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M. Guy Thompson's The Ethic of Honesty: The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis challenges the reader to revisit and rethink Sigmund Freud's basic principles of psychoanalysis through the prism of philosophy. Thompson illustrates how these tenets have become
blurred and diluted as psychoanalysis has evolved from its beginnings.
He devotes a chapter to each of eight technical principles. In the preface, he claims, “My method is to examine these technical principles and their tributaries phenomenologically, which is to say, from the analyst's lived experience, by exploring their internal consistency as they emerge from a clinical context” (p. xv).
Thompson begins with an examination of the fundamental rule. He builds his argument by citing Laplanche and Pontalis, Moore and Fine, Rycroft, and Strachey, and then shows how each fails to convey the essence of the fundamental rule in its entirety. He distinguishes free association from the fundamental rule, which entails a pledge to be absolutely honest with another person and never to leave anything out. In this first chapter, he discusses psychoanalysis and jurisprudence, Freud's conception of the superego, and guilt and authenticity, bringing in Heidegger, Sartre, and Rieff in order to compare and to contrast their concepts of guilt with Freud's.
In chapter two, “Thinking through Free Association,” Thompson contrasts Lipton's and Greenson's definitions of free association, then compares them with Freud's, concluding that “Lipton's and Greenson's respective conceptions of free association rely almost entirely on analytic interpretation in order to fathom the unconscious meanings of the patient's discourse, while dismissing the efficacy of self-disclosure as a mutative agent” (p. 26). Thompson teases out the complexities inherent in free association and contrasts the phenomenological manner of spontaneously experiencing what one is saying by hearing it, with intellectualization and rationalistic comprehension. He concludes: