Lacan and the Question of the Psychotherapist's Ethical Orientation

Abstract

This article addresses the thorny issue of the psychologist or psychotherapist's values or ethical orientation. The suggestion is made that certain aspects of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical theory provide the resources to overcome the obstacle of arbitrariness or relativism faced by psychotherapists who unavoidably have to take an ethical stance — implicitly if not explicitly — in relation to clients' or analysands' lives and decisions. The dilemma faced by the psychotherapist is recontructed and specific aspects of the poststructuralist psychoanalytical theory of Lacan are addressed. These include the function of the subject's position in the symbolic register (in contrast to the imaginary register of the ego), the role of the unconscious as the ‘discourse of the Other’, of narrative and of repressed signifiers as ethical ‘anchoring points’. Crucially, however, the implications of the register of the ‘real’ for the ethics of the psychoanalyst as psychotherapist are added. These, offer invaluable means of overcoming the dilemma of ethical relativism faced by psychotherapists.