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Luigi Zoja's Ethics and Analysis is an edgy, risk-taking and exciting work. It is almost a practical experiment in the transcendent function, in that it works the field of ethics to see if a reconciling position can emerge from the interaction between two distinct imperatives. On one hand, he points to the imperative to maintain vigorous ethical boundaries in today's clinical culture, as in the world at large. On the other hand, as a depth psychologist, he is aware of the need to integrate rather than suppress or repress the shadow side of the personality. These imperatives might be seen to be moving in opposite directions: How can one be honoured while respecting the other? Rules and regulations, he writes, establish a clear black and white contrast, whereas psychological understanding operates in the grey zone. Rules emerge from Enlightenment rationality, but clinical ethics proceeds from choices and thus cannot be given in advance or be satisfied by black and white reasoning. Zoja puts all of this on the line, out in the open. He does not approach the book with a preconceived outcome as to the ethical dilemmas of contemporary practice. Instead he seems to workshop the ideas, and his reflections are refreshingly transparent and alive.
Zoja turns back to the first psychoanalytic cases, Anna O. and Sabina Spielrein, not to add further historical detail or ideological weight to these cases, but to tease out the complications in light of the ‘new ethic’ that we need to develop. In reflecting on these early cases, Zoja makes use of a forgotten classic of analytical psychology: Erich Neumann's Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949). This book is a favourite of mine and I have been perturbed to see it sink into obscurity, with little or no references to it in the recent literature. It is surely a book that needs to be rediscovered and Zoja does just that. His book can be read as a contemporary meditation on the classic of 1949, a work which inspired Jung to write an enth