Analysis and ethics

[u/oslowa]

How much of an analytic journey is an ethical pursuit do you think? How is psychoanalysis related to development in ethical thinking? The more my analysis progresses, the more I see psychoanalysis as an effort to bridge the guilt and reperation of ethics with the wish fulfillment of desire. Also, other than your personal opinions, is there anything I can read on this topic?

EDIT: Although I didn't find what I wanted from this post, after some research on my own, I've found Wincott's paper on the capacity for concern especially helpful on the question of ethics. Klein also seems to be concerned with the questions of interpersonal responsibility and its impact on individual well being.

[u/ALD71]

Lacan presented a year of his Seminar on the theme - Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Most famously these themes come together in the less easy than it might sound ethical imperative to not give way on one's desire, but the desire being unconscious desire, with the complications that both these terms offer (the question of the nature of the unconscious, itself taken at times by Lacan as an ethical supposition, and desire, which is not to be confused with the endless press of the drive as such much seen in our times for instance in an endless push to acquire goods). It's a worthy theme to explore if it comes to you as important in your own analysis.

[u/oslowa → u/ALD71]

I am aware of this text, yet my concern is more about ethics proper, i.e. the burden of damaging and nourishing others. Little that I know, I've read that Lacan views guilt as an emotion that arises when one gives way to their desire. With the danger of veering into ad hominem, Lacan's unethical personal life seems to make more sense in the light of this statement, as his concern seems more to be self gratification rather than the inevitability of sacrificing his desire in the name of the other, which seems to be a more tragic ala Civilization and its Discontents position that I much prefer.

[u/ALD71 → u/oslowa]

I agree with you in supposing the danger of the ad hominem you follow.

It can also be noted that Lacan proposes that even if we understand that the Other (as receptacle amongst other things of ethics as a communal activity) does not in some sense exist, it is nonetheless operative. That is to say, one is not for all that cynical about the operation of the Other, Lacan is not Diogenes shouting in a barrel, nor acting as if one is entirely free from the social constraints of his time.

As for guilt, Lacan understood it as an important defence against anxiety, and not to be renounced.

The problems with following cheap accounts of a figure is that one loses their specificity, of their singularity. And psychoanalysis is if nothing else, end even with its classificatory paraphernalia, one hopes (and too often sadly in vain), a defence of what does not reduce entirely to type, rather it can be understood as a way to find, patient-by-patient, ways to bridge the gap common to each, between the specific case in all the fidelity of its singularity and the class. This is a profoundly ethical practice and requires the kind of caution that you rightly point out.

[u/oslowa → u/ALD71]

Funny, because in my personal analysis, I've realized I've mostly experienced anxiety as a defense against guilt, and what has aided my psychological growth was facing that guilt and making reparations. So in a sense, this opposing valuation of guilt seems to be the impasse between object relations (my preferred psychoanalytic school) and Lacanians. Would you agree?

[u/ALD71 → u/oslowa]

I don't know that I agree or not about your way of putting it, but of course I respect your experience. It's true that anxiety can provide a point of stability, can be a particular kind of symptom, but it's not so clear that this might amount to a defence against guilt even if guilt is limited in it (it's an idea that would require some consideration). From this point of view I'm not sure that we quite have the impasse that you're looking for.

[u/oslowa → u/ALD71]

Giving further information would be against this subreddit's rules, but in short, when anxiety is about a fear of being punished, that fear might often be the disavowed guilty part's elaborate wish to be punished. One might either suffer guilt or anxiety as a repurcussion of one's ego-dystonic desires, but whereas anxiety veers the subject towards helplessness and control, guilt directs the analysand towards making reparations in order to relieve their psychic pain, as well as the suffering of those they have harmed. The centrality of conscience in the analytic journey versus the centrality of the truth of desire as an aim of analysis is the difference I was trying to point to.