ABSTRACT
There has been a surge of interest recently in matters pertaining to ethical issues within the analytic and psychotherapeutic professions. No doubt this interest has been activated in part by increased calls for accountability in the helping professions from the general public, by steps taken towards voluntary and now towards statutory registration of psychotherapists, by ethical questions relating to genetic and foetal research that have raised awareness of ethical issues generally, and by an increasing number of ethics complaints brought against practitioners. But I suspect that these reasons alone do not account for what amounts to a radical change in focus and interest in ethics matters. The expectation that high ethical standards be consistently maintained in clinical practice has been a principle enshrined in the Constitution and Code of Ethics of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP). Recently, the IAAP has devoted considerable organisational time and energy to improving and updating its ethics provisions. But however much we require at the institutional level that ethics be taken as a core value, and rightly insist on the principle of high ethical standards for our profession, we have not really worked out a depth psychological understanding of this core value. There has been little attempt to locate and understand the ethical attitude as an intrinsic component of the self, or, indeed, to locate the ethical attitude as an intrinsic component of the analytic attitude, which seeks to protect the development of the self and of that so intimate of relationships, between patient and analyst. Indeed, rather curiously and with some notable exceptions, ethics does not receive much exposure, if any, in our training curricula, and even less do theories about the origins and functioning of an ethical capacity or attitude in human beings appear in analytic literature. This chapter will attempt to make a contribution to this needed enquiry.
