ABSTRACT

The term 'ethical imagination' refers to the analyst's modes of thinking about various forms of enactment of the unconscious transference-counter transference or psychical entanglement between patient and analyst. The analyst's thinking that sometimes follows associational drift is often a precondition for clarifying the unconscious intrapsychic-interpersonal implications of an interpretive shift or transition in our understanding with the patient. It is interesting and a bit paradoxical that in many ways most psychoanalytic models have more procedural transparency regarding maintaining the analyst's privacy than is so for the relational model. Benjamin the part of the analyst's mind and experience that considers how to reach a patient and aspects of moral responsibility in doing so. The analyst's receptivity to the patient's mind and his own involves an 'ethic of hospitability' which, in turn, includes an ethic of responsibility about both his attunement to the patient's unconscious life and his or her participation in that life within the analytic process.