from advice-giving. While the advicegiver moralistically applies a bromide or truism derived from experience with situations that possess surface resemblances, the therapist, by contrast, attempts to fashion his therapeutic responses into insights that reflect an understanding in depth of the unique human situation of the particular patient. While the use that the "new morality" makes of the case study is not quite so obvious, it will upon reflection be found to be as essential to the "new morality" as itis to psychotherapy. The unique circumstances of each ethical decision must be carefully weighed in the balance. It is appropriate that Joseph Fletcher chose to entitle his already classic exposition of the "new morality" Situation Ethics. The basic concern of the "new morality" is, indeed, with the application of moral principles to the particular social situations. Fletcher's book is therefore appropriately interspersed with illustrative case material. It is significant also that Bishop Pike in a more recent book entitled You and The New Morality: 74 Cases:: almost completely abandons a topical presentation, and relies almost entirely on a case-presentation arrangement. Conclusion
The major thrust of this article has been that the modern individual finds that traditional types of philosophies and theologies no longer provide him with a satisfactory cosmology. Without such a general outlook on life, the individual has the giddy experience of being a rather ephemeral self in a fluid and shifting world. W e have, therefore, in this paper reviewed the parallel ways in which psychotherapy and the "new morality" attempt to provide modern man with meaningful and comprehensible answers as to who he is and what is the meaning and significance of his existence.
280
Journal of Religion and Health
Psychotherapy and the "new morality" have both done much to help modern man discover a system of Values that is both meaningful and personally satisfying. Psychotherapy and the "new morality" are, however, for somewhat different reasons limited in their ability to change decisively the general moral style of contemporary society. Psychotherapy is expensive and time-consuming, and only a small minority of the members of contemporary society can avail themselves of its benefits. And as the author has pointed out, the practice of psychotherapy is itself rent by a multiplicity of value-orientations that make competing and conflicting claims for moral truth. There are also serious practical limitations to the "new morality" as a source of values. In its theological context it depends upon a biblical concept of agape that is somewhat less than universally understood in contemporary society. In addition, the principles of the "new morality" are often difficult to apply in real life. One critic has, therefore, charged that using the "new morality" as a guide to ethical actions is as frustrating as trying to grasp a greased pig. There is a very real danger, therefore, that the psychotherapist and the "new moralist," in spite of good intentions, will both fail to become authoritative sources of values unless each can further enrich his own grasp of the ultimate nature of human behavior. The concerns of the psychotherapist and the "new moralist" complement one another. Each can contribute in different ways to the individual who seeks a more personal set of values, and since there is a significant amount of overlap to ultimate concerns of the psychotherapist and the "new moralist," it is obvious tha t they should have much to say to each other. It would seem appropriate, therefore, for them to work together in helping man secure a more authentic type of individualism. If this takes place, the likelihood is increased that men will be able to advance through a period of moral ferment and uncertainty to a new type of culture in which humanistic, theological, and psychological values can find a more authentic fulfillment. R eferences
1. Lowe, C. M. Value-Orientations in Counseling and Psychotherapy: The Meanings of Mental Heahb. San Francisco, Chandler, 1969. '
Psychotherapy and the " N e w Morality"
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
28I
Murphy, G., Personality. New York, Harper, 1947. Rieff, P., Freud, the Mind of the Moralist. New York, Doubleday, 1961; p. 362. - , The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York, Harper & Row, 1966, p. 243. Fletcher, J., Situation Ethics: The N e w Morality. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1966. Robinson, J. A. T., Honest to God. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1963. Fletcher, op. cir., p. 79. Aiken, H. D., "The New Morals," Harper's, 1963, 236 (1413), 58-72. Fromm, E., Man for Himself. New York, Rinehart, 1947. Aiken, op. cir. Pike, J. A., You and the New Morality: Seventy-four Cases. New York, Harper & Row, 1967.
