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Authenticity: An Ethical Core for Clinical Practice - Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP (Webinar live online)
2026 Grand Rounds Series
The ethical codes for mental health professionals are guided by internationally recognized standards centered around core principles: respect for others, competence, integrity, and responsibility to society. Central to these standards is our integrity as a human being, a professional, and a member of society, based on principles of fairness, justice, and respect for difference. These codes also recognize the value of community service; ways in which our training demands a certain level of social responsibility. We are called upon to know our field well enough to make choices that have integrity, and to engage in ongoing trainings that support our own development within a changing world. And yet, countering these standards is the anxious insecurity that threatens to make us lose our minds rather than build them, and to turn to rules that, in the absence of our reflective capacity, can become dangerously mindless. We see this, for example, in the turn towards using diagnoses, not to organize our understanding, but as reified entities that demand specific treatments that may harm more than they help. In that turn, we lose touch with the most basic principle guiding our ethics: to do no harm. The price of objectifying persons rather than assisting them in enlarging their own subjective capacities is highlighted in this era of AI. In such an era, we need to locate our ethics within a foundation that does not betray us – or those we work with – by masquerading behind a veneer of ‘truth’ that has no authentic, ethical, human core. Using clinical illustrations, I discuss the values of authenticity and respect for difference as crucial grounding points for ethical clinical practice.
Target Audience
______ Introductory X_____ Intermediate ______ Advanced
Learning Objectives
- To describe one way in which ideas about modeling can inform our stances regarding ethical practice within the clinical encounter.
- To describe one hazard of turning to ‘the rule’ when human dignity is at stake.
- To be able to describe why the author puts authenticity at the core of ethics in clinical practice.
Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center, co-chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) and scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. Affiliations include the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, Universidad de Monterrey, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and Harvard Medical School. Research interests include creativity, metacognition, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the impact of devaluation on women and other marginalized groups. A contributing editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and a member of several editorial boards, Marilyn is actively engaged in mentoring future generations of psychoanalytic scholars, clinicians, and researchers. Marilyn is also a mother and grandmother, and an artist and a poet, aspects of self that inform her practice, writing, and mentoring. She has presented her work nationally and internationally, publishing more than 150 articles and book chapters and six books: Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience; Constructing Realities: Transformations Through Myth and Metaphor; Learning from Experience: a Guidebook for Clinicians; Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan; Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live; and, most recently, Echoes of Trauma: Meaning and Identity in Psychoanalysis. She has also published five edited volumes: Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering (with Michael O’Loughlin); Women and Psychosis and Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness (with Marie Brown); and The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education: Psychoanalytic, Attachment, and Developmental Perspectives (with Jill Bellinson).
Austen Riggs Center Inc. adheres to the ACCME’s Standards for Integrity and Independence in Accredited Continuing Medical Education. All those at Austen Riggs Center involved in the planning of this activity, including the presenter(s) listed above, report they have no relevant financial relationships with an ineligible company*.
The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are those of the presenter(s) and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of the Austen Riggs Center.
* An ineligible company is any entity whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.
Available Credit
- 1.00 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™
ACCME - As a Jointly Accredited Organization, The Austen Riggs Center, Inc. designates this learning activity for a maximum of 1.00 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
- 1.00 APA
As a Jointly Accredited Organization, The Austen Riggs Center, Inc. designates this learning activity for 1.00 continuing education credit(s) (CE) for psychology. Continuing Education (CE) credits for psychologists are provided through the co-sponsorship of the American Psychological Association (APA) Office of Continuing Education in Psychology (CEP). The APA CEP Office maintains responsibility for the content of the programs.
Austen Riggs Center, Inc. is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0115.
- 1.00 ASWB-ACE
As a Jointly Accredited Organization, The Austen Riggs Center, Inc is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Organization, not individual courses, are approved under this program. State and provincial regulatory boards have the final authority to determine whether an individual course may be accepted for continuing education credit. Austen Riggs Center maintains responsibility for this. Social workers completing this will receive 1.00 continuing education credit(s).
Austen Riggs Center, Inc is recognized by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0843.
- 1.00 Contact Hours/ ParticipationA certificate of attendance for all Learners.