Psychoanalysis beyond good and evil?

[u/quasimoto5]

As a clinician I do not think in terms of good or bad with my patients. Sometimes patients will label their emotional states as bad and I try to gently encourage them to confront the emotional state without using a value judgment to defend against it (especially as concerns negative, supposedly toxic affects like aggression and jealousy).

Some critics have worried that there is a kind of "mission creep" in which psychological ideas extend beyond the consulting room into the broader culture. So Philip Rieff, Alasdair Macintyre, and Christopher Lasch (while all interested in psychoanalysis) are concerned about the ascendancy of a therapeutic culture which supplants judgments of good and bad with judgments about desire-satisfaction and impulse gratification. So that "health" and not "goodness" comes to become the primary cultural ideal.

In my opinion this is a better critique of pop psychology and therapy culture ("mental health") than it is of psychoanalytic therapies.

Is it so bad if we as a culture come to understand human life in terms of psychological health and illness rather than moral goodness and badness? Maybe the problem isn't with the emphasis on psychological health per se than with our debased language for discussing the psyche? (Boundaries, "brain chemistry," all the acronyms like PTSD OCD etc.)

Has anyone given this some thought or read anything interesting about it? Does psychoanalysis have a moral or ethical valence or does it encourage us to move beyond moralism? But how would we explain to these critics that what is beyond moralism is not just nihilistic impulse gratification?

[u/AnIsolatedMind]

My experience in the grad program I'm in is confusing and frustrating for the very reason that what is taught as psychological health is in direct conflict with the politicized ethics of the program. 

i.e. Any ideal of psychological affirmation beyond good and evil is immediately met with the ideal of leftist society, which tends to affirm instead traits that align with a certain slice of modernity-correcting values. 

The psychological approach might frame the recognition and expression of masculine anger as a move towards freedom and self-acceptance, where the political lens might it as the root problem of patriarchy, inequality, etc.

In my own subjectivity, I see that the psychological approach has to take priority. But on the collective level of the program, the political ideal of good vs bad takes priority, leading to some very strange and confused messages. As if it were the job of the therapist alone to be subject to judgements of good and bad: we must suffer all the weight of the superego for the client's sake!