The Letter, Issue 69, 2020, pages 1-19
EATING HONEY IN BED
Liam Barnard
There are few fields of human experience that have not had to reckon with the consequences of Freud’s discoveries. Ethics, a field which is concerned with human action, is a topic that is of particular importance given the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. One of the most revered and influential of ethical thinkers, at least in the Western tradition, is Aristotle, whose work the Nicomachean Ethics is regarded as a paradigm of virtue ethics. In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan radically dismantles the system of ethics put forward by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, discarding much of it but retaining that which he sees as useful in articulating a new form of ethics, one that has at its centre the subject of the unconscious and addresses the question ‘what must one do in order to act in the right way?’, given that in the Freudian view, action emanates from the unconscious.
Keywords: ethics; Aristotle; Sovereign God; knowledge; pleasure; reality
The seminars of Jacques Lacan can be viewed as one long exploration of the question of what it is that defines psychoanalysis as a field of inquiry and, more specifically, as a practice. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and the questions he posed throughout his seminars were drawn from this context. The fact that the seminar project continued for over twenty years gives some indication as to how elusive a concise, reductive answer to the question of what constitutes a psychoanalytic practice was and continues to be.
By continually addressing the question of the practice of psychoanalysis through his seminars, concerning himself with the acts that take place within the analytic encounter, Lacan weaves the ethics of psychoanalysis and its practice tightly together: ‘I will say right off that the ethical limits of psychoanalysis coincide with the limits of its practice. Its practice is only a preliminary to moral action as such’.[1] This emphasis demonstrates, to my mind, that it is only in the context of the practice of psychoanalysis that its ethics can be articulated, or at the very least that it is in the practice of psychoanalysis that one must reckon with it. One consequence of this is that throughout the seminar project, Lacan’s lifelong examination of the practice of psychoanalysis is, to some degree, also an examination of the limits of its ethics.