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Can psychoanalysis contribute to morality and ethics? Freud's position is obscure. Ernest Jones recalls Freud's remark that “analysis makes for unity, but not necessarily for goodness.” And a patient reports that Freud stated that the analytic cure “simply means that a person gets on well; it doesn't mean that the person is particularly worthy. There are ‘healthy’ people who are not worth anything” (Roazen , 292). Yet, this is not the whole story. For it is Freud who also writes as if no person who truly knows himself is capable of evil. Anyone, says Freud:
who has succeeded in educating himself to the truth about himelf is permanently defended against the danger of immorality, even though his standard of morality may differ in some respect from that which is customary in society. (SE 16: 434)
The reason, apparently, is that repression isolates the desires, so that we deny to ourselves what we are doing, and in this way fail to take responsibility for our own conduct (Abramson, , pp. 120-121). To be sure, pace Socrates, to know oneself is no guarantee of morality. It is better seen as a necessary condition, for reasons outlined by Paul Ricoeur (, p. 280; Abramson, p. 121), who argues that insight into the lies of repression opens up “a clearing of truthfulness, in which the lies of the ideals and idols are brought to light…. This truthfulness is undoubtedly not the whole of ethics but at least it is the threshold.”
The question addressed below is whether psychoanalysis can take us beyond the threshold. There seems little doubt that psychoanalysis can explain ethics, showing the origins of morality in the demands of the superego, for example. The