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How are we to live? What makes life worthwhile? What would it mean to live the “good life” in the here and now, in the life we are given? David Black does not eschew or shy away from the big questions. The chapters collected in Psychoanalysis and Ethics (2024) are not confined to the consulting room but address nothing less than the major moral and environmental dilemmas we face today. Our moral obligations, according to Black, extend beyond our responsibility toward other people and encompass climate change, the crisis of extinctions, ecocide and our relationship with nature, with other species, and with Gaia herself. Psychoanalysis could hardly be called upon to do more or be more responsible. That it is equal to the task, at least, in a form sufficiently revised to take relationships seriously, is the burden of Black's argument.
Black does not venture onto the terrain of practical ethics. His argument stops short of politics. This spares him certain difficulties; extrapolating political points of view from clinical thinking is fraught with all sorts of challenges. Black manages successfully to steer clear of these problems by concentrating on foundational rather than practical questions. As for the format, I do not think the chapters in this collection are best thought of as self-contained or freestanding; nor do I see them as simply a succession of essays with a few themes in common. Psychoanalysis and Ethics, in my view, comprises a single, coherent argument; there are a couple of review essays tagged onto the volume, which readers may find interesting, but they add nothing further to the main argument, which is presented clearly and distinctly along two axes: one critical, the other positive. The critical and positive series of propositions are connected, of course; the positive argument underpinning the volume issues from a critique of classical Freudian thought and particularly what Black sees as its failure to acknowledge the foundational character of ethica