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This panel speaks to the vulnerability of the clinician and to the responsibility and integrity with which it is managed. A symposium on the value of consultations was conceived by the Ethics Committee of the Psychoanalytic Consortium as a consciousness-raising project. The symposium was presented as an invited panel of the Division of Psychoanalysis (Division 39) at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, August 1998, and then as a component of the Fourth International Conference on Sexual Misconduct by Psychotherapists, Other Health Care Professionals, and Clergy, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Boston, October 1998. The Ethics Committee seeks to promote, among all professional mental health providers, a climate of awareness of ethical principles, and the continual practice of self-monitoring necessitated by each clinican's ongoing susceptibility to ethical conflicts and dilemmas.
Mindful of how the privacy and intensity of the analytic process challenge every analyst to manage highly evocative, destabilizing, or enticing moments in the treatment relationship, we believe that the establishment of a regular practice of consultations—(perhaps two or three a year) by all analysts (and, ultimately, all professional psychotherapists) would support the individual practitioner to maintain a check on personal vulnerabilities, blind spots, or interactive lapses in the clinical work. We assume that, aside from the extreme cases of predatory clinicians, most ethical violations could be prevented