From the Unconscious to Ethics: Jacques J. Rozenberg. New York:  Peter Lang Publishing, 1999,  158 pp.

Reader, beware. This is a formidable little book. The author leads us through a forest of carefully reasoned propositions about the philosophy of psychoanalysis that is both interdisciplinary and “cosmopolitan.” He relates our “talking cure” to mathematics, optics, philosophical semantics, formal logic, and comparative linguistics. What is fascinating about Rozenberg's expansive theoretical formulations is how he links them to the practice of day-to-day analytic work. He rewards the reader's efforts with sudden moments of synthesis and insight that are quite exhilarating.

Rozenberg's goal is ambitious: “to examine the process of gaining mastery over the unconscious forces for the purpose of building a true ethical relationship with the Other” (123). This statement brings together at least four “paths” of discourse. First, Rozenberg demonstrates how Freud's theories are an extension of Immanuel Kant's philosophical thought. Second, he examines how Freud deduced his theories of unconscious psychic activity from the psychopathological symptoms of his analysands. Third, drawing on both Kant and Lacan, he demonstrates deep connections between language and ethics, which help to understand what is therapeutic about the analytic dialogue. Finally, he invokes recent advances in philosophy, especially that of Emmanuel Levinas, to demonstrate the possibility of developing what he calls a “true ethical individuality” (129). In doing so, he takes issue with the inevitable incongruency and tragic implications of Kant's and Lacan's theories.

Freud compared his distinction between conscious perceptions and unconscious mental processes with Kant's “sensibility” versus “supersensible” logic. Kant's philosophical writings contain a number of conceptual oppositions that he felt could only be intuited but never unified. His duality of the “phenomenal self” versus the “moral self,” for example, implies a tragic view in relation to our moral will that Freud also epitomized in the Oedipus m