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This paper is prompted by reflections on the challenges posed to analysts who are working in situations of social catastrophe or social violence. Such situations induce particular moral distortions, the analyst, faced with such distortions — a pervasive deterioration of values and a confusion of ethical standards — may experience a particular kind of dilemma. The analytic focus has to be enlarged to permit interpretations that consider ethical issues as well as instinctual conflict.
In this paper I deal with that ethical aspect, taking into account the rules and values that regulate the subject's relations to his social milieu and his family (Puget, 1991), with special emphasis on the need to belong.
I start from the assumption that ethical issues appear as a struggle against irrationality by means of impositions and guilt as a regulatory feeling. In this context guilt is related to moral conscience and to responsibility; more specifically to neighborly love and value judgments.
Psychoanalytic practice confronts us with the difficulties inherent to a discipline that has as one of its tasks that of giving meaning to the irrational. That meaning helps differentiate the good from the bad, the just from the unjust, the beautiful from