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On behalf of the American Psychoanalytic Association and as Chairman of its Committee on Liaison with the A.A.A.S., I want to welcome you to this symposium on 'Ethics, Moral Values and Psychological Interventions'. It was arranged by our Committee to continue its ongoing dialogues with scientific colleagues in related disciplines. Psychoanalysis is not only a specialized scientific psychological discipline but also has its general interfaces with humanities, the social sciences, medicine, education and anthropology, etc. Thus our previous panels at the A.A.A.S. have been concerned not only with long-range effects of sensory deprivation and interfaces with education, but with Youth: Ego-ideals and the Impact of Culture, the Adaptive Value of Human Aggression and Psycho-history. So we welcome this opportunity to continue our interdisciplinary dialogue with fellow scientists.
Our focus here on the ethics and moral values inherent in the psychological interventions of current therapies was formulated with the idea of determining whether we could arrive at some general concensus of what constitutes a workable ethical and moral matrix from which therapists can proceed to direct their therapeutic efforts for patients in psychological or psychosomatic distress, (although these are not mutually exclusive). This will no doubt take us into many areas not considered in our original design. However, speaking as psychoanalysts, we are quite familiar with our own prolonged self-scrutiny, undertaken as part of our training analyses. They are a kind of preliminary calibration of our psychic apparatus before venturing to analyse others. Since this is undertaken in our five to eight year post-graduate education, we accept certain standards of maturation and maturity as part of our armamentarium (and as a necessary by-product also). In this process many unconscious dynamic systems have become a matter of growing awareness for us so that when we have reintegrated them into our