In the domain of psychotherapeutic treatment, any discussion of ethics today is given less importance than the discourse of effectiveness and evaluation. But a discussion of ethics is necessary when one realizes that it has at times been reduced to mere rhetoric. Based on the description of a psychoanalytically-based psychotherapeutic process, the author proposes a research procedure that is able to clearly highlight the ethical dimension of clinical acts. In a situation of incest, the category of the ethics of the intimate appears as a basic value in the overall attitude in clinical work. This questions the validity of a strictly evaluative approach which, in spite of everything, might fail to consider this dimension of the clinical act.
Intimacy; incest; clinical act; ethics