268
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality" as Sources of Personal Values
C. M A R S H A L L
LOWE
Modern man has to a large extent lost faith in the older systems of belief that provided meaning and psychological structure for his forebears; he therefore finds himself plunged into an experience of alienation and self-doubt. The anxiety and despair that have been the result of the loss of traditional types of faith have produced a crisis fo r man in both the religious and psychological aspects of his life. The theologian is likely to ascribe the bewilderment of modern man to the loss of traditional religious symbols. The psychologist, on the other hand, is likely to describe the so-called emancipated individual as experiencing an identity crisis, or as having difficulty in formulating a consistent and coherent concept of self. While the theologian and the psychologist use different terms to describe the inner state of modern man, theology and psychology both attempt to interpret many common aspects of the contemporary individual's inner world. Both disciplines must therefore deal conceptually with the experiTIaF. P~v. C. MARSHALLLOWE,PH.D., is Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been pastor in a Presbyterian parish in Newark, Ohio, and has worked as a psychologist at the Brecksville (Ohio) V. A. Hospital. He is a member of the Academy.
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality"
269
ence of a modern man who feels bewildered and alienated in a changing world where social guidelines can no longer be experienced as believable or reliable.
The need of the individual for a system of personal values Underlying both the contemporary individual's loss of religious belief and his psychological difficulty in discovering an identity is his difficulty in formulating a system of values that is personally satisfying to him. Elsewhere, I have described values as attempts by the individual to gain an experience of an inner psychological unity that will enable him to encompass psychologically virtually the whole of his life experience.1 It is through values (as also through rather more specific social attitudes) that man learns to impose order and structure upon the world that he experiences at birth as a blooming, buzzing confusion. On the basis of such a schema or psychological blueprint, the individual establishes for himself an implicit set of priorities, which help determine what his purposes shall be. Gardner Murphy has thus described values as canalized drives that provide anchor points for goal-seeking behavior,z It is upon these psychological anchor points that man fashions a cosmology or genera] outlook on life that enables him to find spiritual and religious meaning and significance in his existence. Man rather universally seeks to create an orderly and goal-directed life for himself. Every individual must find a system of attitudes and values that will enable him to arrange hierarchically his choices and experiences so that he can fashion for himself a schema or inner psychological core that will enable him to confront with confidence a world he experiences as being structured and predictable. It is obvious, therefore, that as older systems of faith and sources of belief cease being acceptable as sources of value, man must find a new rationale for his choice of values. Without some justification for his moral choices, it is apparent that man must experience the terror of an unstructured existence in a society so anomieally without form that the individual falls prey to the alternative forms of that existential sickness foretold by Kierkegaard of bland indifference or hopeless despair.
270
]ournal of Religion and Health
Psycbotherapy and the "near morality" as sources of values for the contemporary individual Values are (as we have seen) attempts by the individual to ereate an inner experience of his existence that is uniquely his own. But even though sueh values are both personal and individualistic, the individual is, in the learning of such personal values, never completely self-taught. As he seeks to fashion his own unique eosmology, he is inevitably influenced by the social Zeitgeist. Within the Western world, personal values have to a major extent been formulated out of various aspeets of a general Judaeo-Christian tradition. In the past, therefore, individuals have been largely dependent upon the moral practices and beliefs of a so-called Christian culture for both their religious and psychological outlook upon the world. Since modern man has to a large extent lost faith in older sourees of belief, it is evident that he must search for new sources of values. Man is no longer unquestioningly willing to give assent to authoritarian and dogmatic religious creeds. Similarly, he is increasingly likely to reject traditional soeial moralities. He seeks instead for new types of attitudes and beliefs that will enable him to find meaning and significance among the changing social mores of the eontemporary world. Contemporary man relies upon a number of different sources of direetion in his search for personal values. Many individuals still find traditional types of faith to be meaningful. Others continue to find direetion in political ideologies and other types of secular beliefs. There are, however, a significant number of individuals who find that these traditional sources of direction do not provide personal meaning and direction. W e shall in this paper eonsider two sources of values that appear to be of major current signifieanee. Because of their eontemporary importance, these new sources are able to address themselves effectively to those individuals in modern society who have become estranged and alienated from older sources of value. The first source of eontemporary values for the bewildered individual is psychotherapy. The psychotherapist has, as a moralist, taken over many of the
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality"
271
social roles once performed by the theologian and the moral philosopher. While the psychotherapist is commonly thought of as a scientist trained in psychiatry or one of the behavioral sciences, it is inevitable that his own personal values as to what is basic in human nature profoundly influence his conception of what is wrong with man, his choice of methods in treating those problems, and the definition of mental health that he sets before his client as being the goal or purpose of treatment. The second new source for values is found in the contemporary theological and philosophical movement popularly termed the "new morality." There are many individuals who, having rejected more traditional authorities, also refuse to become beholden either to the psychotherapist or to that interpretation of the nature of human life derived from the behavioral sciences. They seek instead .to find values that have personal significance from more traditional theological and philosophical sources. This attempt to replace the older creedal orthodoxies of theology and moral philosophy with open systems of thought that possess personal meaning and significance seems to be the broad common denominator for that rather diverse ideological movement called the "new morality." How psychotherapy and the "new morality" both function as sources of values
Psychotherapy and the "new morality" are the result of two rather different felds of study. They are based upon quite divergent types of thinking, and t h e i r appeal is to quite different types of individuals. While at first glance these obvious dissimilarities would appear to defy attempts at comparison, there are, upon thoughtful reflection, important similarities between these two systems of thought. Both psychotherapy and the "new morality" have become sources of values for individuals who have become distrustful of older types of moral dogma. Psychotherapy and the "new morality" share a concern for providing the contemporary individual with a value-orientation that is both meaningful and significant in the following ways.
