Saturday April 25, 2026
10:00 am – 4:30 pm
6 CE’s
Location: Seattle TBA
“Agency from Within, Ethics as Process and Field”
An ethic – and ethics – exist in a context. Unlike commandments, differentiated ethics do not descend from above to below. They are not based on dictates and dogmas, nor fixed and universal precepts nor rules applicable to all settings and conditions. The vectors of ethical thought and behavior are both vertically linked to the constants of values, and also horizontally connected to mandates emerging from specific situations.
Finely tuned ethics pertain to both implicit values and explicit behaviors. They develop from the purposiveness of the enterprise, the contracts among the participants, and the considered ideals which inform them. Ethical stances and perspectives are calibrated and refined within the domains of stated endeavors. They imply devotion, commitment, and attunement to both the nuanced and explicit. They demand sacrifice of what is not fitting, attunement to what is required and submission to what is essential and enduring. Thus, ethics is a field phenomenon. What belongs in one setting may be intrusive in another, what is essential in one scenario may be anathema in the next. This requirement of relevance is far from relativizing. Rather, discriminated ethics demand the ability to measure and weigh various values, an alertness to mutual expectations and obligations, to the satisfactions of appropriate standards, and sensitivity to dubious gratifications.
Ethics could also be called a systems theory – theoretical and practical, abstract and behavioral, grounded in mindfulness of repetitive patterns, immediate consequences and long-term effects. It is alert to memory, and open to imagination. Unlike the systems of belief based on revelation, or the reactivity to past experience, ethics is an emergent process. It is akin to complexity, wherein the third of a synthesis or conjunction is greater than the sum of its parts, considered here as impersonal articulated values and the personal reality of authentic experience.
Jung describes instinct as “the dynamic form of the image”, and image as “the instinct’s representation to itself”. In The Psychology of the Transference, he alludes to emotion as “Fermentation.” Complex and symptom, conscious and unconscious, instinct and image, the givens of the body, the yearnings of soul and dynamics of spirit mix, merge, discern and differentiate in the explicit service to the seeker and the implicit psychological benefit of the therapist.
Past and present meet, for the sake of the future, in a psychic time, Jung described as the prospective or teleological vector of the unconscious. For the clinician, there is much to track, pursue, uncover and reveal through the comprehension and admission of what exists within. Through attending to the reality of one’s own psyche, while engaging the subtle and obvious interpersonal effects in the field phenomena of therapeutic process, we may land in the intrapsychic ground where we find the agency of a subject, emerging from within.
