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Psychoanalysis is both a collection of ideas and a method based upon those ideas whose goal is the right way to live. Hence, psychoanalysis is an ethic in the sense that it concerns the manner by which individuals conduct themselves. Derived from the Greek ethike tekhne, meaning the moral art, ethike is in turn derived from the Greek ethos, meaning character. Both the character of a person who aspires to behave ethically and the customs of a people by which one's standards are measured derive from the concept. Morality, a subsidiary of ethics, pertains to distinctions between right and wrong and good and bad, whereas ethics, according to the Greeks, concerns the pursuit of happiness, the nature of which produces a state of equanimity by obtaining freedom from mental anguish.
If psychoanalysis is an ethic whose goal is liberation from psychic conflict, then the nature of that conflict must have something to do with the way one lives, thinks, and behaves. While the character of an individual is no doubt decisive in the outcome of a person's treatment, the psychoanalytic experience essentially revolves around a kind of work that is performed and accomplished, the outcome of which succeeds or fails. By analyzing the customs of a given patient — the manner by which that individual lives — the patient is in a better position to change what needs to be changed and discover a better life. If psychoanalysis is an ethic, then what kind of ethic does it foster? What are the rules by which it is administered and what is the basis of its method?
In Philip Rieff's (1959) classic study, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, he argues that the basis of Freud's conception of psychoanalysis rested on what