A Question of Ethics

 

If you had asked me twenty-five years ago what my memoirs would be about, and even then I imagined that someday I would publish them, I would not have included in my list of themes, ‘a question of ethics.’

I would have included the subject of my interracial relationships and my fight against the immoralities of racism. I would have included Jung and the way his teachings about being true to one’s Self have informed my life. I would have named the joys and trials of motherhood. Trauma, sexual healing, the mystery of psychoanalysis and the even greater mysteries of love, these were the topics that filled years of journals that I would, I imagined, someday share.

But then in my early forties I fell in love with one of my clients. And out of that analysis was born a mutually healing and humanly flawed coupling—my partnership with the man, my husband, whom I’ve been with for the last twenty-two years.

This part of my story comes up hard against the ethical edicts of the psychological community whose blanket condemnation of a romantic relationship beginning in analysis casts a pall over those couples who share this complex fate. And there are more than you might imagine. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ is the unwritten policy, and behind that is a significant threat that holds the livelihood of these analysts and psychotherapists in check.

And so this question has become a major theme for me, as I follow In the Tracks of the Unseen the ethics of love and the ethics of owning my life.