Clinical and Experimental Psychology

Desire or Desire and Ethics in it?

Vera Marta Reolon^{* *}Correspondence: Vera Marta Reolon, Department of Psychology, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul - PUC/RS, Brazil, Email:

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Introduction

In order for us to be marked as desiring, to have a “voice full of value”, we need the primordial mark of a narcissistic institution, which we call the Love of the Other. Another one that plays a maternal role for us, as the founding mother of the loving imprint that we will carry in our lives. Without this initial mark, we are not considered structurally subjects, owners of an identity, we will always be tied to someone who must lead us through life, as this mark is primordial, necessary in our frantic struggle for liberation. With the brand we can free ourselves and follow. Without the brand, we are stuck with the Other's desire, with its impositions.

In the beginnings of psychic experience, a primary identification that would consist of the "direct and immediate transference" of the ego in formation to the "father of individual prehistory", which would have the sexual characteristics of father and mother and would be a conglomerate of their functions.

How can we understand and interpret ethics, from philosophy, from antiquity to post-modernity? For psychoanalysis, what is Desire? Thinking about psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalysis, as psychotherapy, based on ethics is essential when we refer to postmodernity, a period characterized (and marked) by perversion and psychosis.

What makes it possible for there to be human desire, for this field to exist, is the assumption that everything that actually happens is accounted for somewhere. It is insofar as the subject situates himself and constitutes himself in relation to the signifier that this rupture, this division, this ambivalence takes place in him, at whose level the tension of desire is located.

If the ethics of psychoanalysis is the ethics of Desire – to live and act according to our Desire -, how to reconcile it with post-modern times? Is psychoanalysis ethical - in the strictest sense – towards contemporary society? Wouldn't psychoanalysis be contributing to the increase in individualism and egocentrism, which are characteristic of our times?

The question of ethics imposes itself on psychoanalysis because it is a social practice and because, like any practice, it seeks a certain being better, a Good. But this question poses for it in a very particular way. In effect, ethics intends to give an object at will and places us in the scope of the world and the project (this is where it can be said that the analyst “knows what he does”, due to the practice he assumes). Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is based, above all, on the affirmation of the existence of the unconscious, which, rigorously thought, calls into question the being-in-the-world of man. How to articulate unconscious and ethics? Man is the only being I cannot meet without expressing this encounter to him. The encounter is distinguished from knowledge precisely because of this. There is a greeting in every attitude towards the human – even when there is a refusal to greet. What distinguishes thought that aims at an object from a link with a person is that a vocative is articulated in it: what is named is, at the same time, what is called. 

A question is then asked: to what extent does psychoanalysis ethics of psychoanalysis is the ethics of desire, constituted from love, to investigate how this ethics is configured, from the Platonic ethics. What does it mean to be ethical in post-modernity, according to the authors surveyed? What does Derrida say about psychoanalysis? According to the thinker, is psychoanalysis being ethical, as it is in a state of “psychic cruelty”? If psychoanalysis links its ethics to the ethics of the subject (ethics of Desire), how is it found in society? Are your actions, towards the other, ethical? What are the relationships between psychoanalysis and philosophy, under the prism of ethics and desire?

Desire/Desire and ethics

In postmodern times, with its so unique characteristics, it is extremely important to propose a research, with limits between ethics, desire and psychoanalysis, as we witness a crisis of values and a stagnation, in some aspects, of psychoanalysis in the late 19th and early 20th century. Society has evolved (?) and psychoanalysis, it seems to me, is still centered on neurosis, a clinical structure that no longer fits with a large part of society. Currently, the current clinical structures are psychosis and perversion and it is up to psychoanalysis, together with philosophy, to propose a reformulation of thought and theories in this regard. Philosophy here as the most viable (and external) way to think with psychoanalysis, or to help it in its reflection on itself.

