New Article – ‘Judgement in Psychotherapy’

I have published a new article on ‘judgement’ as a comparative analysis of its role in psychoanalysis and in cognitive theory.

The article will be available to anyone who subscribes to the BACP’s ‘Private Practice’ periodical in the July ’23 edition.

Here is a snippet….

The Role of Judgement in Psychotherapy 

Freud .v. cognitive theory? 

The dominant theory of emotions in the latter part of the twentieth century was that they are a form of evaluative judgement concerning an object, be that a person, a thing, or a situation. Accordingly, any feeling of pity I have toward ‘A’, for instance, is preceded by the judgement that  ‘‘A’ is worthy of pity’. What we will simply call the ‘judgement theory’ is primarily associated with the cognitivist school of philosophy and psychology, which represented a departure from both Freud’s highly influential instinct theory and the physicalism of the late nineteenth century. 

For the purpose of this essay, we can say that a founding assumption in cognitive psychology and philosophy alike, is that judgement, discernment – thinking – is our principle tool in understanding the world. Our emotional experience is mediated through how and what we think and, as such, does not represent a direct experience of the world. 

What this brief paper will try to illustrate, firstly, is that Freud was in fact explicit in stating the importance of the concept of ‘judgement’ in psychoanalytic theory. This will entail a response to criticisms of Freud that he was ‘in need of an account of the meaning that he located in an emotion’s intentionality’ (Deigh, 2009, p26), what I will call the ‘because’ of an emotional state: why it is being expressed as such. We will argue also that a cost of Freud’s own account of judgement is that Freudianism remains vulnerable to the accusation of pessimism. Secondly, we will suggest that it is in fact judgement theory itself that must be considered tenuous and, finally, we will attempt a synthesis of views between the cognitivist and the psychoanalytic view of judgement; one which demonstrates not only their differences but their mutual dependence.