272
lournal of Religion and Health
By providing man with a more individualized set of values. The contemporary individual finds it more and more difficult to derive values that have personal meaning from the customs of his culture. T h e diffuseness of modern society makes it less likely that his culture will provide him with a satisfying set of social roles. As a result, modem man is to an ever increasing extent thrown upon his own inner psychological resources. Since the fashioning of a set of personal values tends to become a "do-it-yourself" affair, the social ferment that has accompanied recent ideological and moral changes can be regarded as being the birth pangs of a more differentiated and authentic kind of individuality. The result has been an increased need for man to maintain fidelity to his own personal value-orientation. The significance of an increased individuality in personal values can be appreciated best by following historical trends. Western civilization during the last thousand years has been witnessing a forward movement from the rigidly prescribed morality of a feudal society where morals are enforced by supernatural sanctions to an open society where there is an increasing tolerance for diversity of values. The decline of the Middle Ages was accompanied by the break-up of a traditional or closed morality that forced the subjugation of the individual to the general social will. The Renaissance ushered in an age of what by almost any standard must be judged to be an era of self-reliant individualism. Nevertheless, the new individualism does not appear in retrospect to have long remained as genuine as the ideologists of the period often imagined. Instead, the spontaneous nature of the new cultural forms took on an increasingly stilted nature with the passage of time. During the Age of Reason, man sought to realize his individuality through an exaltation of his rational powers that at times approached intellectual pretense. The individual came increasingly, therefore, to nourish the illusion that he was so completely set apart from culture that he was completely self-made and rationally self-determining. As a result there was, during the Age o f Reason, a moral sameness, the basis for morality now being the shared ideology of basic truths that were assumed to be self-evident. Post-feudal individualism consequently had about it a stereotyped
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality"
273
moral imprint resembling the mass-produced character of forms stamped out by a cookie cutter. Contemporary man has suddenly become more sophisticated in his thinking about himself. Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes modern man as suddenly having come of age. No longer is the contemporary individual willing to be blindly subservient to the rigidly encapsulated system of religious belief that Bonhoeffer terms a deus ex machina. And similarly he refuses to be swayed any longer by the polemics and apologetics based upon philosophical abstractions. Bonhoeffer describes man as possessing an independence produced by new knowledge of a universe whose mastery has become a much more reasonable challenge. As he has come of age, modern man has also gained insight into his place in society. He has learned that he must achieve a resolution of the need for social solidarky that dominated the Middle Ages with the need for self-reliant individualism that has more recently been the dominant social morality. Thus within our own century man has become aware of the dynamic tension between the need for the individual to experience his own personal value system and the opposing press of a social moralky imposed from without that seeks to enforce adherence to the mores of the culture. Psychotherapy can be regarded as the first vehicle that modern man has chosen in his search for a personal freedom that allows him to choose his own unique set of values. Psychotherapy can justifiably be described as man's search for a more genuine experience of selfhood. Phillip Rieff, in his book Freud, the Mind of the Moralist, uses the phrase "the psychological man" to describe the awareness of newly individualized man of his need to reconcile the seething turbulence of emotional arousal with the demand by society that he conform in an orderly fashion to the requirements of various social institutions. Rieff associates the emergence of the psychological man with the advent of psychoanalysis. Accordingly he describes the successful patient in psychoanalysis as one who "has learned to withdraw from the painful tension and assent and dissent in his relation to society by relating himself more affirmatively to his depths. ''3 He concludes, therefore, that Freud's significance lay in providing a
274
Journal of Religion and Health
