ABSTRACT
Over recent years there has been an enormously powerful trend towards making the practice of psychotherapy and counselling safe. Tim Bond is largely responsible for giving credibility to current approaches to professional ethics, particularly within British Association for Counselling and psychotherapy (BACP). Risk and uncertainty are inescapable existential challenges that face all therapists and their clients, and they are often only partially and inadequately addressed in existing approaches to ethics. The conscious and deliberate risk taking is in fact an ethical requirement, and the only way to mitigate the dangers of unconscious risk taking. Risk taking is as unavoidable in therapy as it is in life. Therapy is not a medical practice, but a practice of truth; hence measures of efficacy and effectiveness are at cross purposes to its project. The imaginary power to cure social ills which therapy is granted goes alongside an imaginary power to do harm.
