You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The relative lack of psychoanalytic examination of the ethical questions of a moral life may have been fueled by Freud's ambivalence about morality, in his quest for a scientific system based on biology and the natural sciences. Ethics was separated eventually from psychology, and ethical and moral concerns became a rarely visited territory of psychoanalysis. One notable exception was Karen Horney, with her reference to moral values: “to work at ourselves is not only the prime moral obligation but the prime moral privilege” (Horney, , p. 15). However, there is a renewed interest in the moral dimension of human experience. Keeping with the ongoing broadening scope of analysis, Timothy Zeddies states the question in his paper on moral values: is it possible, or even necessary to find a new character ideal or a new understanding of what it means to live a full or worthwhile human life? Zeddies presents the views of contemporary philosophers and their interpretations of Aristotle. Zeddies writes that ethical and moral deliberation is valuable and inevitable: “we are always expressing, through word or action, some understanding or vision of the good life.”
In an integrative article, Marilyn Charles captures the dawn of creativity in sensory patterning. “Consciousness fluctuates between alert awareness and auto-sensuous states. In auto-sensuous states the outside world, and the objects in it are experienced as a continuation of our body,” according to Frances Tustin (1990, p. 218). Charles explores the creative aspects of auto- sensuous shapes, a type of unconscious phantasy. The memory of early maternal failures of holding and containment, stored in the body, becomes accessible to the therapeutic pair through the analyst's synchronizations to the rhythms of the patient. Charles describes the optimal milieu of the “rhythm of safety,” and her experience of being out of rhythm and in rhythm with her patient. As she creates rhythm out of her disjointed, jumbled inside, meanin