Consenting and Assenting to Psychoanalytic Work
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8334483 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Allannah Furlong (0000-0002-1757-5869, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 68 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 583-613 |
| Publication date | 2020-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0651 • E-ISSN: 1941-2460 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0003065120954353 |
| PMID | 32927986 |
| OpenAlex | W3087331456 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 33 |
The moment is opportune for a renewed look at what we understand about patient consent to treatment. Until recently, little reference to informed consent could be found in the literature, as though it has never been a preoccupation for psychoanalytic practitioners. Yet several post-Freudian authors offer reasons to suppose the risk of misunderstandings about consent. In fact, the very discovery of transference, replete with unrequited infantile wishes, implies that at some level, at some moment, in every psychoanalytic treatment there will be moments when “consent” will to some extent vacillate. A distinction, justifiable on etymological and intersubjective grounds, is made between patients’ consent as a cognitive, somewhat passive, acceptance and patients’ assent as an arduous, conflicted, partial disagreement with the symbolically limiting details of analytic work. It is in the discovery and working through of unexpected unconscious responses to aspects of the analytic setting and to the analyst that patients become “informed” of the unique risks to their psychic equilibrium the process poses, as well as its benefits. Instead of a static and unitary contractual event, informed consent in psychoanalysis is more properly conceived as a multilayered, repetitively posed, and necessarily ambivalent process of good-enough assenting over time
Ambivalence · Argument (complex analysis) · Epistemology · Freudian slip · Informed consent · Psychic · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Psychotherapist · Unconscious mind · Medicine · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology
The Violence of Interpretation
Me Here, You There—Now What? Commentary on Kite, Morris, Wilson, and Kattlove
Varieties of Long-Term Outcome Among Patients in Psychoanalysis and Long-Term Psychotherapy
Psychoanalytic Technique and The Creation of Analytic Patients
The Conception of the Repetition Compulsion
Initiating Psychoanalysis
A risk of confidentiality
Postmodern psychoanalysis
No, twice no
From the fundamental rule to the analysing situation
Selecting a patient or initiating a psychoanalytic process
A theory of the setting
Analysis Begins in the Analyst’s Mind
The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Human Freedom
The Ethical Foundation of Analytic Action
The Analyst’s Offer
Book Essay on Informed Consent to Psychoanalysis
The Analyst’s Ambivalence About Continuing and Deepening an Analysis
Acknowledging the “Analyst as Person”
The Fundamental Ethical Ambiguity of the Analyst as Person
The Draw to Overwhelm
Toward an Ethics of Psychoanalysis
The Analyst's Reluctance To Begin a New Analysis
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |