ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to develop an ethic that subsumes and exceeds liabilities and procedures, positioning our ethics and our actions deeply within the person of the therapist and the therapeutic relationship itself. It argues that changes brought about through post-modernity, growing cultural awareness, and changes in psychoanalytic theory itself require psychoanalysis to pursue the development and practice of a thick ethic. In 2004, Browning and Cooper's critique of psychotherapeutic ethics is that our theoretical models and/or association standards do not take into account one's history, including one's unacknowledged culture, including, but not limited to, ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status, religion, and so on. Objectivity suggests absolute detachment; distanciation points to the simultaneous use of one's historical horizon and yet partial detachment from it to examine and test that very horizon. Thus, the professional, theoretical, personal, and communal ethics strengthen each other, deepening our ethical awareness, and offer a greater accountability in our clinical work.
