Can Levinas's Ethical Metaphysics Contribute to Psychoanalysis?: The Case for and against

… blest are those Whose blood and judgment are so well com medled, That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart…

For Freud (using “Freud” as synecdoche for psychoanalysis and its therapeutic method) ethics is relative. For Levinas ethics is absolute. Fruitful dialogue between them becomes possible only if one of them moves toward a compromise. This paper tries to show how Levinas can make that move. The thesis is that affect is proto-ethics, but only proto- ethics. To identify or and equate ethics with affect is to limit ethics too much, allowing no room for reason to override affect-based responses when affects lead us astray; ethics begins in affect and develops as rationality develops. For Levinas to contribute to Freud we need an interpretation of Levinas that relativizes ethics in a way he would find acceptable. To achieve this we can invoke neuroscience first in support of Levinas's primacy of the face, and second to open up (that is, relativize) his ethics by showing that for neuroscience ethics is an emergent property exerting downward causation in a social context. Making ethics a subset of the social relativizes ethics (in relation to the social); this means ethics is no longer absolute but remains the supreme social virtue. If Levinas would accept that ethics retain its primacy while forgoing its absoluteness,