ethics - Blogs - Depth Psychology Alliance2024-03-28T21:56:35Zhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/ethicsBody Wisdom Spainhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/body-wisdom-spain2014-05-06T21:20:21.000Z2014-05-06T21:20:21.000ZBrigitte Hansmannhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/BrigitteHansmann<div><p style="text-align:center;"><img alt="ORGANIZA:" class="attachment-200x99 aligncenter" src="http://www.bodywisdomspain.com/wp-content/uploads/BODYWISDOM_1.png" height="99" width="200" /></p><p>III International Congress Body Wisdom Spain "Vital connections: the Essential Function of Fascia in Movement and Structure", June 6-7, in Benicassim, Spain</p><p>I will talk about</p><ul><li><h6><em><b style="letter-spacing:0px;">Towards a fuller understanding of the interaction between myofascial tone and water – Working with beliefs reflected in liquid cristal</b></em></h6></li></ul><p style="text-align:justify;" lang="en-us" xml:lang="en-us">Hypertonic tissues keep wide areas of human experience underneath the threshold of consciousness. When they acquire an optimal resting tone, possible with efficient alignment in the gravitational field, the flow of sensory information is recovered. It becomes possible then to examine it and to discern to what extent experience belongs to a remembered present or actually reflects the present moment, because to an educated eye it becomes clear like a reflection on the surface of coherently ordered water. From underneath the threshold of consciousness, on the other hand, highly charged contents are usually projected onto others and one remains caught in repetitive cycles of reactivity. Experiences that seem utterly personal and intimate often turn out to have a collective dimension, linking the individual to all other living beings across space and time. With structural integration and somatic pattern recognition it becomes possible to find support within oneself as well as in the material world we all are a part of, and take on the task of recognizing the parts of our experience we tend to hide from ourselves as parts and representatives of the shadow side of the whole human race. In this way, one by one, every individual has the power to bring mankind a step closer to truly ethical behavior or to move us farther away from it.</p></div>The Incest Taboo - in therapy and in lifehttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/the-incest-taboo-in-therapy-and-in-life2014-04-15T14:16:19.000Z2014-04-15T14:16:19.000ZJane Platkohttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/JanePlatko<div><p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9142447461,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img width="500" height="534" class="align-full" style="width:188px;height:269px;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9142447461,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9142447461?profile=original" /></a><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">In my story of how after nine months of some pretty intense psychotherapy my patient and I decided to end our therapeutic relationship for a more emotionally and spiritually honest coupling that leveled the playing field, even in its telling, I break a taboo. The publication of my account of what it has been like for my husband and me to live with this history for twenty-four years has elicited the predicted ire and scorn from parts of the psychological community.</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">The evolution of a therapy relationship into an intimate relationship is a highly charged topic. It unearths an archetype, threatening the cornerstone of psychotherapy from back in the day of Freud and Jung. The incest taboo. This taboo lies at the core of the transference phenomena, where the conscious and unconscious of both therapist and patient meet and mix in ways not dissimilar to the ways we all relate to one another, but with the exception that in therapy it is the therapist’s responsibility to do whatever she can do to bring consciousness into the resulting stew of projection and projective identification better known as human relationship. Which is a very long-winded way of saying the buck stops at the therapist’s door. And it is, I believe, every therapists' conscious desire to do no harm.</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">The bottom-line here points to what in psychotherapy is imaged as the inner or interior child of the patient. It is the patient’s child-self that must be protected at all cost. The two-year rule found in many psychological ethics codes, which mandates a two-year waiting period between the termination of therapy and the beginning of a sexually intimate relationship, is primarily designed to keep the former patient’s child-self safe from any sexual exploitation. An inarguable intention.</font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">Let me be perfectly clear. I am not, nor have I ever been, an advocate of converting therapy relationships into sexual relationships. Though I have dared to reveal intimate details of my history in an effort to show how the broken pieces of my psyche fit into the puzzle of my husband’s psyche in a way that brought us together, there is nothing cavalier in that telling.</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">I say in my memoir,</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">"To my mind the move from analysis to a romantic partnership was necessarily daunting and those who made it blithely were fools, or worse. But to declare that a union forged along the seam of transference was sure to fail would be a poor prognosis for most relationships—so much of attraction being borne of projection.