Title: Philosophical roots of psychoanalytic ethics
Abstract: Fundamental notions of psychoanalysis are based on the long tradition of the Western philosophical thought. In parallel with the growing doubt over rationality of the global order, philosophical systems that placed irrational forces as the basis of reality appeared in the second half of the 19th century; it is this spiritual climate that produced psychoanalytical theories of drives and the unconscious, which bear a surprising likeness to the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Further on, differentiation was made between the unconscious as a psychological notion and the irrational as a gnoseological category (Jung), the difference that was indicated earlier in Freud's idea that the contents of the unconscious can include certain repressed contents (in the dynamic sense), or that parts of Ego and Superego are unconscious (in the topical sense). From the perspective of philosophical notion of totality, mental disorder was defined as a predominance of specificity (irrationality), which escapes the integrative function of personality. The objective of treatment can then be presented as a demand to reverse the situation in which, according to Freud, Id manipulates Ego in order to satisfy its irrational tendencies, a demand that is expressed in the therapeutic maxim 'Where Id was, there shall Ego be' - and where the Socratic rationalist ethics program is evoked as a practical postulate. Kant's deontological ethics, on the other hand, also leads to reexamining the notion of manipulation, especially with the 'second' formulation of the categorical imperative, which prohibits the use of man as a means, as manipulation can in fact be defined as the instrumentalization of man, with a necessary condition that the individual is unaware of the nature of that relationship, unless it should be a case of simple coercion. Accordingly, again in accord with Kant's imperative, communication implies a relationship with man as a rational purpose in itself, not a means for external purposes. On the other hand, the famous 'first' formulation of the categorical imperative, which subordinates subjective will to the universal rational moral principle, affirms the previously mentioned motive of generality rather than the specificity of the irrational.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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