People go to see a therapist typically because they experience problems with living which exceed their own resources of understanding or their ordinary ways of coping. These problems may concern their relationship to others to whom they feel attached - or the lack of such an emotional connection. People may feel in conflict if there is more than one passionate attachment to others or to causes they may wish to pursue; if these diverse investments become rivals in one’s mind painful choices may have to be made, and feelings of loss and guilt can ensue. Or a problem may arise if intense urges collide with one’s own ‘better judgement’ or with the expectations or strictures of society. Conflicts between ‘passion’ and ‘reason’ press for a resolution which is often hard to achieve.

What is important? What is valuable? What is it that I feel I cannot or do not want to live without? What are the elements in my life which

make it a life worth living - or a life of misery in their absence? What remains of my life if I cannot have what I feel I need or want most of all? These questions, pertinent and personal to each of us, concern our notion of ‘the good life’; they are at heart ethical questions. Whilst in the past people may have turned to philosophers, or priests, for answers to these questions, these days they may decide to turn to a therapist. This step may be taken as one comes to realise that, in the messy business of living one’s life, the problems one faces tend to resist ready solutions.

Engaging in any explorative talking therapy can be seen as a review of one’s values and ideals, one’s attachments and moral commitments. To this extent, psychotherapy is in itself an ethical endeavour; it is a place and a process that offers the chance to put one’s morality in question and to think again about one’s own ideas about a life that is good. It is the particular contribution

of psychoanalysis to view our values and moral commitments as, at least in part, an effect of early emotional attachments - an effect, furthermore, which is to a significant extent inaccessible to conscious thought. Psychoanalysis sees the person not as a unified whole but as essentially divided and in conflict with oneself. We are not just rational agents in pursuit of a clear and socially sanctioned vision of the good life; often we pursue aims which are in conflict with each other and we find ourselves acting in ways which defeat our best intentions. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint we might say that our unconscious wishes or fantasies ‘trip us up’, leaving us puzzled and often in considerable anguish and pain. This view of the person as individualised through their very particular life-history but also divided internally between conscious and unconscious parts of the mind has a number of important