The Proper Aim of Therapy: Subjective Well- Being, Objective Goodness, or a Meaningful Life?

What should psychotherapists be aiming to achieve with their clients? In seeking to answer this question, this chapter enquires into whether there is good reason to believe in a certain final end that is appropriate for therapy. In seeking out the final end of therapy, this chapter is not fundamentally interested in means that are particularly useful for attaining it. Making a client feel heard and interpreting a dream s/he has shared are often apt tools for obtaining a certain, ultimate goal, where this chapter is solely concerned to identify what that goal ought to be, not how to achieve it effectively. Similarly, it is not concerned with moral constraints on the way that a therapist ought to pursue the proper aim of therapy. A therapist normally ought to keep facts about a client’s past confidential and ought not to engage in a sexual relationship with him/her. These are plausible restrictions on the way a therapist should interact with clients, and clearly do not constitute what the point of the therapy is. Some might suggest that there are myriad points of therapy, varying from client to client. That is of course true at one level, but is quite dubious at another. At a certain level of specificity, each client is of course different and calls for a particular aim on the part of the therapist. Some clients have an interest in overcoming a fear of intimacy, others an addiction, others a tendency to dominate, still others an inclination toward wishful thinking, and so on. However, stepping back, it is plausible to think that there are some commonalities among how clients are badly off and what a therapist ought to be striving to achieve with them. After all, dependence on alcohol is not qualitatively different from addiction to drugs; and then arguably those conditions are not all that distinct from being overly attention seeking or being