The inability of the field of psychotherapy to enter into moral discourse according to limitations imposed by the epistemology and ontology it has borrowed from academic psychology was used as a deconstructive heuristic to examine the assumptions underlying these foundations. A search was made for components from which a more appropriate foundation for psychotherapy might be constructed by examining the relationship of being to value in early Greek thought, the contemporary writings of Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, and the Buddhist viewpoints of Nagarjuna and Shantideva. Tentative psychotherapy foundations are suggested in which value, rather than consisting of an optional appendage to being, is both integral and constuitive. At the same time, I maintain that shifts in value deconstruct being, allowing alternative configurations to emerge that may be psychotherapeutically useful. In this view, truth is a situationally, rather than cognitively, based creatively appropriate response that is healing. Arguments for this interpretation are presented at two levels of discourse, one in terms of conceptual analysis and the other personal narrative based on a phenomenological account of the AIDS pandemic.
