ABSTRACT
Ethical questions arising in the course of therapeutic work mobilise the psychotherapist’s superego in helpful and hindering ways. The therapist’s task of maintaining the therapeutic relationship on an ethical footing often proves complex and uncertain. In this chapter I offer a triangulating model with three reference points – ethical principles, the analytic framework and the defining features of the psychoanalytic model – to assist the therapist to create a mental space in which to think through the conflicts of interests at stake between, and within, therapist and patient and to hold the necessary uncertainty about the ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ of the outcomes of ethical thought.
