The Analyst's Offer

How does psychoanalysis begin, how does it come into being, what makes it start to happen as something new between this analysand and this analyst? This is the ethical question I will take up. Call it the ethics of the analyst's offer.

The offer is the opening into a foundational ethics for psychoanalysis. This ethics asks how the analytic situation is secured in the first place, how the frame is set. Foundational ethics underlies the operational ethics of psychoanalytic practice, something that is easier to talk about. Operational ethics is more experience-near. It takes up, moment by moment and instance by instance, all the gnarly questions of how practicing analysts must attempt to attend to the frame, attempt to maintain it, especially at the inevitable moments of disorientation we call enactments. Foundational ethics, compared to this, risks seeming cerebral. It starts from the seemingly abstract question of how what we call the analyst's stance makes possible psychoanalytic treatment in the first place. Lacan's 1959-1960 seminar is one of the major efforts at delineating a foundational psychoanalytic ethics. In 2012 the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association acknowledged the importance of Lacan's effort in an issue centered on an article by Lewis Kirshner. But long before that, in a plain-spoken style that couldn't be less Lacanian, Lawrence Friedman took on questions of foundational ethics in his trenchant 1994 American Psychoanalytic Association plenary address, “Ferrum, Ignis, and Medicina: Return to the Crucible” (1997). I'll start there.

Friedman wants to make us squirm—that's the word he uses (1997, p. 22)—as he asks us to think about what it is we are offering as analysts. Freud's effort to make great discoveries, Friedman writes, “had unexpectedly put in his hands a peculiar power—the power of psychological seduction” (p. 25). “I shouldn't have to—” Friedman continues, “but I've