What's Going On? The Psychoanalysis Metaphor for Educating Lawyer-Counselors

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Connecticut Law Review

Abstract

In this essay prepared for the Connecticut Law Review’s 2012 symposium, Reform of the Legal Education System for the 21st Century, I propose an alternative to the dominant metaphor of “lawyer as warrior” for educating the many lawyers whom clients will seek out as counselors even at early stages in their careers. My preferred metaphor is “lawyer as psychoanalyst” because it invokes the need for lawyer-counselors to understand clients’ idioms and meanings, or more generally “what’s going on” beyond the mere analysis and application of the rules of positive law. Like lawyers, psychoanalysts learn a technical discipline (whether either discipline constitutes a science) but need to apply it non-technically in the process of counseling patients. I consider implications of the metaphor for lawyer-counselors and their education, concluding with some preliminary and modest suggestions about how reflection on the “repressed positivistic” and “courting surprise” might benefit our students in the “what’s going on” aspect of client-centeredness.

First Page

1355

Last Page

1388

Publication Date

5-2013

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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