The issue of ethics in psychotherapy: contributions from Martin Heidegger's Hermeneutic
Phenomenology
Ethics; Martin Heidegger; Code of ethics; Phenomenological-existential clinic
The present research aimed to build understanding about the phenomena of human existence,
developing an approximation between ethics and psychological clinic. Inspired in the Martin
Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology, as well as in his studies in the area of Ontology. In the
research, the developed comprehensive exercise privileged Heideggerian hermeneutics as a horizon of
encounter to understand ethics from the existential expressive way of opening of the circularity of
meaning, involving human beings and existential ones. The problem investigated proposed
understandings about ethics, fomenting reflections on the ontological condition of being-in-the-world,
according to Heidegger in Being and time. This research aimed to understand ethics, distinguishing it
from moral and deconstructing the usual way as ethics is summarized, in Psychology, to the code of
professional ethics. Ethics is thesis topic and is understood in approach to a permanent updating of the
ontological way. Ethics is conceived as being constituted by existential care, freedom and
responsibility. The research is academic, original, exploratory and descriptive, whose research method
is based on the Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, where are demonstrable
possibilities for comprehensive reading, aiming at the articulation between ethics and clinical
psychology / psychotherapeutics, based on the Existential Phenomenology of the philosopher. The
results suggest the deconstruction of ethics in the way it is considered in the psychological clinic,
justified in the Code of Ethics, in order to defend an ethics focused on the ways in which we inhabit
the world, and from the contributions of Heidegger to clinical and psychotherapeutic work, for the
defense of the construction of ethical pillars such as care, freedom and responsibility. This research
points to other ways of ethical thinking and contribute to the understanding of the everyday life, in a
reflexive manner. With this, the study can promote questions and mobilizations as to ways of relating
to ethics, so that we can inhabit it and approach ontological thinking.