An Ethics for the Psychoanalyst in the Postmodern Age

The psychoanalyst's ethics at issue — referred to a paradigm of complexity in the posmodern age — is to affirm as a fundamental value the recognition of determinism of unconscious desire, which implies a renunciation to any exercise of power, even the power of influence that can guide and support. Intending through interpretation of the partial truth of desire to be accomplished as a process that subverts the subject's relation with its own history, psychoanalysis, as it undoes the imaginary fixations of the subject, cannot predict the “politics” of the unconscious desire. Nor can it confront the possibilities of decision and choice of a relative and finite freedom. Using the interpretative elaboration of an intersubjective field of values, the psychoanalytic practice reveals the limits of a knowledge restricted by the context where the interpretation takes place. It differentiates between deciphering and decoding by emphasizing the attribute of the uncognoscibility of the unconscious Thus it reveals the cryptogram, a cipher designed as an ambiguous puzzle that is not exhausted by interpretation as a symbolic act, and it refers to the unrepresentable and the inaccessibility of the real.