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Lying on the Couch By Irvin Yalom Essay

Decent Essays

In this paper we will be look at the book called “Lying on the Couch”. I will be going over what I saw as the biggest ethical issues that I read about in this book, I will also go over my thoughts on this book and the ethical problems that I saw for Dr. Lash, Carol and Marshal Streider. I will explain my personal opinion regarding self-care and my reasoning as to why it is so important to maintaining clear boundaries. BODY In this book, Dr. Ernest Lash discovers he has a love for psychoanalysis after several years working as a psychopharmacologist. Justin, who has been a patient of Ernest for several years, tells him he left his wife, Carol, for another woman. While Ernest sees this as a good thing since the marriage between Justin and …show more content…

Over all, I found this book to be very interesting. It brought up a lot of the ethical dilemmas we are going to have to deal with in our field of work. Anytime you work with people problems are bound to arise, like in the book when Ernest found himself sexually attracted to his client Carol, what is important is how you deal with them. While I enjoyed reading the book I felt like it abruptly ended in the middle of a lot of the ethical dilemmas. Personally it left me with a lot of unanswered questions such as what ever happened with all of Marshals ethical problems and his wife, and what ever happened with Dr. Seymour Trotter. Let’s look at what some of the ethical concerns are for Dr. Ernest Lash, in this book he faced many ethical dilemmas the first I think is that he doesn’t inform his client that he is extending his boundaries and trying an honesty type of counseling. There are also others such as dealing with Carol’s sexual advances on him, his sexual attraction to her, and when he found out about his supervisors wife cheating on him. Next is Carol while she isn’t a counselor herself she, as all of us do, faced her own personal ethical dilemmas. Some of them are how she would handle the anger over her husband leaving her for another woman, deciding if she is going to try to ruin the career of a man because of her anger, and last is whether to be truthful in the helper/client

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