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When we consider the link between psychoanalysis and ethics, we must turn to a wide range of knowledge and positions which, at present, are far from presenting a homogenous and coherent picture.
A limited number of psychoanalytic thinkers have explored the relationship between ethics and psychoanalysis, among them I make special note of those by Klein (1942, Money-Kyrle (1952), Grinberg (1964, 1989), Racker (1966), and Rangell (1976, 1980). Our late-20th-century study of ethics emerges from various rather independent roots. The first of these—and the one with the higher academic credentials—originated with the pre-Socratic philosophers who tried to discover the reasons men should behave in a certain way.
A second source of our ethical concepts originates in the 18th-century thinkers' concerns with the relationship of man to nature. There was a historic moment in which the divine origin of man began to be questioned; it was suspected that man might instead be a product of nature. We can distinguish among three groups of those thinkers: (1) those who believed that civilization removes the “savagery” from Man's innate bestiality, tames him and turns him into a happy and morally acceptable being; (2) those who, on the contrary, considered that society takes the “noble savage” who lives happily integrated into a healthy and open