In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: Facing Ethical Fragility in Psychoanalysis

It may be that, as Bergson maintained, a philosopher only ever develops one idea. In any case, there is no doubt that the philosopher is born of a single question, the question which arises at the intersection of thought and life at a given moment in the philosopher's youth; the question which one must at all costs find a way to answer.

That psychoanalysis is deep down a practice founded on ethics may seem obvious, even trivial, and, for that reason, be seriously underestimated.

The year is 1976, and my mother is long dead. Having just received my doctorate in clinical psychology, I dream that night that I am standing at the bottom of a long escalator, confidently holding a briefcase that looks suspiciously like an old-fashioned doctor's bag. Looking up, I see my mother slowly descending, each metal stair folding neatly into the next, bringing her closer. She looks characteristically anxious, not quite all there. When she gets to the bottom and we are face to face I say to her confidently, hopefully: “Mommy, I'm a doctor now, and I'm here to take care of you.”

My responsibilities as a newly minted psychologist in this dream are clear. The dream didn't surprise me. In fact, it presented a picture that was already known to me. But I still needed to know why. How had things

lined up that way? Who was really taking care of whom here? This is perhaps the first ethical question, the one that had spontaneously arisen at the intersection of thought and life on the day I had “officially” become a psychologist. It was also a clear (if unbidden) path into psychoanalysis for me.

My turn to clinical psychology had been prefigured in my undergraduate thesis in literature titled “Autobiography and the Psychology of Change,” written when I was twenty-one. My orienting question in this work was, “How, or better, why, does the impulse