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A culture's world view, dominant rationality, and core ideology provide the defining context that speaks to how a culture understands and interprets itself. A culture's ethical doctrine provides the text that speaks to the body of values by which a culture understands and interprets itself with regard to what is good and bad and right and wrong (Scott, 1990). A culture's ethical doctrine is inextricably linked to its view of people and theory of life. It defines, reflects, and perpetuates that which is held out to be the dignity, the values, and the ideals of human life. And the ethical doctrine reflects the ethos, the underlying system of values, which permeates and colorizes the ideological strands in the culture's fabric. This broad-based understanding of ethics speaks to the inseparable interweave of the culture's world view and ideology, with its core beliefs and values. As a doctrine, ethics refers to a grouping of principles which provide the moral foundations underlying legitimate knowledge, sound value judgements, and good conduct in the discourse of every day life. Ethics, it has been said, is the point at which philosophers come closest to practical issues in morals and politics (Hare, 1997). Ethics, it might also be said, speaks to the practical relevance of moral philosophy in the lived experiences of everyday life as both citizens and professionals.
In the psychoanalytic culture, the legacy of Freud has been described as a dialectic in which every psychoanalytic proposition blends science with humanism (Bornstein, 1985). Historically, this legacy has guided the development of psychoanalysis from the paradigm of biology, medicine, and the natural sciences—a way of thinking that continues to dominate in the analytic culture to this day. In this modernistic mythology, a natural science of the mind is unprejudiced and unmediated by theories, presumptions, or values; and humanism provides the values that humanize the harshness of the science and its objectiv