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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If Freud has an ‘official’ view of ethics, it tends towards the pessimistic and sceptical. Morality is one of the things we need to internalize for the sake of social living, and because social living is necessary for survival, internalizing morality is required by the ‘reality principle’. But surviving is not the same as thriving, and Freud makes much of the uncompensated sacrifices we make for the sake of socialization – the ‘discontents’ of his Civilization and Its Discontents. He also stresses that psychoanalysis doesn’t aim at people’s moral improvement. Indeed if it were – misguidedly – to seek to do so, it would only succeed in making people more ill. Most people, he tells us, aren’t capable of anything much in the morality department, and if they ‘wish to be more noble-minded than their constitution allows’, they will ‘fall victim to neurosis’; ‘they would have been more healthy if it could have been possible for them to be less good’.

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To do psychoanalysis properly, he thinks, two virtues are needed – courage and truthfulness. That’s an important counter to the view that psychoanalysis is just a ‘medical procedure’.

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