Life Vocations

Abstract

Marsha Linehan’s dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) rests on a dialectical worldview that practitioners experience as clinically effective. Linehan’s own framing locates that worldview in a lineage running through dialectical materialism, the philosophy systematized by Friedrich Engels from Karl Marx’s thought. This essay argues that, although the materialist lineage is the one most often cited, the actual philosophical substance of DBT’s dialectic is more faithfully Hegelian than Marxian. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel, the essay distinguishes the Marxian dialectic—materialist, antagonistic, and historically teleological—from the Hegelian dialectic of sublation (Aufhebung) and reconciliation (Versöhnung). It then maps DBT’s central synthesis of acceptance and change onto the Hegelian model, in which contradiction is resolved not by the victory of one pole but by a higher integration that preserves both. The conclusion considers what this reframing clarifies and what it does not claim.