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Abstract

The purpose of this article is to describe some postmodern implications for the ethical conduct of psychotherapists. In our opinion, one of the overriding implications is the increase in the ethical responsibility held by psychotherapists. In a context that rejects objectivity, redefines boundaries and broadens the notion of the client, the ‘buck stops' with the psychotherapist. Consequentially, with an increased emphasis on the ethical responsibility of psychotherapists, training, curricula and ethical codes have to be revisited. This article is a postmodern discourse. In deconstructing the text, the reader engages in, and assigns meaning to, it. This process is an echo of the therapeutic relationship in which psychotherapist and client engage each other and assign meaning to the texts presented in psychotherapy. All behaviour in this dynamic relationship has ethical implications that psychotherapists need to manage. Thus, the postmodern psychotherapist ‘is the ethics’.

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Thoughts on Ethics,Psychotherapy and Postmodernism

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