Who suffers and mourns? Who suffers from what? What is the complaint of psychoanalysis? What condolence book does she open? Who signs? What does not go well according to the prevailing marks of its discourse, its practice, its hypothetical or virtual community, its institutional inscriptions, its relations with what was once called civil society and the This work proposes to carry out a deep analysis of psychoanalysis, as an “institution” bearing ethics; ethics that must be studied, evaluated, re-evaluated. Thinking about ethical issues, in contemporary times, is undoubtedly an interesting, instigating and necessary task. Thus, using psychoanalysis and philosophy is appropriate and advantageous.

Psychoanalysis, as an interpretive theory of reality, as “hermeneutics”, serves to analyze the phenomena, in the individual field, through the manifestations of the unconscious, present in the language of different subjects, in jokes, in the interpretation of dreams, etc. It can, however, interpret social phenomena by analyzing the manifestations of society, organizations and institutions, and social groups. Allied to philosophy, essential for its development since the beginning, psychoanalysis, in addition to performing interpretations, reflects on facts, using the theories of great thinkers.

Thus, in this work, psychoanalysis and philosophy come together to reflect on its ethics. The ethics of psychoanalysis is centered on the ethics of being, as a desiring subject; that is, the ethics of psychoanalysis is the ethics of Desire (Desire as an identity mark). How does the subject realize his (sexual) identity? It goes beyond castration, as it implies the dimension of the third. Initially, according to the author, the subject is with the Other, in a relationship of dependence, of care. This Other is the mother, not necessarily the biological mother or a woman, The Other who does the mothering. The Other, little by little, introduces a third party, the father, not necessarily the biological father or a man, the one who makes the difference from what motherhood is. This Other, when desiring the partner, Place of Desire of the Mother, institutes in the child the desire for someone other than this child. Thus, the paternal place in the structure is determined, place of the third, place of the paternal "law", the law of the Father's Name. This third place constitutes a law internal to the subject, the law of interdiction ("you can all but this one, which is mine!”). As the subject identifies with the mother, or with the father, boy or girl, this identification determines his choice of object, decision of the male or female side in his sexual choice.

Sexual fulfillment depends on disconnection from the Other. The Other is immortal, he remains in the structure as love, institution of Desire. 

Desire that will make you have different desires, in life, in the world. There is no cultural signifier that accounts for this death. Desire is indestructible, The death of the Father is represented, in culture, through the individual's personal progress. Assisting these personal advances of the subject in its structuring. “Act in such a way that the maxim of your will can always be valid as a principle of universal legislation”. This statement guides the subject's action and protects him from helplessness, a source of moral ethics. The desire that constitutes us is our ethical differential before the world. Seeking it, we differentiate ourselves from others, we become unique. Desire would be the only 'ethical universal' we have; and the novelty of Freud's revolutionary practice consisted in placing this tragic issue at the center of our ethical thinking, promising us something new in the possibilities of our almores. To show you where your desire is, just forbid it (if it is true that there is no desire without prohibition). X... wants me to be there, by his side, as long as I leave him a little free: malleable, absent sometimes, but staying not far away; on the one hand it is necessary that I be present as a prohibition (without which there would be no good desire), but it is also necessary that I move away when I run the risk of disturbing the formed desire A little prohibition, a lot of game.

Desire, which structures us as human beings and induces us to search for life throughout our existence, is "transmitted" to us in the desire of the Other, the desire of the one who once desired us (before our generation, by our parents) and who later “looked” at us with a look of possibilities to live and be happy. This initial, structural desire, launched by the Other, is what we call, in psychoanalysis, love, love of structure. The psychotic does not give, does not want the relationship with the Other, who would suppose that he would enter into castration. "Psychosis", says Lacan, "is a kind of failure as far as the realization of what is called 'love' is concerned." In it, the subject wants absolute jouissance, which he actually knows at the level of his body. Hence his narcissism. [In perversion] it is given only to the symbolic Other, essentially absent from the world. All human “others”, including the subject himself, are instruments of jouissance for this Other. The neurotic therefore needs a supplementary symbolic, that is, the symptom, where the desire remains repressed.

