You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a book that I suggest should become obligatory reading for all trainees and qualified counsellors, psychotherapists and analysts, regardless of their orientation. Co-authored by seventeen Jungian analysts from around the globe (of whom ten are women), and with a provocative foreword by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, this deceptively slim volume is readily accessible to all those in the therapeutic professions. But it is a book that requires careful reading and challenges the reader to question and reflect upon ethical codes, the assumptions of which can sometimes be internalized without sufficient thought.
The title is somewhat misleading: it hints at addressing the spectrum of ethics in psychotherapeutic practice. In fact, its thrust is directed at sexual acting-out between therapist and patient, and that seems valid particularly at a time when the profession is under relentless attack, partly justified by an increasing number of reports of sexual abuse on the part of therapists.
The book is divided into four sections: ‘Evolution of ethics’; ‘Metatheories of ethics’; ‘Dilemma of the analyst, the healer, and the community’: ‘Behind ethics: archetypal dimensions.’ Its treasures lie in a specific dynamic — the potentially creative tension between an individuating personal ethic and a collective historical ethic, the latter based primarily on medicine and the Hippocratic oath, an oath, which one needs to remember, is based on a prohibition (the first duty is not to harm) rather than on a prescription of proper conduct. But readers hoping for prescriptions will be disappointed. The book is an exploration, inviting us to view the prism of ethics from the personal, social and cultural vertices of the authors, which had the dual effect on me of softening rigidly held opinions and sharpening woolly thinking.