Strangers Among Us: Psychoanalytic Ethics at the Crossroads

Psychoanalytic ethicists identify caring as the deepest virtue in our work, but what is our capacity for caring at the collective level? Beyond our “groupish” nature (Bion, 1961) and our collective unconscious (Jung, 1926), the author considers an emerging collective conscience, in our theories and practices. Freud (1930) believed that our post-oedipal superegos, through the sacrifice of individual instincts, builds civilization—the “power of a community” larger than each of us. By basing his theory on one intrapsychic actor in the tragic myth of Oedipus, Freud left out a whole cast of characters who Oedipus treated as outcasts. These strangers, and those he estranged, offered a community of care to the oedipal triad. In our time the Oedipal complex has transformed into oedipal complexity; individual Oedipus at the crossroads now encounters sociocultural intersectionality. Grounded by our phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and sociogenic beginnings to bond in groups through the ethic of caring, the author tracks the longer road we travel on towards the ethic of fairness.