ABSTRACT
A particularly egregious pathway toward dignity violation is generated whenever patients become caught between conflicting professional opinions or paradigms of understanding. The core psychoanalytic literature rarely addresses dignity. However, the literatures of applied psychoanalysis, medical ethics, gender studies, recovery and patient advocacy, nursing, quality of life, end of life care, assisted suicide, and quality of care have accorded greater importance to dignity. The world of psychoanalysis continues to struggle with the subjects of external reality and the treatment of trauma. Significant strides have been made, but one need only attend the discussion groups and panels of psychoanalytic organisations to appreciate how poorly contributions made by modern psychoanalytic explorers of trauma have become integrated into the thinking and practice of so many of their colleagues. Israeli psychoanalyst Ilany Kogan described her analysis of a woman who, like Kogan herself, was a second-generation Holocaust survivor.
