The Ethics of Retirement

The late stages of an analyst’s working life cycle bring certain ethical issues into the foreground. For aging analysts, the risk increases of using their work for their own needs at the expense of the patient’s needs. When to retire is also an ethically loaded question. How long should one go on offering psychoanalytic treatment as one becomes more likely to die during the course of it? Life expectancy figures related to increasing age need taking into account. Retirement has many strands. One may stop clinical work with patients, consultations, supervision, institutional work and teaching in different ways and at different times. There are ethical issues to be considered in relation to all of these.