consequences for the ethical stance of the psychoanalyst:

1) What is held to be good or bad, right or wrong, healthy or sick is itself an important aspect of that which requires analysis, i.e. elucidation in terms of the individual’s life history. Rather than taking its direction from the person’s moral precepts the analytic process takes these as essential material to be explored both in their conscious and unconscious constituents.

2) What is true for the person’s desired outcome - say, to be ‘happy’ or freed of anxiety - is true also for the presenting problem or symptom: rather than focus on the removal of the symptom the psychoanalytic process seeks to unravel the deeper and more wide-ranging issues of which it might ‘speak’. Symptoms are regarded as compromises between conflicting conscious and unconscious desires which need to be honoured and

understood. Since symptoms can also serve to give stability to a person’s life it cannot be taken for granted that the patient is indeed prepared to give theirs up.

3) The psychoanalytic therapist cannot answer the patient’s (implicit or explicit) question as to what is good or right for them to do in relation to their problems. Just as the patient’s moral precepts are taken as material for analysis rather than guidance, so no preconceived idea on the part of the therapist, however much it might be validated by current theories of ‘mental health’, must become a recipe for action for the patient. Therapists are not experts in living life - not their own, let alone that of others. Equally, therapy is not the place to instil the values of the therapist in their patients, even if these values are entirely in tune with what today’s society expects or demands.

4) The psychoanalyst’s position is therefore
characterised by a dual refusal - or, to put this less starkly, by a dual abstinence. Neither the patient’s insistence to be made ‘better’, in the terms of their complaint, nor society’s norms of what is healthy and satisfying can serve as the blueprint for the therapeutic process and the yardstick for its outcome. The analyst cannot and must not accede to the pressure to act as an expert either in the medical or the ‘life-coach’ sense of the word. The fact that the work aims at the unconscious conflict rather than at the fulfilment of the patient’s demand may well be the cause of some tension and dissatisfaction. Whilst this may be regrettable it is perhaps not too high a price to pay for a measure of the person’s freedom.

5) Far from having achieved some ideal state of health and psychic integration the analyst too is subject to his or her own unconscious