negative community that limits the power of the culture to strangle the individual's quest for personality. In his recent book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff traces modern concern for this psychological man as it has evolved with various post-Freudian therapeutic systems. He describes this triumph of the therapeutic in general terms "as a profound effort to end the tyranny of primary group moral passion by learning to live more distinctly from one another. TM Different therapeutic processes seek a more genuine type of individuality in quite different ways. Amidst the broad diversity of a proliferating number of different types of psychotherapy there is, however, a broad common denominator: the enhancement and enrichment of the individual personality. Such a concern is seen in the Rogerian or client-centered concern for an increasingly positive self-regard. In client-centered therapy, the individual is encouraged to express his own individual feelings in what is classically described as a hothouse atmosphere in which the enhancing personal warmth of the therapist is an antidote to the coldness of an impersonal society. Concern for the enhancement of individuality is even more obvious in the newer existential therapies. Here the therapist is much more overt in focusing the client's attention upon the individual responsibility he must take for asserting his freedom in a responsible fashion and finally, an enhancement in individuality can be seen as a basic goal in behavioral or learning theory therapies. By freeing the client from the inhibitions produced by anti-therapeutic types of social learning, behavioral therapies enable the individual to gain a greater degree of self-control over his environment. It is also the aim of the "new morality" to increase man's sense of individual freedom in his choice of values. Such an emphasis seems to be equally prominent in both theological and humanistic interpretations of the "new morality." The "new morality," as it has been embodied within Christian patterns of thought by such theologians as Fletcher ~ and Robinson, 6 has placed emphasis upon a Pauline interpretation of Christian freedom: Man is freed from subservienee to the law to gain spiritual freedom. When so justified by faith, the individual is freed from legalistic and moralistic concerns so that he may ful-
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality"
275
fill the Augustinian admonition to love and do what he pleases or (as Hetcher translates the phrase) "to love with care and then what you will, do. m Theological efforts to establish an agape or love ethic that guarantees a respect for individuality finds an echo in secular interpretations of the "new morality." While secular new moralists seem less concerned than their theological counterparts with transcendental aspects of human personality, they are equally opposed to a conventional morality that judges individual human worth on the basis of degree of adherence to social conventions. Henry D. Aiken thus describes the primary attitude of secular "new moralists" as believing that "moral experience is something wholly real, but its reality is wholly personal. ''s He describes these "new moralists" as being dissatisfied with the social game as it is conventionally played, and therefore as being concerned with replacing conventional morality with a moral code that is more experientially derived. Instead of being based upon the expectations of others, Aiken sees the "new morality" as being built upon what he terms "first-person responsibilities." Morality in this way becomes a personal discovery, as moral principles become first-person precepts for the guidance of one's conduct through the maze of one's life.
By belping the individual find an identity and sense of selfhood. W h e n the individual is uncertain as to what set of values he should espouse, he finds it difficult to know who he is. Some theorists have conceptualized this inability to find a stable identity as being due to a failure to discover a coherent system of social roles. Others have described such a failure in terms of the inability of the individual to develop a concept of self that is able to draw the different aspects of his behavior into a consistent pattern. Rather recently existential thinkers have described the problem as one of finding meaning and significance so that one is able to experience a freedom of choice over one's destiny. Those sources of identity that have in the past supplied individuals with a sense of meaning and significance are lacking in contemporary Western culture. In a traditional society, man was able to define the nature of self through his membership in the tribe or the clan. Since he could identify with a social
276
Journal of Religion and Health
