In this article, philosophical hermeneutics is combined with interpretive social science perspectives to generate a framework for considering the influence of cultural values and assumptions on counseling theory and practice. The core of this framework is the claim that people necessarily live within moral visions that answer the questions: (a) what is a person? and (b) what should a person be or become? Culture provides answers to these questions not only through folk and indigenous psychologies but also by shaping psychological and counseling theories. Moral visions are generally unacknowledged because of the fact-value dualism and the ideals of neutrality that pervade Western culture. Consequently, moral visions, like individualism, operate as disguised ideology in counseling theory and practice.
C ounseling theory and practice embody different conceptions of what a person is and what
a person should be or become. In some ways this idea has been around almost as long as counseling itself. For example, May (1967) discussed at length how counseling and psychotherapy depend on presuppositions about human nature that are prior to scientific research and theorizing. Ellis (1973) noted that "all psychology is, at bottom, a value system" (p. 28). Similarly, Wachtel (1977) added that "the theories that guide contemporary therapeutic efforts both reflect and shape the culture's view of human potential and the good life" (p. 3). However, despite statements by May,