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Choice, consciousness and ideological language

  • Psychiatry and Freedom
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Abstract

Because psychotherapists are not moral teachers, they ought not to advise their clients about evaluative questions. This means that their advice must be limited to a concern with the client's view of reality. It happens that in our times, there are prefabricated views of reality on offer from a variety of ideologies-Marxism and feminism being currently the most influential. Ideologists not only offer prefabricated realities-called consciousness- but also present a set of arguments to show that because choice is unreal, consciousness is all that matters. Adopting the ideological concept of consciousness thus becomes a backdoor variant of the ultimate sin against scientific method: namely smuggling unsubstantiated, indeed undiscussed, values into therapy.

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Minogue, K. Choice, consciousness and ideological language. Metamedicine 3, 351–366 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00900937

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00900937

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