The PACT Institute's Photo and Video Release: A Clinical and Ethical Objection
A Consent Form That Forecloses Consent
On a Saturday morning in early January, six weeks before the training was set to begin, I sat down with my coffee and logged into the PACT portal for the first time. I had been waiting for this. I registered in November, had been planning to do this training for years, and had spent most of December locked out of a portal that wouldn't load. Now it was finally working.
I've read and reread Tatkin and Solomon's Love and War in Intimate Relationships (Solomon & Tatkin, 2011) and have shared his "Allergic To Hope" (Tatkin, 2011) and "Addicted To Alone Time" (Tatkin, 2009) articles with every one of my interns. The Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy is built on a genuinely sophisticated integration of attachment theory, psychodynamics, and neuroscience, and of all the couples modalities it is the one I feel most aligned with. I had been reluctant for years to invest in any of these branded, commodified training programs, but I wanted an infusion of creativity into my couples work, and I had decided the time was right.
The portal opened with a video of Stan Tatkin introducing the training. It was good. It described PACT training as explicitly experiential: participants are expected to bring their whole selves, remain embodied and present, engage in role plays, demonstrations, and processing, and to keep their cameras on throughout. Only those willing to fully participate in the relational process of the training should register, the video said. I felt the excitement I had been hoping for. This is the kind of training I value.
The next screen was the Terms of Agreement. It included a Photo and Video Release that I found shocking, particularly in contrast to what I had just watched.
Here is the release in full:
Photograph & Video Release
This agreement outlines permissions and use of images to be used by The PACT Institute. By registering you are agreeing that the PACT Institute may use your image.
This agreement grants permission to the rights of my image, likeness and sound of my voice as recorded on audio, videotape or camera without payment or any other consideration. I understand that my image may be edited, copied, exhibited, published or distributed and waive the right to inspect or approve the finished product wherein my likeness appears. Additionally, I waive any right to royalties or other compensation arising or related to the use of my image or recording. I also understand that this material may be used in diverse educational settings within an unrestricted geographic area.
Photographic, audio or video recordings may be used for the following purposes: i. Conference presentations ii. Educational presentations or courses iii. Informational presentations iv. Online educational courses and videos v. Website presentations
I understand this permission signifies that photographic or video recordings of me may be electronically displayed via the Internet or in the public educational setting. If you do not wish to be photographed you will be required to position yourself out of range of recording devices.
There is no time limit on the validity of this release nor is there any geographic limitation on where these materials may be distributed.
This agreement applies to photographic, audio or video recordings collected as part of the sessions listed on this document only.
By registering I acknowledge that I have completely read and fully understand the above release and agree to be bound thereby. I hereby release any and all claims against any person or organization utilizing this material for educational purposes.
Compare this with standard practice in clinical training. When supervisees obtain client consent to record sessions, that consent is bounded in scope and purpose: the recording is for the supervisee and supervisor, within the supervision relationship, period.
I sent the following letter to the PACT admin team later that week:
Dear PACT Institute Team,
I am writing regarding the Photo and Video Release from the Terms of Agreement for the Level 1 training.
After registering, the first material I encountered was the introductory video describing PACT training as an experiential form of learning, emphasizing that participants must bring their whole selves, remain engaged and active, participate in demonstrations, role plays, small and large group processing, and keep cameras on throughout the entire training. The video states clearly that participation in these exercises is required, and that only those willing to do this should register.
I felt excited and eager after watching the video.
The next item presented was the Terms of Agreement, which must be completed before accessing any further materials. The Photo and Video Release is inappropriate clinically, ethically, and pedagogically. I cannot sign it.
The requirement to be fully visible, engaged, and experientially participatory sits in sharp tension with a demand to grant unlimited, irrevocable rights to my image, voice, and participation. When full presence and vulnerability are required, knowing that one's image and voice will be recorded and potentially edited and reused indefinitely, without any right of review, fundamentally alters what participation means.
A facilitating environment for experiential learning depends on protected containers and bounded consent, where partial selves, uncertainty, and mistakes can emerge and then recede. Permanent capture works against this. It turns relational process and embodied presence into extractable material and introduces a commodifying and exploitative corporate gaze into what is described as relational work.
This does not work for me personally, and it also forecloses the possibility of presenting my clinical work. Even when anonymized, my clients have not consented to have their material submitted for recording or reuse in service of training and promotion by your organization.
