Ethicality versus Morality
Publish Date : January, 2025
It sometimes surprises people when I insist that the position or attitude of the Psychoanalyst is one that is entirely amoral, yet radically ethical. To a certain extent, this is because of the prevailing confusion between morality and ethicality such that they are frequently deployed as if synonymous. Not only in the public’s mind but also in the proceedings of professional philosophy, an important distinction has been virtually lost. Indeed, if one reviews the so-called ‘psychoanalytic literature’ on ‘the ethics of psychoanalysis,’ one finds the confusion fulsomely replicated and perpetuated.
Yet, as I shall use the terms here, the distinction is crucially and profoundly significant for the way in which we think about healing the psyche. In brief, morality involves judgment ― good/bad, right/wrong ― and the articulation or imposition of such judgments on events or behaviors. Ethicality, by contrast, implies the cultivation of ― compassionate ― openness to whatever is. Note that openness does not entail endorsement, but rather a willingness to face whatever is the case and to do so with understanding and equanimity, both of which require abstinence from judgment.
So, it is legitimate to question whether judgment ever promotes healing ― at least in terms of the operations of the psyche. Indeed, one can argue that judgment is inherently contrary to a process of healing, because the latter must necessarily be holistic. One cannot decide against this in favor of that, if the intent is to heal the whole.
This is not to suggest that judgment and the conveyance of sociocultural values ― in short, moral reasoning ― is without value in the appropriate circumstances. But in the context of personal growth practices, these are the labors of the Counsellor and the Life Coach, not the Psychoanalyst. They are also the activity of the Rabbi, the Priest, and the Iman, as well as the Police and the Social Worker. Following the warnings of Karl Marx in The German Ideology, one must question to what extent such practitioners end up being, not the facilitators of liberation, but rather those who make their livelihood from the formation and perpetuation of the illusions of the ruling-class along with the dominant sociopolitical or epistemological order. The practices of psychotherapy must also be critically scrutinized in this respect.
The faculty of judgment entails decision; this must be kept and that must be suppressed, thrown outside the city’s gates, sent into exile. Decision ― from the Latin, de-cidere ― means to cut off something, to excise a possibility. This may or may not be okay in a medical or even in a sociocultural context of healing but, in the context of our psychic realities, to cut off some aspect of what is surely cannot be healing. Again, healing must be holistic.
In this context, it is useful to consider the ethical position or attitude of the psychoanalyst (or, for that matter, the psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapist). Everything that is, both inside the practitioner and inside the patient, must be explorable, faced with understanding and equanimity. This requires a radical and compassionate openness to all possibilities and eventualities. Any adherence to judgment forecloses such a healing process.
Obviously, there is a sense in which the ‘frame’ of a psychoanalytic treatment, which the practitioner takes unilateral responsibility for establishing and maintaining, does involve a certain sort of moral judgment. This ‘frame’ has five aspects:
- Regular appointments, kept with scrupulous reliability and punctuality, in which the practitioner is as totally focused on the patient as s/he is able (so, no notetaking, no phone calls, or other distractions).
- Confidentiality, especially with the exclusion of all third-parties ― including colleagues, family members, insurance companies, supervisors ― and there can be no note-taking in sessions.
- Transactionality…the patient must be made to pay a fee that allows her/him to know that s/he is taking care of a significant portion of the therapist’s welfare ― this is the patient’s sole responsibility.
- Abstinence…the therapist remains at all times passionately involved with the patient, yet equanimous, and entirely abstinent in terms of sensual and as abstinent as might be feasible in terms of narcissistic gratifications.
- Cultivation of a relationship the patient can come to experience, moment by moment, as one of safety, intimacy, and freedom. The therapist encourages the patient to “speak as freely as possible” but also “when you find there are things that might be important to say but that feel impossible to tell me, let’s talk about why some things seem so difficult to share with me.”
Thus there is a certain sort of morality explicitly and implicitly structured into the operation of the ‘frame.’ But this is done precisely so that the free-associative process of psychoanalytic treatment can proceed ethically in a unique context of intimacy, safety, and freedom.
The compassionate and nonjudgmental ― nonpartial ― openness of understanding and equanimity, which is then required of the psychoanalyst as s/he works and plays within this frame, usually takes the practitioner years of ― emotional and spiritual ― training to acquire. It must then be applied or held studiously and consistently in each clinical session with the patient. This is centrally necessary to the possibility of a deeper mode of healing.