pressures as well as changing social and ethical norms. Laws can be, and have been, directed to ends that are incompatible with psychoanalytic ethics. Individual analysts and their patients will generally be better protected if ethical guidelines avoid asserting the precedence of the law. It was for this reason that in 2000, the IPA Executive Council altered the statement about confidentiality by deleting the clause "within the contours of applicable legal and professional standards.” 4 The aim was to defend the autonomy of professional ethics and ensure that the Ethics Code creates a space which allows individual members who have doubts about breaching confidentiality to feel safe in explaining their ethical stance to the relevant authorities. 2.9 Psychoanalysis and the wider community Among the institutions of civil society, psychoanalysis makes a unique contribution to the extension and elucidation of human mental life, particularly its unconscious layers. There is an ongoing "work of culture" (Freud, 1933, p. 80) occurring in psychoanalytic therapeutic spaces around the world, the benefits of which are not only in one direction. The health and integrity of psychoanalysis is also dependent upon the values and goals fostered in the surrounding society. We do not practice in a vacuum; we both influence and are influenced by adjacent disciplines and contemporary cultural movements. This is why psychoanalysis, as an institution, must continue to take its place in the various forums of public life : listening, learning and engaging in dialogue with other community entities in an ongoing paradoxical labour of resistance to, and extension of, human collective experience.
4 Executive Council Minutes, 28 July 2000.
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