A shred of revolution: the ethics and politics of psychotherapy

Abstract

It is easy today to see psychotherapy as a branch of the service-industry society, personalized to the degree that maladjustments are still all too often seen as an individual matter. We will argue that the nature of psychotherapy cannot be understood if the nature of ethics is not properly understood. Psychotherapy is not a monadic hocus-pocus on, about, of, and to the »psyche«. The domain of our work as psychotherapists is the domain of human life proper, and thus of ethics and politics, for the question of what it is to live a good life is inseparable from the notion of human beings as zoon politikon. How can major concepts from Aristotle’s ethics help us to understand the practice of psychotherapy? Discussing this question is as intricate as understanding the world brought by every client when entering the psychotherapy room. We will see that the shortcomings of neoliberal thought in its forgetfulness of the political in favor of the social and the private, is paradoxically a forgetfulness of the ethical and of the limits to simplification whenever one treats the domain of human matters.