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In this interesting book, Viviane Chetrit-Vatine takes up the themes of the origins of morality, responsibility, and the analyst's ethical obligations to the patient. Her principal thesis is that the mother's responsibility for the child—a relationship she will explore at length—offers a model for the analyst/patient relationship.
This strikes me as a deep insight. But, reader, be forewarned: the book is full of abstruse quasi-philosophical reflections that are not easy to follow. In some instances, for example her musings on gender, I just gave up. And her discussions of the French psychoanalytic tradition, which is her primary influence, make little effort to translate its idiosyncratic vocabulary into a language American analysts might more readily understand. A notable exception is her discussion of Emmanuel Levinas, whose writing is both powerful and relatively transparent, and with whom she begins.
Levinas claims that ethics is defined by the relationship of responsibility for another person. Further, the ought and the is, so to speak, are born together in the same fundamental situation, that of the infant's total dependence on the mother who is responsible for the infant. The is is the infant, the ought is the mother's relationship to the infant. As the theologian Hans Jonas—who influenced Levinas—puts it, “the plain being of a de facto infant immanently and evidently contains an ‘ought’ for others” (p. 19). There is thus a fundamental asymmetry built into the maternal situation: the mother owes the infant everything, the infant owes the mother nothing. The infant, in turn, learns what it is to be responsible, to