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David M. Black's new book, Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The necessity of perspective (2024), offers a rather timely engagement with the all-important issue of ethics. One might be tempted to respond that ethics is not a new question for psychological consideration—the first ethical code of conduct for the American Psychological Association was promulgated in 1952 already, though it was only in the 70s and 80s hat it rose to deliberate levels of enforcement and integration into training (by contrast, the American Psychoanalytic Association adopted an ethical code of conduct in 1975, followed by sustained debate and controversy over enforcement mechanisms and protocols). There is, though, a difference in the renewed attention to ethics over the last few decades; the concern now seems less with prescribed rules and codes of conduct than with an articulation of the conditions of possibility for ethics in the first place—for the ethical that makes ethics possible. One might credit philosophy, and most notably the work of Emmanuel Levinas (2004, 2013), for this “ethical turn” and its resultant challenge to the human and social sciences for the psychological ontology from which its epistemology and methodological praxis gather form.
David M. Black's book situates itself precisely at this nexus of “a radical new dialogue of psychoanalysis with philosophy” (p. 2). The desire is for such a
dialogue to furnish psychoanalysis with a “theoretical base” from which to understand the ontological importance of ethics as foundational to practice and understanding. Given a startling paucity of such exchanges between philosophy and psychology in general, Black's contribution is welcomed, to be supported, lauded and closely read. Even more, beyond the importance of cross-disciplinary dialogue for psychology and psychotherapy in general, and at the risk of my approaching a hornet's nest with a stick, this is a conversation particularly important to psychoanalysis, the practice of which,