Addressed to practicing psychoanalysts and mental health professionals, this presentation makes the point that the basis for ethics in psychoanalysis is paradoxically anchored in what is unknown in the analyst, and the unforeseen ways in which the analyst’s unrepresented traumatic experiences may contribute to ethical failures in practice. Ethical fragility and uncertainty will be assumed as the norm rather than the exception in all of us, calling the question of whether ethics can be “taught” in an a priori fashion at psychoanalytic institutes. The phenomenon of fundamental human helplessness in the face of the inevitable transgenerational transmission of trauma will also be addressed, including the role played by early unregistered trauma in the analyst that may be discovered and recreated in “boundary violations”.

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