Ethics, Human Rights, and Power Devices in Clinical Practice

Clinical practice emerges when we enter into relationship with people, with their stories, and with the cultural and institutional systems in which they live. Every therapeutic encounter, however, is crossed by forms of power — symbolic, linguistic, diagnostic, and social — that the therapist must be able to recognize in order to prevent them from becoming tools of control or exclusion. The systemic perspective, together with the international framework of human rights, reminds us that dignity is the first ethical movement: seeing the other without colonizing them with our categories, without imposing values, without turning culture, the body, or the symptom into something to be corrected.

In this sense, human rights are part of every professional gesture and intrinsically linked to psychological intervention. They constitute a system — or rather, a plurality of systems — that accompanies every human being from birth and that must fully enter clinical reflection.

To practice clinically means welcoming the multiplicity of worlds, listening to what the other's culture makes possible, and avoiding the "gentle violence" that occurs when we reduce difference to pathology. At the same time, we must remember that we do not work only with individuals but also with schools, services, courts, and communities: systems that can either support or hinder people. For this reason, the psychologist's responsibility concerns not only care but also the transformation of contexts, the denunciation of injustice, and the promotion of a culture that defends freedom, equality, and dignity.

Ethically, to practice clinically means creating hospitable, tender, and non-oppressive spaces in which professional power becomes a tool of protection rather than domination, and in which the therapeutic relationship can generate new possibilities for the person, the family, and the community. It means choosing, each time, to stand on the side of human dignity and relational justice.