Ethics Education in Psychoanalytic Training: a Survey

Didactic education in psychoanalytic ethics is a relatively new phenomenon. Ethics courses were offered by few institutes before they were mandated and before publication of the first Ethics Case Book in 2001. As institutes have developed ethics training, the solutions they have arrived at—formats, length and placement of courses, and preferred readings— remain unknown to other educators and analysts. This survey was undertaken to gain an overview of the current state of ethics education. Twenty-nine of the thirty-one training institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association (93%) responded to inquiries. Most institutes (79%) offered one course, and the average number of class sessions was 6.3. Of 258 different readings used, 61 (23.6%) were used by more than one institute and 37 (14.3%) by more than two. The most frequent topics were boundaries, confidentiality, and illness, and Dewald and Clark’s Case Book (2008) and Gabbard and Lester (1995) were the most common readings. These findings should be useful to instructors, curriculum committees, and ethics committees in their ethics education planning, as well as to practicing analysts in their ethical self-education. This study may also serve as a model for analogous investigations into other areas of analytic education and as an impetus to further research and educational innovation.