group, the individual hardly found it necessary to look within himself for the meaning of life. Instead, he gained a sense of significance from the strength of a group whose destiny transcended his own. Similarly, man experienced little problem in finding meaning and a sense of significance during the recent period of history in which his values were greatly dominated by his faith in reason. The individual now sought to gain a substantial amount of detachment from his culture, but instead he gained a sense of significance through the achievement of those values that were sanctioned by the Protestant ethic. Man now to a large extent could evaluate himself by the values of the marketplace, the result being what Erich Fromm describes as a marketing orientation that has required the individual to judge his own worth in terms of the value placed upon his abilities by the marketplace? There are among contemporary youth signs of an increasing dissatisfaction with an identity dependent upon recognition by others. A reaction against the values of economic achievement appears to be occurring, and new sets of values that emphasize being rather than doing are emerging. As modern youth seek to become more genuinely individualistic, they seek an identity based upon neither the values of an achievement-oriented activism, nor recognition by others. Instead, they seek an identity based upon their own stabilizing sense of wholeness or inner coherence as part of what Erikson terms a search for fidelity. Both psychotherapy and the "new morality" can be regarded as attempts by contemporary man to replace a moral code based upon the expectations and demands of others with a more personal morality that is more personally meaningful. A broad common denominator that unites what would otherwise be highly divergent types of therapy is, however, the task of helping the individual find a satisfying value-orientation that will help him to gain an enriched experience of his nature. As divergent as different schools of therapy are in both goals and methods, the aim of virtually every method is to help the individual gain control over his life. Psychotherapy does this either by helping the individual grasp his identity or sense of inner selfhood or by teaching him
Psychotherapy and the "Nev: Morality"
277
new behaviors that will increase the effectiveness and the significance of the social roles he performs. Different therapies attempt to provide man with a sense of personal significance in quite different ways. Classical psychoanalysis has heeded the famous admonition of the father of psychoanalysis that where there is id, let there ego be. The purpose of psychoanalysis has accordingly been to increase the individual's control over both the emotional forces emanating from the libido below and from the social pressures acting from without through the superego. More recently, neo-Freudians have interpreted the analytic task more broadly so as to include an interpretation of the self in social terms. Erikson thus has conceptualized the therapeutic task as that of dealing with an identity crisis. Other analysts such as Karen H o m e y and Harry Stack Sullivan have described the task of therapy in terms of authenticity of self. This concern has seen further development in client-centered therapy in which the aim of therapy is to explore that deeper affect that comprises the inner core of one's experience of self. There is even more of an emphasis on the significance and meaning of selfhood in existential types of psychotherapy. For the existentialist, the purpose of therapy is to confront directly those impediments that limit man from assuming responsibility for an authentic type of selfhood. The "new morality" is also concerned with man's search for meaning. It seeks to increase a sense of personal significance by replacing blind obedience {O [ [ I C l a w W l t l l :fi I I I U I ~ ~,IIIK.~;IK; R I I U LIU~DLIOIIIII~ dttempt t o discover a system of morality that possesses personal meaning for the parties involved. Moral principles cease to be literal injunctions to be applied universally and unthinkingly. Nothing can in itself always be labeled as being wrong. Rightness and wrongness are somewhat pragmatically to be judged by their effect upon self and others. The new standard for justice thus ceases being the legal and becomes the personal. The nature of good and evil is now to be judged on the basis of the effect it has on the personality of particular individuals. The "new morality" thus can also be seen as an attempt to encourage the individual to discover for himself a system of values that is more personally
278
]ournal of Religion and Health
significant. The "new morality" can be regarded as a reaction against what Aiken calls a morality based upon "my station and its duties. ''1~ The sanctions for such an "old morality" are incurred through various obligations demanded by the various institutional relationships and practices in which his social life is involved. The "new morality" replaces the demands of so-called institutional establishments with what Aiken describes as a process that is akin to the Socratic search for self-understanding.
