Ethical Processes in Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

This chapter explores the foundational role of ethical experience in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy, from the perspective of theory as well as technique. The author reviews seminal ethical constructs across the range of analytic perspectives, including classical psychoanalysis, object relations theory, self-psychology, and contemporary relational/intersubjective thought. While all forms of psychotherapy recognize the importance of ethically grounded principles of care, psychoanalysis is unique in its theorizing about the relevance of ethics to fundamental aspects of the clinical process itself, including therapeutic goals, therapeutic outcomes, and “how change happens” in psychotherapy. These areas of theory are surveyed, along with some basic ethical tensions generated by defining aspects of psychodynamic praxis: the ethics of unconscious exploration, the ethics of “working in the transference,” the ethics of exploratory technique, and the ethics of treatment intensity.