To love is to see in the other the desire for me that constitutes me. Love is the desire for what is good and to be happy, it is the desire for immortality (immortality that is perpetuated in the results of what we do in life and what we leave as our mark in the world). When talking about Love and fiction, states that love is represented in literature, cinema, theater, and the arts in general. According to the psychoanalyst, passion, in its countless manifestations, opposes the obstacles that cause conflicts, and the consequences of these difficulties keep the viewer in a state of suspense and fascination:

What catches attention is both the pursuit of the realization of the ideal of love and its impossibility. The analytical experience replaces this mythical representation of the search for the other as a complement, for the search for oneself in the experience of love. sooner or later, love ends up revealing its decoy face, because loving is, essentially, wanting to be loved. The subject loves the other, while that other reflects its own image, or while it reflects a favorable image of itself. In this sense, love is eminently narcissistic. The thing itself, which we cannot know from the outside, we reach it directly from the inside, as it is in us. This Will, of which the human will is but a manifestation, is a metaphysical principle, the mainstay of all that it is. The expression “thing in itself” must be understood in the most concrete way, as an almighty thing that inhabits each one of us, that makes us live and devours us at the same time. In essence it is a raw, blind and insatiable desire.

If desire is born out of lack, its origin is suffering Both at the origin and at the end, according to Schopenhauer, desire is always suffering; and as he is the very essence of existence, "suffering is the foundation of all life."

Leading life, a little 'beyond hypocrisy and inhibitions. Do not give in to your desire this is the ethical proposition that psychoanalysis leads us to. The appeal, despite its strong consonance with the culture of individualism, is not without a reach in terms of social bonds. But how to reconcile the analysand's Desire (most of the time, perverse and psychotic) and the outside world, society as a whole? Is psychoanalysis being ethical towards the social, as its ethics are based on the ethics of Desire? Although desire can be considered the great concept of modernity, its history is identified with the history of philosophy. Desire is an elusive notion, which may refer to an extraordinary experience, but it seems to go beyond the categories of philosophical reason. Desire is certainly a living concept. Maybe it's the very concept of life. Living is desiring. Ethics is the foundation of the very possibility of thinking about the human. Ethics can be contemporarily described as the fundamental nucleus, or the foundation, of every viable vital relationship between human beings and with nature, in a structure of radical responsibility.

Conclusion

Thus, it seems to me that ethics and desire come into conflict when we think of postmodernity and times of structures: perversion and psychosis. Psychoanalysis, I think, has not yet undertaken and, therefore, has even less managed to think, penetrate and change the axioms of ethics, legality and politics, especially in the seismic places where the theological ghost of sovereignty trembles and where the most traumatic are produced. geopolitical events, let us say, confusedly, the cruelest of these times. It is above all there that the concept of cruelty in psychoanalysis and beyond, calls for indispensable analyzes to which we should turn. Psychoanalysis is indelible, its revolution is irreversible – and yet, as a civilization, it is deadly. If psychoanalysis does not produce, nor does it cause any ethics, what relationship is there between the analyst-analyst? How is the encounter between the psychoanalyst and the patient structured? Isn't transference configured from a pre-established ethics between them?

If psychoanalysis does not take this mutation into account, if it does not engage in it, if it does not transform itself in this rhythm, it will be – and already is, to a large extent – deported, outmoded, left by the side of the road, exposed to all drifts, to all appropriations, to all amputations; or else, conversely, it will remain rooted in the conditions of a time that was that of its birth, still aphasic in its Central European cradle.

Such questions, along with others, will be answered, or at least elucidated, broken down into others. At the end of this work, which will probably remain unfinished, always under construction, I intend to contribute to a possible reformulation of ideas and theories, which remained frozen during the course of psychoanalysis, from its origins in the late nineteenth century to post-modernity.

With this work, I intend to reach the point that the ethics of psychoanalysis must be converted from the ethics of Desire into the desire for ethics.