By relying upon the case study approach ~or understanding of the individual. The contemporary individual's heightened need for his own personal value orientation may be due in large part to his fear that, without fidelity to his own values, he will be ground down by the depersonalizing forces of a mass society whose organizational complexities constantly subordinate each member's need for individuality beneath the bureaucratic demands of institutional establishments. Indeed, many forms of contemporary social protest can not unreasonably be interpreted as attempts by individuals who feel alienated and depersonalized to confront so-called establishments with their own needs to be dealt with as individuals and not merely as atoms in an undifferentiated social mass. It is in reaction to the greyness of the commonality characterizing so much of modern life that modern man seeks the sharpened awareness of differences that occurs through a search for values. It is in this spirit that both psychotherapy and the "new morality" can be regarded as attempts at redressing a social balance that gives short shrift to individual differences. Both seek to accomplish this through awareness of the unique circumstances in each person's life. It is, in other words, possible to interpret each one as being a reaction against those dehumanizing tendencies in modern thought that depersonalize man by interpreting his behavior in terms of abstract economic, social, or political principles. The use of the case study approach has rather obviously been an essential part of the professional lore of the psychotherapist. Ever since Freud instituted the practice of psychoanalysis, clinicians have regarded the case history
Psychotherapy and the "New Morality"
279
method as essential to gathering together all the relevant variables of a patient's past that bear upon his present situation. The case study is, in fact, essential to the understanding of the underlying psychodynamics basic to every type of therapeutic procedure. Indeed, it is on the basis of the case study approach that therapy can be differentiated from advice-giving. While the advicegiver moralistically applies a bromide or truism derived from experience with situations that possess surface resemblances, the therapist, by contrast, attempts to fashion his therapeutic responses into insights that reflect an understanding in depth of the unique human situation of the particular patient. While the use that the "new morality" makes of the case study is not quite so obvious, it will upon reflection be found to be as essential to the "new morality" as itis to psychotherapy. The unique circumstances of each ethical decision must be carefully weighed in the balance. It is appropriate that Joseph Fletcher chose to entitle his already classic exposition of the "new morality" Situation Ethics. The basic concern of the "new morality" is, indeed, with the application of moral principles to the particular social situations. Fletcher's book is therefore appropriately interspersed with illustrative case material. It is significant also that Bishop Pike in a more recent book entitled You and The New Morality: 74 Cases:: almost completely abandons a topical presentation, and relies almost entirely on a case-presentation arrangement. Conclusion
The major thrust of this article has been that the modern individual finds that traditional types of philosophies and theologies no longer provide him with a satisfactory cosmology. Without such a general outlook on life, the individual has the giddy experience of being a rather ephemeral self in a fluid and shifting world. W e have, therefore, in this paper reviewed the parallel ways in which psychotherapy and the "new morality" attempt to provide modern man with meaningful and comprehensible answers as to who he is and what is the meaning and significance of his existence.
280
Journal of Religion and Health
Psychotherapy and the "new morality" have both done much to help modern man discover a system of Values that is both meaningful and personally satisfying. Psychotherapy and the "new morality" are, however, for somewhat different reasons limited in their ability to change decisively the general moral style of contemporary society. Psychotherapy is expensive and time-consuming, and only a small minority of the members of contemporary society can avail themselves of its benefits. And as the author has pointed out, the practice of psychotherapy is itself rent by a multiplicity of value-orientations that make competing and conflicting claims for moral truth. There are also serious practical limitations to the "new morality" as a source of values. In its theological context it depends upon a biblical concept of agape that is somewhat less than universally understood in contemporary society. In addition, the principles of the "new morality" are often difficult to apply in real life. One critic has, therefore, charged that using the "new morality" as a guide to ethical actions is as frustrating as trying to grasp a greased pig. There is a very real danger, therefore, that the psychotherapist and the "new moralist," in spite of good intentions, will both fail to become authoritative sources of values unless each can further enrich his own grasp of the ultimate nature of human behavior. The concerns of the psychotherapist and the "new moralist" complement one another. Each can contribute in different ways to the individual who seeks a more personal set of values, and since there is a significant amount of overlap to ultimate concerns of the psychotherapist and the "new moralist," it is obvious tha t they should have much to say to each other. It would seem appropriate, therefore, for them to work together in helping man secure a more authentic type of individualism. If this takes place, the likelihood is increased that men will be able to advance through a period of moral ferment and uncertainty to a new type of culture in which humanistic, theological, and psychological values can find a more authentic fulfillment. R eferences
1. Lowe, C. M. Value-Orientations in Counseling and Psychotherapy: The Meanings of Mental Heahb. San Francisco, Chandler, 1969. '
Psychotherapy and the " N e w Morality"
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
28I
Murphy, G., Personality. New York, Harper, 1947. Rieff, P., Freud, the Mind of the Moralist. New York, Doubleday, 1961; p. 362. - , The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York, Harper & Row, 1966, p. 243. Fletcher, J., Situation Ethics: The N e w Morality. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1966. Robinson, J. A. T., Honest to God. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1963. Fletcher, op. cir., p. 79. Aiken, H. D., "The New Morals," Harper's, 1963, 236 (1413), 58-72. Fromm, E., Man for Himself. New York, Rinehart, 1947. Aiken, op. cir. Pike, J. A., You and the New Morality: Seventy-four Cases. New York, Harper & Row, 1967.
