Introduction

There has been much discussion in recent decades about what is fundamental to psychoanalytic theory and practice. We have been asking ourselves whether it is technique, the alliance, or some particular aspect of theory that binds us together. Some have asked what goals do we have in common. However, there is a question that has not been asked as much as it might: What are the values of psychoanalysis? What is the idea of the “Good” that we seek and which influences, inflects—undergirds—our practice?

Psychoanalysis has been a cosmopolitan, more recently global, phenomenon. It crisscrosses the Western world, where psychoanalysis began. Its originary discoveries and formulations, including the unconscious, childhood sexuality, transference, among others, are part of the aquifer that feeds our culture. Further, globalization has taken the ideas and practices to which we lay especial claim beyond the permeable borders of the Western world. At the same time, though, as the world has blended, it has fragmented. Global access brings what temporal and geographic distance allowed to be thought foreign and strange into our cultural and political living rooms. “Diversity” is today's catchword. Relativity challenges essentialism.

So it seemed to me important to think not of the value of psychoanalysis to our patients in our consulting rooms, but of its values. What are its ideas of the “Good”? Many might contribute to this discussion. I asked three of our members—steeped in philosophy, religion, and culture—to reflect on whether we share and what we share as an idea of the “Good.”

Jonathan Lear, an analyst and distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, has published thoughtfully and provocatively on Aristotle and on the Crow Indians, separately and in tandem. He has written, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis.

Robert Paul, former dean at Emory University and graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, as a cultural anthropologist has written about Moses and Monotheism as a myth deeply responsive to structures of Western thought. The book won the Heinz Hartmann Prize. He has thought extensively about Tibetan Buddhism and its seekers. I have asked him to reflect on the correspondences between Buddhist and psychoanalytic values.

Jamieson Webster is an advanced candidate at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and Its Sublimation, and coauthor with Simon Critchley of the forthcoming, The Hamlet Doctrine. Immersed in philosophy, aesthetics, and Lacan, she has brought those concerns to bear on our question.

I hope you find their responses to the question “What are the values of psychoanalysis?” as interesting and provocative to read as I have to edit.