ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic treatment embeds dignity as a clinical provision into that individual listening. This chapter argues that dignity is implicit in a technical stance of neutrality, abstinence, and relative anonymity—sometimes controversial concepts these days. For D. W. Winnicott, his survival brings joy, to which we would add dignity, to the patient as a whole person and to the therapeutic relationship, which can be trusted—almost in the engineering sense—to hold the full weight of the patient's affectivity. If dignity is about worth, the "worthy opponent" dimension of treatment is worth noticing. A colleague in the social conflict field commented that troubled societies suffer from three deficits: "a development deficit, a democracy deficit, and a dignity deficit." Dignity, within the community's work, as distinct from the psychotherapist's work, has to do with the staff's commitment to considering symptomatic eruption in group and systems terms.
