On Ideas of “The Good” and “The Ideal” in George Eliot'S Novels and Post-Kleinian Psychoanalytic Thought

The conflation of the “Good” with the “Ideal” has long muddied the waters of inquiry where matters of morality and ethics are concerned. This paper sets out to draw a distinction between the role of an abstract notion of the Good-in-itself—in speculative terms dangerously close to the “Ideal”—and the seeking after a good that is attainable, and in relation to which people may usefully live their lives. The paper draws on two areas that are at the same time distinct and interestingly similar: the novels of George Eliot and post-Kleinian psychoanalytic theory. Both George Eliot and psychoanalysts may be said to be engaging with the problem of truthfulness in human affairs and with the role of that truthfulness in the growth and development of the individual. In each case, where “ideal” sanctions are invoked, there is a price to be paid. In the novels it is paid aesthetically, since the intrusion of the ideal carries neither philosophical, nor personal, nor artistic conviction. In psychoanalytic terms it is paid at that point of abstraction where it becomes extremely hard to link the theory with the major ethical problems that psychoanalysis, of its very nature, poses at the heart of its practice.

In one of her early articles for the Westminster Review, written before she turned to fiction as a way of making her ideas “thoroughly incarnate” (Haight, vol. IV, p. ), George Eliot stated a belief that was to become a raison d'être for her novels: “Emotion links itself with particulars, and only in a faint and secondary manner with abstractions” (1857, p. 30). The ideas she sought to rescue from speculative detachment and to explore in the lived experience of her characters and their relationships were those which have been central to the philosophical and theological inquiries of Western culture from Plato to the present day: How does a person live, or achieve, a good life, and what generates and informs “the good life”?

In theory and in daily pr