ABSTRACT
The expectation that high ethical standards be consistently maintained in clinical practice is common to psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. Both the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP) have this principle enshrined in their constitutions and Codes of Ethics, and as a matter of good governance review their ethics provisions regularly. Freud pointed to the development of two regulating systems relevant to moral behaviour that seem to reflect the operation of the talion law and the principle of agape. The internalization of the experience of non-talionic relating nourishes psychically, mentally, and emotionally, as recent neuropsychological research has indicated. In the teleological perspective in which the self is always becoming more itself, the self is supported in its development through the symbolic capacity of the transcendent function and the creative resources of the unconscious. Analytic practice and the ethical attitude are intimately bound together; each permeates the other and defines and gives value to the other.
