Creating a Space for Responsibility: Reply to Commentary of Donna Orange

Abstract

In response to Donna Orange’s discussion in which she addresses the relationship between informed consent and one’s ethical response to the Other, I attempt to articulate that informed consent is born at the moment of an analyst’s responding to her patient’s demand prior to the awareness of his professional role. Informed consent proclaims the birth of a human relationship in which both participants take responsibility for each other’s suffering. I conclude that it is part of the fundamental ethics of our professional work to create a space for mutual responsibility, for the future therapeutic relationship, in the present relationship, and that the analyst’s efforts in this regard can be a way of making the impossibility of informed consent possible in an intersubjective field.

Keywords:

• ethical turn
• human dignity
• human relationship
• informed consent
• responsibility