I was struck by how unrelational the agreement itself is. It is the language of a corporate lawyer, not a therapist. It is sweeping, non-negotiable, and lifetime in scope, with the only alternative being to remove myself from view or withdraw entirely. For a model that explicitly teaches mutuality, fairness, and secure functioning, this structure is incongruent. Couples therapists are trained to be acutely attuned to power, consent, and asymmetry, and anyone who has thought seriously about these issues would immediately recognize the problem with an agreement that makes participation conditional on the permanent surrender of agency.
If there is an alternative consent structure that allows participation without an unlimited and irrevocable release, I would be open to reviewing it. Otherwise, I will need to withdraw from the training.
Thank you for taking the time to consider this. It is my hope that your leadership team will take this feedback seriously and discuss it.
Sincerely, Robin Levick, LMFT
The following week, one of the administrators responded with a full refund and a brief note that engaged nothing I had written. What I was hoping for was something like: we see the problem, we won't record this semester while we work out a more clinically appropriate approach.
Six weeks later, hoping that he had just never seen it, I forwarded the original email to Stan Tatkin directly. I received an auto-reply, and Beverly Baker, MBA, the Executive Director, responded on his behalf. We scheduled a Zoom meeting.
The Zoom call began with a recording already running, which I asked her to turn off. Beverly made clear she had no interest in engaging the substance of my concerns. The only concession she made was that the release should be included in the sign-up process, rather than after payment. Her follow-up email confirmed that the organization considered the matter closed.
Placing an unacceptable term earlier in the process does not make it acceptable. The refund without conversation was a transaction, not a response, and the Zoom call that began with a recording running was, whatever else it was, perfectly on the nose.
The foundational ethic of psychotherapy is straightforward: do not exploit the vulnerability of the person in your care. Clinical ethics, and laws governing consent, recognize that when one party in a relationship is structurally vulnerable, exploitation can occur regardless of what the vulnerable party agrees to. The protection exists not to override someone's agency but to recognize that the conditions of the relationship itself can compromise genuine consent. We do not have sexual relationships with clients who initiate them. We do not enter business arrangements with clients who propose them. Why? Because the therapeutic relationship creates conditions that make certain agreements impossible to obtain without exploiting the vulnerability the relationship depends on.
Our ethical principles extend to supervisory and teaching relationships. APA Ethics Code §3.08 states this directly: "Psychologists do not exploit persons over whom they have supervisory, evaluative or other authority such as clients/patients, students, supervisees, research participants, and employees." The AAMFT Code of Ethics says the same: marriage and family therapists must not exploit students and supervisees.
The PACT training invites participants to bring their wounding, their full embodied self, their capacity for authentic relational risk. That experience is what makes the difference between a training that changes you and a training that merely certifies you. Therapists come hoping to become more effective, to find their way through their most difficult cases, to make the work feel less depleting. This need for help, and the hope for relief, is part of the vulnerability. The release has you authorize PACT in advance to use this to promote their model, with unlimited, irrevocable, unreviewed rights to whatever you produce in that state. This is commercial extraction, and it is not a standard we would accept in our work with clients.
I would not advise any clinician to sign a release like this, and especially not as a condition of entry into a space where they are being asked to show up with genuine vulnerability. I have submitted formal complaints to NBCC and the APA, the organizations that accredit PACT as a CE provider. Through this process I have learned that CE providers are required to have a published grievance policy. The PACT policy language treats the colleagues they train as customers, and has a provision for a refund but nothing about how they address harm. When licensed professionals take your training, they are still colleagues. When a colleague raises an ethical concern, it's part of our code of ethics to take this seriously.
I am sharing this publicly because other clinicians considering this training deserve to know what they are stepping into, and because the broader pattern is not unique to PACT: the insertion of extractive corporate logic into spaces that depend on genuine relational safety.
I also drafted what I believe an appropriate release for this kind of training would look like and sent it to the PACT Institute. You can read it here.
The Fabricated Body and the Promotional Gaze
"…The True Self does not become a living reality except as a result of the mother's repeated success in meeting the infant's spontaneous gesture."
— Winnicott (1960)
”The spontaneous gesture is the True Self in action.”
— Winnicott (1960)
Transformative change in therapy happens through moments of meeting (Boston Change Process Study Group, 1998) between the therapist and client. As the therapist, or the supervisor, or the clinical trainer, we facilitate risk, and provide a holding environment so that defended-against psychic material can emerge. As participants, when we enter fully and truly into experiential learning, we bring our own wounds and the client's wounds and we surrender to the holding environment. This cannot be rehearsed or summoned. But the false self can fabricate it.
