Discover Top Posts Tagged with #ethics of psychoanalysis

...when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human.

We must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance–to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven…

Judith Butler - Giving an Account of Oneself. ( Fordham University Press), 2003.

#Lacan #Unconscious #psychoanalysis #ethics of psychoanalysis #lacanian ethics #ethics #speaking body #speaking being #parletre

“At every moment we need to know what our effective relationship is to the desire to do good, to the desire to cure”

Lacan’s seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960) pursues, from a Freudian perspective, a fundamental philosophical question classically addressed by Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics: How is human life best lived and fulfilled? Is there is an ethic of this type intrinsic to psycho- analysis? Lacan placed the problem of desire at the center of his Ethics. His notorious self-authorized freedom from convention and probable crossing of limits (see Roudinesco 1993), may have led mainstream analysts to ignore his admonition: “At every moment we need to know what our effective relationship is to the desire to do good, to the desire to cure” (Lacan 1959–1960, p. 219). This means that the analyst’s desire, as well as the patient’s, is always in play in his attempt to sustain an ethical position. An examination of Lacan’s seminar highlights this link, but also points to a number of unresolved issues. The patient’s desire is a complex matter, readily entangled in neurotic compromise, defense, and transference, and the analyst’s commitment to it is also problematic because of the inevitable co-presence of his own desire. Lacan suggested that more emphasis be placed in training on the desire of the analyst, but beyond that a proposal is advanced for the institutionalization of a “third” as reviewer and interlocutor in routine analytic practice. Analysis may not be a discipline that can be limited to a dyadic treatment relationship.

Lewis Kirshner- Toward an ethics of Psychoanalysis: a critical reading of Lacan’s Ethics. Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association. 2012.

#Lacan #Unconscious #psychoanalysis #ethics of psychoanalysis #lacanian ethics

There’s absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream.

There’s absolutely no reason why we should make ourselves the guarantors of the bourgeois dream. A little more rigor and firmness are required in our confrontation with the human condition. That is why I reminded you last time that the service of goods or the shift of the demand for happiness onto the political stage has its consequences. The movement that the world we live in is caught up in, of wanting to establish the universal spread of the service of goods as far as conceivably possible, implies an amputation, sacrifices, indeed a kind of puritanism in the relationship of desire that has occurred historically [that you have to cede or restrain your desire in pursuit of the good]. The establishment of the service of goods at a universal level does not in itself resolve the problem of the present relationship of each individual man to his desire in the short period of time between his birth and his death.

Lacan - The Ethics Of Psychoanalysis. (The Seminar Of Jacques Lacan VII) 1997.

#Lacan #Unconscious #psychoanalysis #ethics of psychoanalysis #psychoanalytic #desire of the other #cause of desire

[W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance--to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient "I" as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven... Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself. ( Fordham University Press), 2003.

#lacan #judith butler #ethics #ethics of psychoanalysis #unconscious #psychoanalysis

Never give up on your desire.

Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis

My old master's directive here, as with every essential thesis, must be divided into two: 1) Do not satisfy your desire so as to continue desiring, and so as to in this sense not give up on your desire, that is on desiring as such. 2) Keep going after your desire, after the object of your desire until you have actually attained it and the 'state' of your desire withers away, since you never gave up on your desire qua object-cathexis, human, thing, hole, armpit, etc., of said desire.

Political correlations: 1) Rightist hermeneutic: Kautskyists, Althusserians, Deng Xiaopingists, every infantile anarchist/senile social democratic opportunist and every post-modernist and post-marxist fuckwit idealist i’ve ever had the bitter displeasure to have met or read, etc., obstruct the fulfillment of their desires so as to go on desiring, only to shit their theoretical pants with pearls of wisdom (read: excuses for incompentence and inaction) such as ‘it’s too soon!’, or its disgusting variant ‘stop rebelling, you’re not class conscious enough yet!’. 2) Revolutionary proletarian voice: the revolutionary proletarian vanguard of the working class stop at nothing to, by any and all means necessary and possible, really satisfy their desire.

Amorous correlations: 1) the neurotic ‘lover’: admires the beloved from a distance, writes love letters to the beloved that never seem to arrive at their destination, which for the neurotic amant IS paradoxically its true destination, at least according to his drive and not desire. 2) the psychotic lover: does whatever it takes to fulfill his desire. Enough said.

No doubt, there are many more figures other than the lover and the revolutionary communist militant which we could illuminate through the coordinates of Lacan’s thesis, but frankly nothing else interests me. Voilà: be reactionary and lose, impotent and fail! Or be audacious and invent, revolutionary and victorious! Saint Just was thus saintly and just to have said: «Osez! Ce mot renferme toute la politique de notre révolution».