Value bracketing is a clinical practice proposed by graduate-level mental health counseling educators to help therapists-in-training learn how to avoid imposing their private values on clients as well as how to manage value conflicts with clients that emerge during the course of therapy. With value bracketing during professional work, a therapist does not refer to his or her private values so as not to influence a client’s decision-making process. When some academic writers describe this practice, however, they risk overemphasizing the distinction made between a therapist’s private values and the professional values that regulate his or her clinical work. This overemphasis is especially apparent in the assertion that a therapist’s religious morality must be entirely separated from the ethics of professional practice. In contrast with this viewpoint, I maintain that a Catholic therapist can both avoid imposing values on clients while at the same time balance value bracketing with the integration of religious morality into professional work. I approach this integration in two ways. First, I approach therapy from the perspective of the intellectual tradition from which value bracketing originates (the tradition of qualitative research involving phenomenological interviewing). From this perspective, I agree that bracketing is methodologically necessary during the stage of clinical interviewing but not necessarily during the stage of treatment planning (when both therapist and client consent to seek particular treatment goals). Second, I outline moral criteria derived from the Catholic intellectual tradition that can help therapists exercise practical wisdom when discerning their professional involvement in how clients will apply treatment outcomes outside of the therapy. Summary: The goal of the foregoing discussion has been to explore how therapists might balance the clinical practice of value bracketing with a supplemental practice of value integration. Ways were sought for Catholic therapists to adopt the practice of value bracketing without it requiring the professional affirmation (in thought, word, or deed) of client decisions and behaviors that contradict the therapist’s private value system. An integration strategy to professional acculturation was explored where students and professionals seek to balance value bracketing with value integration. This balance is primarily to be located in the collaborative work of the therapist and the client when formulating a treatment plan together. At this stage of clinical work, a Catholic therapist consents to seek goals not only as a professional but also as a follower of Christ.

Aquinas’ denial that God has a real relation with the world results in the difficulty of understanding how God creates, knows, wills, and loves the world without entering into a real relation with the world. Because of this perplexity, the contemporary philosopher William Lane Craig argues that Aquinas’ doctrine is ‘extraordinarily implausible.’ After reviewing Aquinas’ teaching in the Summa theologiae, I consider Craig's criticism and then attempt to defend Aquinas’ teaching. In this defense, I consider Aquinas’ teaching as heir to Aristotle, Lombard, and Augustine. I also look at Aquinas’ teaching in relation to his discussions of the divine immutability, knowledge, will, and love.

Contemporary mental health professionals exhibit interest in integrating spirituality into the services they provide to clients. This clinical integration raises questions about both the goals of mental health services and the professional relevance of mental health providers’ spiritual competency. Drawing on the Christian anthropology of St. Thomas Aquinas, Benedict Ashley’s approach to psychotherapy differentiates psychopharmacological, psychotherapeutic, and spiritual approaches on the basis of the different domains of a client’s personality. These domains are the focus of different professions, and Ashley’s account suggests that mental health providers who lack additional spiritual-moral training should adopt a clinical model that recognizes their work is spiritually oriented but not spiritually directive.

No abstract

Kwang-Kuo Hwang provides numerous recommendations for how to develop an indigenous cultural psychology. These recommendations may be understood to suggest proceeding according to three stages: (1) beginning with philosophical reflection on the meaning of modernization and exploring the topics of reality and structure (where such reflections ground one’s subsequent development of meta-models concerning self and social interaction), (2) adopting such meta-models as a hermeneutic for interpreting texts associated with one’s cultural tradition, and (3) conducting experimental studies on the basis of hypotheses derived from such cultural interpretations. Hwang’s philosophy is valuable in that it exemplifies a postmodern approach to cultural psychology that integrates traditional pre-modern forms of wisdom with modern methods of scientific investigation.