Pluralism and the basis of freewill in psychotherapy

In the context of the European Association for Psychotherapy (EAP)'s strengthening of its pluralistic vision through the accrediting of organisations to award the European Certificate of Psychotherapy, and its democratic development of its constitutional structures the papers in this issue are an expression of this pluralistic system of values. Geoff Heath's new paper charts a journey for psychotherapy away from positive science models of reality, towards a model or vision of an irreducibly value-laden form of embodied and emotional being in the world. Paul Ziolo explores the part monastic history played in creating the culture we still are suffering from, of the emotional cauterisation and emasculation, in education, of children. John Nuttall's exploration is of how there is open to us the possibility of, in a very post-modern way, juxtaposing , and thus relativising, models of integration in psychotherapy, not only with each other, but with their analogues in the social world and the world of cultural artefact, such as in architectural design.The issue culminates in Dr Goldberg's emphasis upon the basis, in upbringing, of acquiring an ethical-emotional conscience , and the consequences of its lack in the Nazi functionaries, whose values, though not crudely insane or sadistic, were those of introjected obedience. The implication is that psychotherapy has to regain emotional values, such as those of friendship, which are wider than those derived from the Freudian superego, and its analogues, which are based primarily upon environmental introjection.