ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy, more than any other form of health care, is dependent upon personal and ethical integrity among its practitioners. The call for professional ethics and integrity among psychotherapists is understandable in such a context. Codes of ethics contain the rules of conduct or classes of actions adhered to by a particular group. Virtually every professional organization in psychotherapy has its own ethical code. In psychotherapy, ethical codes develop to prohibit such exploitation of patients or clients in one way or another. No ethical code among the major mental health professions prohibited sexual relationships between psychotherapists and their clients until the American Psychiatric Association adopted such a measure in 1973. As ethical codes grew among professional organizations, so has awareness of their limitations. For one thing, their protective function could only produce a catalog of unrelated rules governing this practice or that. Milton Mayerhoff in his monograph, On Caring, suggested that this endeavor to care for others generates its own ethic.
