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Some central questions focused on by Ernest Wallwork, the author of this seminal volume on Psychoanalysis and Ethics are as follows:
Can the coexistence in one person of the paradox of psychic determinism and moral responsibility be reconciled, understood, and validated?
Are we psychologically able to be moral?
Can we live up to the demands of the love commandment?
Wallwork performs a scholarly feat in attempting to answer these questions through the words of Freud and many other searchers for the truth of what it is to be human and ethical.
Even though his topics are unclear and difficult to define, the author writes clearly and comprehensively in tying together material that in many circles is still considered dangerous, made from fantasies, as well as being full of paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguities.
Chapter titles of interest include: The Hermeneutical Problem of Reading Freud, Reconciling the Paradox, Psychic Determinism and Moral Responsibility, The Pleasure Principle and Psychological Hedonism, Narcissism, Object Love, On Modifying Normative Standards, The Case of the Love Commandment, Toward a Psychoanalytically Informed Ethic, How is Practical Reason Guided?, Happiness and the Basic Goods of Life, Why Take Psychoanalytic Findings Seriously?, and The Credibility of Freudian Theory.
The author intrigues and makes rapid identification with the reader in his early chapter on the hermeneutical problem of reading Freud. He asks, “How should we go about reading Freud?” He immediately and masterfully reaches into the heart of so much confusion concerning what Freud said, what Freud meant, and the difficulties of comprehending Freud if one adopts an either-or policy with his repeatedly revised metapsychology, or his clinical theory, which in fact was also not fixed but evolving and changing as he grew older. Wallwork establishes himself as a scholar's scholar early on with his multiple exact references criss-crossing what Freud actually said in his numerous writin