Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Microethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microethics. Show all posts

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Some thoughts on the microethics of our professional rules of conduct: Keeping play in imagination

by Anna Guerra, JD, MA, LPC
The Jung Page
Originally published October 19, 2013

A client’s ability to play and imagine is essential to their healing and growth and the provision of a “playspace” where this can happen is a central component of what we do as psychotherapists. Maya Angelou writes, “The needs of a society determines its ethics” (Angelou, 1980, p. 190). “Microethics” focuses on the needs and purposes of our profession, on the ethos underlying our professional rules of conduct, going beyond “the rules,” beyond the “dos and don’ts,” the “shall and shall not” to the “one shall or shall not because we seek to do the following.” Like a microphone, microethics expands and makes audible the reasons for our rules. Providing our clients with a playspace and helping them play is part of what we do as therapists, and it is an ethos written into the various rules of our professional conduct, our ethics.

By play I mean allowing the emergence of imaginal material into conscious awareness. When my clients are “playing” they can allow thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and other material into conscious awareness, into the psychotherapeutic space which if the psychotherapy is working is a playspace.

The entire article is here.

Thanks to Deborah Derrickson Kossmann for this article.