Epilogue: The Ethical and the True

Abstract

What, then, is the ethical which, by the present approach, does so intimately pertain to analytic psychotherapy? I hope now that we have reached the conclusion of this book, no one is surprised that the ethical in psychoanalysis consists of the formation, development and affirmation of subject positions and actions, grasped in their critical dependence on the other, the Otherness of the other and the subjectivity of the other. The ethical terrain is where subjects come and go and it is the aim of analytic psychotherapy to enlarge and enrich it in the patient’s life. Because their subjectivity is reciprocally determined, the ethical domain stretches between self and other. This does not mean that one loses one’s mind when one acts to suppress or obfuscate one’s own or an other’s subjectivity, but such action is always non-ethical, on the one hand, and psychically depleting, on the other. For me, therefore, any suppression of subjectivity embodies the non-therapeutic par excellence. Of course, this still leaves us with Jeremiah’s protest at how wickedness prospers: ‘Yet I would speak with you about your justice: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?’ (Jeremiah 12:1). The narrowing of mental life does not always lead to dysfunction.