ABSTRACT
And we are right to suspect any technique that alters attitudes, not with the object of restoring the critical faculty, like psychotherapy, but of numbing it. We have argued in earlier chapters that morality requires respect for persons, a willingness to treat everyone as an end, and not solely as a means, and therefore a readiness to attend to their needs and listen to their claims. Anyone who conditions a patient without consulting him must, even on the most charitable estimate, .have decided what was good for him without having let him speak for himself. Psychotherapy aims to bring about a healthy state of mind, and there are agreed criteria, although of rather a negative sort, for estimating its success.* This is its saving feature. Where the patient is unfit to state his own case, we do not give the therapist a free hand to make whatever he likes of his mind, as he thinks best. For benevolent mass conditioning, however, there are no agreed canons; moreover, it may be necessary for the success of painless conditioning that the patient should be unaware of what is being done. At best, then the operator is bound to make his own choice of what is good for others, regardless of what they would think.
