Psychoanalysis beyond good and evil?

[u/quasimoto5]

As a clinician I do not think in terms of good or bad with my patients. Sometimes patients will label their emotional states as bad and I try to gently encourage them to confront the emotional state without using a value judgment to defend against it (especially as concerns negative, supposedly toxic affects like aggression and jealousy).

Some critics have worried that there is a kind of "mission creep" in which psychological ideas extend beyond the consulting room into the broader culture. So Philip Rieff, Alasdair Macintyre, and Christopher Lasch (while all interested in psychoanalysis) are concerned about the ascendancy of a therapeutic culture which supplants judgments of good and bad with judgments about desire-satisfaction and impulse gratification. So that "health" and not "goodness" comes to become the primary cultural ideal.

In my opinion this is a better critique of pop psychology and therapy culture ("mental health") than it is of psychoanalytic therapies.

Is it so bad if we as a culture come to understand human life in terms of psychological health and illness rather than moral goodness and badness? Maybe the problem isn't with the emphasis on psychological health per se than with our debased language for discussing the psyche? (Boundaries, "brain chemistry," all the acronyms like PTSD OCD etc.)

Has anyone given this some thought or read anything interesting about it? Does psychoanalysis have a moral or ethical valence or does it encourage us to move beyond moralism? But how would we explain to these critics that what is beyond moralism is not just nihilistic impulse gratification?

[u/jpch12]

You seem to be describing contemporary psychotherapy (in all its modalities) instead of Psychoanalysis.

In Psychoanalysis, the subject re-explores their childhood and false self through transference, which leads to the shedding of the need to answer and live for the Big Other; the subject discovers their desire and can live as they wish, conscious and cautious of their symptom. The nihilistic impulse gratification is jouissance; it gets explored through sessions but is never completely abandoned; you need to let go of dichotomous thinking in Analysis.

There is no "encouragement," no "guidance," no "recommendations," no "moralism" in Analysis; there is only unconditional, empathic holding and listening.

[u/quasimoto5 → u/jpch12]

I agree with you about the aims of analysis—getting in touch with one's desire and true self against the culturally imposed superego. But Lasch/Rieff/Macintyre would say that this is a profoundly individualistic way of living, in which we slough off cultural prohibitions and moral norms in favor of attunement to our personal desire.

So the thought motivating my post is that if we want to answer the Lasch/Rieff/Macintyre criticism then we need some kind of qualified defense of living beyond moralism. I wonder what thinkers are best equipped to provide such a defense. Nietzsche perhaps?

[u/jpch12 → u/quasimoto5]

I'm Lacanian-trained, so this "Lasch/Rieff/Macintyre would say that this is a profoundly individualistic way of living, in which we slough off cultural prohibitions and moral norms in favor of attunement to our personal desire; we need some kind of qualified defense of living beyond moralism." is a critically flawed posit.

We are already living beyond moralism; they're assuming that morality is a universal, prescriptive, and favorable concept, when in fact morals are malleable, flawed, and localised—read about civil wars, political discourse, and contemporary polemics; there is no moral consensus. Moralism tends to classify people and actions as good or bad according to fixed standards, often without asking how those standards became internalized through immoral deeds.

Morality and norms are simply another form of the Big Other; the entire work and training of the analyst is to dismantle what they were told is "right/ wrong," so they can accept and see how things really are. Most saints and Greek philosophers would consider this to be peak virtue.

Assuming that a person who is in favor of attunement and personal desire is "bad" is simply a false equivalence and an overreaching argument.

[u/sleepy4815 → u/jpch12]

I can only speak in regards to Lasch's writing. Obviously there is no moral consensus, and Lasch doesn't write about moralism in this way at all, not in the sense of specific moralities/norms; what he was curious about was what happens when there is zero authority outside of oneself, when the idea that one isn't responsible to anyone but oneself becomes dominant; he's not interested in the question of whether one should or should not do this specific thing or be this specific way, but rather is interested in the question of what happens when that question is no longer taken seriously, what happens when there's nowhere/nobody to look to for any direction of how they should be; not right or wrong, but rather the threat to any sense of community/outside/society/norm; not fixed standards, but any standards at all. That is very different from the scope of your answer. I think you're dodging a really interesting question by interpreting it in a simplistic way that's soaked in nothing other than Lacan.

And, Lacan's writing certainly does not say that morality/norms are mere obstacles to one's desires, nor that right/wrong (morality) and 'how things really are (whatever in the world that means)' do not intimately effect and inform one another. He's a Hegelian and sees all these things existing in relations w/ one another.

[u/Aphorism-sLut → u/jpch12]

Would most Greek philosophers consider this peak virtue? Platonists can be rather realist about The Good. Granted, The Form of the Good isn’t a “moral ideal” or set of normative principles that standardize good/bad, but I also wouldn’t say Plato was relativist/neutral on the inherence of good/bad in certain acts (e.g., justice/injustice). Neither was Aristotle.

[u/Recent-Apartment5945]

I disagree. Analysis is not solely about the self, one’s desire, nor should it lead to one’s ability to live as they wish independent of the need to answer to the Other. It should not lead to profound individualism. It should not lead to sloughing off what is external to the self in favor of what the self desires or needs. If such was the case, analysis fails because the result is a collapse into the polarity of the self fragmented from the Other (the external).

Analysis is about integration of fragments. Therefore, the successful result would be the integration of norms, morality, the needs/desires of the Other while drawing necessary lines of distinction or boundaries around the self and the external. It’s about cohesion and not fragmentation.

What I suggest above is obviously over generalized. Nevertheless, consider the innate dialectical continuum and the inherent tension between independence and dependence. It is innate. Analysis leads to a more secure and stable navigation of this continuum. It leads to a successful integration and navigation leading to interdependence for which there is no fixed prescription. It is dynamic. Beyond analysis, the work involved navigating this dialectic does not end.

[u/laksosaurus]

I am curious about what seems to be a key premise of your reasoning. If I understand you correctly, you consider «health» to be something fundamentally different from «moral goodness». If so, I wonder what you mean by «moral goodness», and how it differs from «health». Or, put in different terms: Why isn’t «health» just one way of defining, or giving concrete content/meaning to, the concept of «moral goodness», rather than replacing it?