The Ethical Dimension of Psychoanalysis: A Dialogue

Preface

Preface Psychoanalysis intersects with many areas of human interest, especially with disciplines concerned with understanding the organization and functioning of the human mind. Psychoanalysts have endeavored to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue with a wide range of scientific and humanistic disciplines seeking to explore areas of interaction between analytic understanding and these other areas. It has found such mutual ground for exploration in interaction with psychology, neurosciences, anthropology, sociology, art, literature, history, biography, and so on. One salient though relatively neglected area is ethics. The conjunction of ethical and psychoanalytic perspectives is a natural by-product of the inherent nature of the two disciplines, each dedicated in its own fashion to understanding the mental processes and behaviors contributing optimally to the betterment of the human condition, both in terms of the inner well-being of the individual subject and in terms of adaptation to the outside world, including both intimate personal relations as well as broader societal and communal relations. My objective in this study is to explore and explicate some of these areas of interaction and common interest. Such interdisciplinary efforts encounter pressures for mutual adaptation , assimilation, and internal modification created by the transformative influence of each upon the other. This has certainly been my experience in pursuing this inquiry, and the reader may find himself or herself encountering similar pressures for rethinking basic issues in either discipline in order to take into account the data and perspectives engendered by the other discipline . This process involves both reshaping certain ethical considerations in a form more congruent with analytic conceptualization on one hand, and a corresponding rethinking of certain tenets of analytic theory on the other to allow greater integration with ethical perspectives. One of the critical points of revision in the analytic perspective involves reformulation of the concept of drives as causal components of human decivii sion and action. Postulation of an independent source of causality for human actions within the ethical agent undercuts components of choice, free will, and responsibility to name just a few. Without these elements, ethical decision-making and judgment become impossible or severely compromised . But rethinking the drive component leaves open questions of how aspects of behavior formerly explained by appeal to drives and drive-derivatives are to be accounted for. And on the ethical side, articulation of unconscious sources of motivation and unconscious mental processes as inherent in any meaningful ethical reflection brings complementary aspects of ethical reflection, deliberation, decision, and judgment into question. One hand washes the other! Both the analytic and the ethical perspectives must undergo mutually reinforcing modulation in the process of interdisciplinary dialogue. The basic question addressed in these pages is the following: “Does psychoanalysis have anything to contribute to ethical understanding and reflection?” Some analysts, and no doubt some ethicians as well, would respond with a resounding “No!” Others, however, might answer with an unqualified “Yes!” And then again, a good many might hedge their bets and offer a qualified response. My argument would challenge the naysayers, since I will maintain that analysis unavoidably involves issues that have ethical implication. But my allegiance to the yeasayers is muted by my agreement with the naysayers that analysis does not contain an ethical doctrine in any formal sense. Any attempt to articulate an understanding of the ethical relevance of psychoanalysis cannot approach the issues with a blackand -white mental set, but must be prepared to work in the muted shadings of gray expressed in terms of more-or-less, and plus-and-minus, without ever being able to shake free of the ambiguities posed by unconscious motivations and mental processes. If we are to answer the basic question with a “Yes!” then, it must be a qualified “Yes,” one that can be asserted only in nuanced, limited, and proportional terms and must continually be framed in reference to individual dynamics and diversifying contexts. But I would submit that this enterprise is entirely consistent with the spirit of Sigmund Freud’s own attitudes in this regard. In his preface to Putnam’s addresses on psychoanalysis (1921b), after lauding James Putnam’s ethical character, he noted that Putnam “bore witness to the fact that the physician who makes use of analysis understands far more about the sufferings of his patients and can do far more for them than was possible with the earlier methods of treatment; and finally how he began to extend beyond the limits of analysis, demanding that as a science it should be linked on to a particular philosophical system...