</font></span></p><div><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">I do agree there must be rules to protect the vulnerable. But there will be exceptions to any rule. And those stories have a right to be heard."</font></span></p></div><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">And the forbidden, I believe, must be continually revisioned and renamed. What exactly are we talking about? What anathema? What map locates love, need, desire, and abuse? And where are the wise counselors able to fine tune the mapmaking?</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">There needs to be clarity in language, certainly in psychology. Is there really no difference between incest committed between adults and children in families and the incestuous pulls in therapy and in life?</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">From the start, my husband maintained that I reminded him of his mother. Only in the best sense, he would say. His mother, who had her demons, was one of the most generous, funny, salt of the earth, intelligent women I’d ever met. In fact, I experienced her in many ways as the mother I’d never had, and my mother-in-law and I became close friends. Sweet, some might say.</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">Others could argue my vulnerable husband was seduced by his therapist mother, and make a case against our relationship, a relationship in which we have been mostly happy together for twenty-four years, calling it pathological, exploitive, inappropriate, and some do.</font></font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">My memoirs are my reflections on the mysteries of my life. My story is my personal truth. I have not offered it as a collective model.</font></span></p><p><span class="font-size-2" style="font-family:georgia, palatino;"><font face="Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif">Deeper conversations about psychological ethics and codes of conduct, about the transferences and countertransferences in therapy, about morality, and the regulation of love and the regulation of sex, and the rational and irrational forces that affect individuation, and about whether those countless couples who live in hiding because their love for each other began in a therapy relationship should be judged as criminal or immoral or insane, these conversations, it seems to me, are waiting to be had.</font></span></p></div>Review: Platko's In the Tracks of the Unseenhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/review-platko-s-in-the-tracks-of-the-unseen2013-12-03T16:00:00.000Z2013-12-03T16:00:00.000ZPatricia Dameryhttps://depthpsychologyalliance.com/members/PatriciaDamery<div><p>Some topics are so controversial we cannot discuss them. Jane Davenport Platko’s <em>In the Tracks of the Unseen: Memoirs of a Jungian Analyst</em> brings one of those topics into full view: when the doctor and patient fall in love.</p><p>While we psychoanalysts and psychotherapists have thorough discussions as to why these kinds of relationships are problematic, we seldom have open discussions about what happens when they seem to work. Those who have entered such relationships rightfully fear judgement.</p><p>I will be honest. I have a bias. Having barely survived the 1970’s in psychology after early experiences with therapists and teachers who did not know the power of the tool of the transference, I developed a healthy respect of the need for “boundaries,” as we put it in the talk of our trade. As a result, I often have had a hair trigger reaction when these boundaries are transgressed. For the most part, I think my stance has merit.</p><p>But Platko’s story demonstrates it is not so simple. What happens when the analytic vessel cannot contain the feeling within a transference format, when the Self has something different in mind? Are there times the therapeutic meeting is a springboard into the soul connection of friendship or romantic love and this is not exploitive of the patient?</p><p>With great integrity, honesty, and courage, Platko lays out her vulnerabilities and history, antecedents to both a friendship with her first analyst and then marriage to a man who had been her patient. Her decisions are not impulsive. In fact, she deeply and openly suffers them with her then current analyst and with her then husband.</p><p>In the preface she quotes Jung, “My story is my truth.” This story is Platko’s truth, and one can only feel compassion, awe and concern for a woman reveals herself so openly in order for us to understand the decisions she has made. There will be judgement!</p><p>When I began reading <em>In the Tracks of the Unseen</em>, I did not want to put it down. Platko is a good storyteller, and I have not read a book like it. It is well written, albeit disturbing, submerging the reader in the rawness of human attachment and the lonely quest of a woman who followed her heart. This is an important book in that it questions some suppositions of the last decades, taking the structure of love in analytical relationships down to the studs. There are no answers here, only a kind of <em>solutio</em>. Perhaps it is only now that we can follow “the tracks of the unseen,” to a larger playing field that may redefine ethics and the challenges of the human connection in the vessel of analytic work.</p></div>