Response to Commentaries

I thank Jonathan Lear, Lawrence Friedman, and Mitchell Wilson for their thoughtful and respectful readings of my paper. Together and separately, their commentaries address three central aspects of my paper: the historical background of Lacan's Ethics, the nature of desire as a psychoanalytic concept, and the consequences of Lacan's argument for institutional reform.

I'd like to begin, however, by presenting some of my reasons for writing the article. Initially I wanted to perform a critical reading of Lacan's seminar on psychoanalytic ethics, which for me raises important questions about the underlying conceptual basis of psychoanalysis as practiced today and how this may shape institutional policies in ways neglected by the profession. In the process, I reread Lear's work covering similar ground and began to think about how we might implement a psychoanalytic ethics. Like the commentators, I was stimulated and frustrated by my struggles with Lacan's text, which typically does not lay out a program so much as chart out some landmarks worth exploring, and I hoped to inspire others to undertake this effort.

The challenge for Lacan was how to define an ethics specific to psychoanalysis, with its tenets of the unconscious, the organization of human behavior by symbolic systems, and the perennial problem of the divided or incomplete subject. As each commentator observes, Lacan typically follows Freud rather closely in his argument before moving into unfamiliar territory that (for better or worse) was opened up by him. Freud's ethics were based primarily on a scientific model, avoiding what may have seemed to him purely philosophical issues like subjectivity or conceptions of human flourishing (with notable exceptions). The major assumptions of classical analysis involved a kind of biological determinism and the importance of objectivity in keeping the field of observation uncluttered.