ABSTRACT
This chapter considers practical ethics, the ‘rules of engagement’ that form a container for the therapeutic relationship. Such ethics can be introjected and practiced without fully being assimilated. However, there are also those ethics that create an ethical attitude, that are concerned with being rather than doing. The chapter provides a dialogue between the client and therapist, who move towards acknowledging each other’s humanness in an ethical meeting. There is a movement towards the other by both parties, one human being recognising the suffering of another human being, and in this process, contact boundaries soften and the roles of therapist and client are stripped back to reveal a sufferer and one who recognises that suffering. An ethical way of being forms the ground upon which ethical issues such as therapeutic boundaries, fees and codes of ethics stand, ‘the ethical relation is not grafted on to an antecedent relation to cognition; it is a foundation and not a superstructure’.
