Psychoanalysis and Ethics – The Necessity of Perspective

This penetrating interdisciplinary study of psychoanalysis and ethics starts from the premise that Freud failed to recognise the foundational character of ethical values owing to his fundamentally materialistic and positivist metaphysic. David explores this theme from many angles, including the distinctive contributions of Jonathan Lear, Buddhism, Dante (whom he has translated), and Emmanuel Levinas. Both Nietzsche and Max Weber were sensitive to the consequences of the loss of spiritual vision and its replacement by a mechanistic philosophy of randomness without purpose. This left an ethical void to be filled by technology and power. Here is where phenomenology comes in, with Levinas ‘prioritising direct experience over theoretical understanding,’ perceiving the other as an immediate source of our obligation of ethical responsibility. A similar emphasis on the primacy of direct experience as a means of accessing profound structures of reality is made in the Galileo Commission Report. Ethics and meaning are mutually entwined, and require a deeper or vertical ontology.

David notes that Buddhism paradoxically abolishes the self while insisting on an ethic of kindness and compassion, while Dante draws both on Virgil’s classical virtues – Aristotle’s phronesis or practical wisdom - of rationality and courage, and on transcendent love represented by Beatrice as guides on his journey. Martin Buber’s emphasis on the importance of “Thou” (I/Thou rather than I/It) is taken up by Levinas, a Jew who was imprisoned during the Second World War where he witnessed that ‘ethical response is supremely important,’ as also noted by Victor Frankl and embodied in the sacrificial gesture of St Maximilian Kolbe, who gave his life for another man who had a family. Viewing the human as a machine as is fashionable in technological circles can only lead to prioritising instrumental I/It relationships devoid of ethics where the subject is reduced to an object.

The last two chapters are devoted to religion as the affirmation of values, especially as reflected in the work of Ronald Dworkin (‘religious atheism’) and Emmanuel Levinas, a thinker who did not feature in the curriculum of the Philosophy Department at Edinburgh when David was studying there in the 1960s (Continental Philosophy was not on their map), although I personally was lucky enough in the early 1970s to be able to study existentialist philosophy at St Andrews with Penny Palmer. Levinas’ ‘face of the Other’ evokes an inescapable ethical obligation derived from felt experience rather than theory. David also notes that many other philosophers have been writing about the objectivity of values, including Iain McGilchrist. An insistence on interiority represents a corresponding emphasis on inner freedom, to be lived out in our relationships. The re-grounding of ethics in phenomenology makes an important contribution to contemporary culture where, as David notes, ‘full ethical seriousness requires that subjective experience be given a central place in the picture.’ (p. 145) All this is consistent with the emerging post-materialist postulate with respect to the foundational nature of consciousness. This book is a significant cultural contribution, especially for the psychoanalytic community.