EXPANDING ETHICS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS: A DISCUSSION OF HILARY MADDUX’S “MEETING OUR PATIENTS HALFWAY: TOWARD AN ETHIC OF CARE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS” AND ELIZABETH CORPT’S “THE ETHICS OF LISTENING IN PSYCHOANALYTIC CONVERSATIONS”

Abstract

This discussion of Maddux’s and Corpt’s important and moving papers offers additional perspectives for enriching our appreciation of the work they are doing to expand our clinical ethics. I look at Gilligan, Dinnerstein, “Mad Men,” and my own experience to further explore Maddux’s attention to the construction of gender in the formulation of care as “soft,” and view both analysts’ clinical vignettes with a complexity sensibility. I affirm the richness of their theoretical ideas and add my own notion of an interpretative attitude to Corpt’s discussion of a response to her patient. Using brief clinical examples of my own, I illuminate how Maddux and Corpt, as well as my patients, have taught me to quiet my pushy self and listen more carefully.

Keywords:

• complexity sensibility
• ethic of care
• ethics of listening
• ethical turn in psychoanalysis
• ethically challenged times
• interpretive attitude

Notes

¹ Iterations of these ideas are ubiquitous in our #MeToo era (Vedantam, 2018).

² In his New York Times column “The 2016 Exit Polls Led Us to Misinterpret the 2016 Election” (March 29, 2018) Thomas B. Edsall focuses on a recent Pew Research Center analysis that changes the narrative of Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 US presidential election. He calls on Democratic strategists, as they craft their message for 2018 and 2020, to attend to William Gallston’s 2016 analysis for the Brookings Center: “On every front—economic, cultural, personal security— [the white working class, that voted in greater numbers than previous analyses estimated, feels] threatened and beleaguered. They seek protection against all the forces they perceive as hostile to their cherished way of life — foreign people, foreign goods, foreign ideas, aided and abetted by a government they no longer believe cares about them. Perhaps this is why fully 60 percent of them are willing to endorse a proposition that in previous periods would be viewed as extreme: the country has gotten so far off track that we need a leader who is prepared to break some rules if that is what it takes to set things right [my italics].”