Description: This book explores an ethical value central to all mental health professions. Although "dignity" appears near the beginning of many codes of ethics, it has been largely unexamined in the professional literature. Potter Stewart famously declared about pornography that we can't define it but we know it when we see it. Likewise with dignity.
Review Quotes: "Every once in a while a creative author gives us the intellectual treat of a look at a brand new subject. Susan S. Levine, an innovative author who also has a firm grounding in our theories, has done just that with the subject of dignity. Dignity Matters has grown from an intriguing APsaA Panel Discussion into this volume. While the entire manuscript usefully informs us about the important place "dignity" holds in our work a number of contributions caught my attention in special ways. Akhtar, one of our special treasures as an author and speaker, delights us with philosophical insights expressed with his usual lucid and incisive beauty. Kravis offers a useful examination of the distinctions between dignity, narcissism, and self-esteem. Vaughan and Holmes bring this subject directly into our timely national conversation on issues related to the most important understandings of gender, sexuality and race relations. These are just a sampling, a few appetizers, that should stimulate one's appetite towards the full serving of this work. One comes away with a sense of the centrality of dignity as a motivating force and a reinforcement of the unique value of psychoanalysis in providing an understanding audience which accords dignity to all parts of one's mind, the darkest as well as the most luminescent."--Warren Procci, MD, Past President, American Psychoanalytic Association, Health Sciences Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine