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ABSTRACT
In the last decade there has been a great outburst of ethics upon the psychoanalytic scene, with the appearance of several books and many scholarly articles making a claim for a central role for ethics in our theorizing and practice. One might ask, Why now? In attempting to answer this question, the author considers the position of psychoanalytic therapists as “implicated subjects” (from Rothberg) within the neoliberal political economy, aware of our passive participation in causing widespread harm. Discomfort with this awareness has provoked strenuous assertions of our goodness, which are undercut, however, by some serious ethical lapses. These include our investment as private practitioners in a manner of service delivery that has contributed to a crisis of public access to mental health care; the lack of accountability for harm caused to LGBTQ people by decades of homophobic theorizing and practice; and the concentration of power in our professional organizations.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Steven Botticelli
Steven Botticelli, Ph.D., teaches and supervises at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is a contributing editor for Studies in Gender and Sexuality and The Division/Review, and coeditor (with Adrienne Harris) of First Do No Harm: The Paradoxical Encounters of Psychoanalysis, Warmaking and Resistance (Routledge, 2010).