Freud’s official position on the connection between psychoanalysis and ethics seems to be that the two are barely related: psychoanalysis is a ‘medical procedure’ which aims to cure neurosis, not to make people morally better. In this article, Edward Harcourt argues, that despite such pronouncements, psychoanalysis and ethics fundamentally belong to the same line of inquiry. Drawing on Aristotle’s view that ethics is not a set of frustrating do’s and don’ts as Freud believed but a way to perfect and realize our human natures, Harcourt argues that ethics and psychoanalysis, correctly conceived, are concerned with the same fundamental question: “How should I live?”
Psychoanalysts face questions about patient confidentiality, for example, and these are ethical questions. But these are also questions faced by accountants and GPs. So if there’s no more to the connection between psychoanalysis and ethics than that, the connection doesn’t go very deep. It can seem as if Freud wanted us to see it that way. As he once put it, ‘psychoanalysis is a procedure for the medical treatment of neurotic patients’. In fact, though, ethics and psychoanalysis are deeply connected. But the connections are complicated, thanks to changes over the course of the twentieth century in the way both ethics and psychoanalysis – even within the Freudian tradition – have been understood.
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If Freud has an ‘official’ view of ethics, it tends towards the pessimistic and sceptical.
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