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We shall give up the idea that there are special classes of processes that prepare or propel mental activity, that is to say, classes that are qualitatively different from the mental activity they prepare or propel; for now everything is an action.
An ethics essentially consists in a judgment of our action, with the proviso that [the judgment] is only significant if the action implied by it also contains within it, or is supposed to contain, a judgment, even if it is only implicit. The presence of judgment on both sides is essential to the structure.
After Schafer and Lacan, Renik (1993a,b) and Friedman (1993, 2007), and, more or less, the entire relational tradition (Harris 2011), it is by now a commonplace to say that psychoanalysts are interested in their own activity—that is, our activity, what we are doing with our patients, what we, as analysts, say, feel, and imagine. Analysts have grasped the ways in which their internal worlds shape, illuminate, or constrain engagement with, and perhaps the very emergence of, the patient's subjective experience. Analysands talk in the hope we will receive their message generatively, openly, all the while taking the risk that we might misrecognize, not hear, and fail to witness what they want us to recognize, hear, and witness. This risk involves, as Shulman (2016) says, “a bid for utmost intimacy” (p. 706); the emotional stakes are high. In this context, it is no wonder we care deeply about how we act and why we act as we do. This is why what we concern ourselves with is