Self-Examination

Self-Knowledge as self-improvement in Plato’s dialogues and cognitive behavioural therapy

“…In other words, it is the examination of one's belief-sets. The "truth" of these beliefs does not mean that the person truly believes them, rather it means that these are actually true (Rowe, 2010). One way of assessing beliefs is via Socratic elenchus during which a thesis is presented and examined by questioning.…”

“…This seems plausible when taking into consideration a previous statement of his that knowledge of the truth of beliefs is nothing individual, in the sense of anything personal, involved; the subject is not Socrates, with all his peculiarities, his history, his traumas, and his genetic inheritance, but a set of ideas and a programme that, as he has proposed, should be taken up by everybody, because-Socrates claims-that will enable them to live better lives-that is to achieve the happiness that we all inevitably want. (Rowe, 2010, p. 210) A point worth making is that in the first quote Rowe (2010) states, "that finding out what the truth is, is more important than anything else" (p. 210), however in the second quote it seems that this is actually a condition for something more important which is to "enable them to live better lives" (p. 210). This further emphasises the nature of the importance of self-improvement in Platonic and psychotherapeutic self-knowledge.…”

“…It is not uncommon for people to equate all psychotherapy to a type of Freudian psychoanalysis; however, this is not the case for most contemporary forms of psychotherapy, particularly not CBT (A. T. Beck, 1979) and not in terms of the function of clients' self-knowledge or disclosure (Farber, 2006). The process of CBT and collaborative empiricism in the context of self-knowledge and cognitive restructuring is a lot more like Rowe's (2010) idea of an academic tutorial of finding out what is the truth, than he acknowledges. In collaboration with the therapist, clients are encouraged to explore their beliefs based on observations of empirical data.…”

“…Although Rowe (2010) believes that he is opposing the link between Platonic selfknowledge and CBT, he may alternatively be providing a route linking the two. This function of personal histories in CBT is in congruence with Rowe's (2010) concluding remark:…”

“…In this article, I clarify the scene by examining arguments which oppose a substantial link between the two. As a starting point for my case, I present Rowe's (2010) objection to the idea that Platonic self-knowledge is related to self-knowledge in psychotherapy. I then focus on two aspects of Rowe's argument, which represent the foundation of his objection.…”