Important New Book on Ethics in Psychotherapy

Alessandra Lemma’s new book First Principles was published by Oxford University Press in May 2023.  In the book, Alessandra examines the centrality of applied ethics to psychoanalytic practice. The book focuses on the articulation of an accessible framework for developing and exercising an identifiable method – an ethical self-discipline – to support critical reflection on clinicians' psychoanalytic work with patients and to help them to approach the resolution of ethical dilemmas.  This book is essential reading for psychoanalytic practitioners as well as clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists and counsellors who work in the psychoanalytic tradition.

Praise for First Principles
Lemma's deeply reasoned and erudite advocacy for ethical self-discipline on the part of psychoanalysts eschews both stodgy moralizing and formulaic guidelines. Instead, she recommends the cultivation and sustenance of psychic space for truth, fairness, and respect for the patient's essential Otherness. Lemma's approach is characterized by a gentle iconoclasm that challenges us to leave the comfort of normative narratives, societal or psychoanalytic, while listening to our patients. Her oeuvre is wide-ranging, writing style elegant, and arguments convincing. The result is a book of rare literary luminosity, theoretical soundness, and clinical significance. ― Salman Akhtar, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College; Training and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia

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This remarkable book manages to be sophisticated, deeply thoughtful, expressive, lively and practical at the same time. It offers an approach to ethics focused especially on psychoanalysis but applicable to all forms of psychotherapy and elsewhere too. Few authors have absorbed the challenge of the philosophy of ethics so completely and demonstrated so brilliantly not only that it is a vital element in regulating psychoanalysis but also that it has the capacity to guide and strengthen psychotherapeutic training and practice for the benefit of therapists and patients alike. ― Professor Stephen Frosh, Department of Psychosocial Studies Birkbeck, University of London and author of Those Who Come After:Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness.