Considerations on ethics in research in psychoanalysis

Abstract

This article starts with a reflection on the breadth of ethical assumptions in their interrelationship with the established research practice in the University. We contextualize the issue of research ethics, considering the ethical specificity of psychoanalytic production and deals with the inherent ethics of academic productions descendant from the course of analysis. Four arguments support the validity of a specific ethics in psychoanalytic investigations: not to reveal data that can identify the subject, always use finished analytic treatments as clinical cases, to do a documentary research consisting of a post-fact reflection and work with clinical facts, not with clinical cases in depth and breadth. We bounce the relevance and the need of encouragement and facilitation from the Academy to investigations that promote advances in psychoanalytic knowledge, supported by methodology and assumptions specific to this discipline.