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For years, most commentators have contended that Freud's portrayal of the human subject made any notion of genuine moral agency impossible. Freud, by his own proud admission, was a determinist who belittled the concept of free will. The Freudian subject, as exemplified in quotations from his texts that span his career, is driven by instinctual forces, governed by a principle whose goal is pleasure, consumed by base passions, perennially infantile, narcissistic, and incapable of regard for or attachment to others which is not fueled by self-interest. Quite clearly, such a subject is incapable of what we commonly think of as moral responsibility. Psychoanalysis, in fact, is seen by some as an important prop in the ideology of selfishness and privatism that they see as characteristic of modern Western societies.
Given the predominance of this reading of Freud's subject, psychoanalysts and moral philosophers have generally had little to say to each other. Some philosophers have proposed a different reading, one which finds a quite different picture of human nature— one more amenable to rational choice and agency—embedded in Freud's clinical (as opposed to metapsychological) theory. These authors (notably Ricoeur and Habermas) have developed their view of the psychoanalytic subject by declaring that a deep contradiction runs through Freud's work, what Habermas terms his “scientistic self-misunderstanding.”
In Psychoanalysis and Ethics, Ernest Wallwork, a psychoanalytically trained moral philosopher, develops a view which challenges these earlier construals. On the basis of a reading of Freud's entire corpus (metapsychology, clinical writings, social theory, correspondence, etc.), he proposes through careful exegesis to make a case for the emergence in Freud's thought of a view of human nature which both allows for rational moral deliberation and action and makes a contribution to answering the questions posed in philosophical ethics. His approach is interdisciplinary. It u