Goldberg (2004), writing about what he calls the somatic false self, describes what happens when body-aliveness is demanded on cue rather than allowed to emerge from genuine desire. This "pseudo-vitality" results in what he calls a fabricated body, in which the natural impulsive rhythms of the libidinal body have been subdued and replaced by coerced and regimented forms of body-aliveness. This is difficult to recognize, Goldberg notes, because cultural and economic conditions furnish legitimizing frameworks that make it ego-syntonic.
This dynamic is not unique to therapy training. In a recent episode of Overthink, a philosophy podcast hosted by professors Ellie Anderson and David Peña-Guzmán, Peña-Guzmán describes an episode of a reality television competition in which a contestant recounted the story of watching his father burn to death. For his runway performance, he dressed as his charred dead father, walking the stage in tears. The judges praised him for putting himself out on the line, for showing who he really was. Peña-Guzmán's observation is sharp: the container creates a structural incentive for participants to display their wounding publicly, and rewards the most affecting displays. Is this authentic?
The PACT release and the presence of the camera risk doing the same thing in the training context. A potent role play, an intense emotional breakthrough, a demonstration of the model working: these are marketing gold. The fabricated body, difficult to distinguish from authentic embodied presence, may in fact appear more legible as proof of the model’s effectiveness. What gets circulated as evidence of the model's power is footage selected for its promotional value.
So, either way, we have a problem. If what gets recorded is a spontaneous gesture, it's sacred. When the therapist's wounding and the client's wounding come together in a role play, what emerges may be too vulnerable for any audience beyond the therapists in the room doing the holding. There is no provision for review, no right of withdrawal. PACT has secured rights to this in advance, and now has the right to use it whether the person is comfortable with that or not. The sacred gets circulated as commercial content, a violation of the person.
If what gets recorded is fabricated, the problem is different but no less serious. Goldberg and Peña-Guzmán are not writing about conscious performance. They are writing about the false self recruiting affect to produce "pseudo-vitality" on cue. This is a character structure, not a choice. The marketing incentive structurally favors fabricated affect over the real thing. This gets circulated as exemplary clinical material, and the field gets a distorted picture of what powerful therapeutic work looks like. The camera selects for the fabricated body, and the fabricated body becomes the standard.
Soth (2006) has written with unusual clarity about how the objectification of the body, so pervasive in our culture, finds its way into psychotherapy itself. Our culture treats the body as an object: something to be managed, fixed, optimized, displayed. Soth argues that attempts to re-include the body in clinical work carry a specific and ever-present danger: that we simply import this objectifying construction into what he calls "one of the last bastions of subjectivity, authenticity and intimacy in an increasingly virtual world." The institutional gaze, the evaluating eye, the camera recording for promotional use: these are not neutral. They introduce into the training space exactly the kind of objectifying stance toward the body that body-based clinical work is trying to move beyond.
This is one instance of a pattern I intend to keep examining: how the logic of extraction, standardization, and surveillance finds its way into the spaces that psychotherapy depends on to do its work, and how that connects to the broader structures of late capitalism.
References:
Anderson, E., & Peña-Guzmán, D. (Hosts). (n.d.). Authenticity [Audio podcast episode 87]. In Overthink. https://overthinkpodcast.com/episode-87-transcript
Boston Change Process Study Group. (1998). Non-interpretive mechanisms in psychoanalytic therapy: The "something more" than interpretation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 79, 903-921.
Goldberg, P. (2004). Fabricated bodies: A model for the somatic false self. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 85(4), 823-840.
Soth, M. (2006). What therapeutic hope for a subjective mind in an objectified body? In J. Corrigall, H. Payne, & H. Wilkinson (Eds.), About a body. Routledge.
Solomon, M. F., & Tatkin, S. (2011). Love and war in intimate relationships: Connection, disconnection, and mutual regulation in couple therapy. W. W. Norton.
Tatkin, S. (2009). Addiction to "alone time": Avoidant attachment, narcissism, and a one-person psychology within a two-person psychological system. New Therapist Magazine, 62(July/August), 10-16.
Tatkin, S. (2011). Allergic to hope: Angry resistant attachment and a one-person psychology within a two-person psychological system. Psychotherapy in Australia, 18(1), 66-73.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The maturational processes and the facilitating environment (pp. 140-152). International Universities Press. (Original work published 1960)