Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | J | Journal of Phenomenological Psychology

The Ethic of Honesty: The Fundamental Rule of Psychoanalysis .

Article Excerpt
Thompson, M. G. (2004). The Ethics of honesty. The fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. Amsterdam/New York, NY: (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies 2), $38 (Cloth).

This is an important book for three different fields. First, this book's main thesis is that psychoanalysis is an ethical enterprise and that the technical rules of psychoanalysis are means for the ethical enterprise. Thompson demonstrates that authors who take the technical rules of psychoanalysis as simple techniques misinterpret these rules. Second, this book is one of the best illustrations of the basic claim of Husserlian phenomenology: experience is sometimes clouded, if not made impossible to understand. by theory. Thompson argues that psychoanalysis is both a practice leading to an experience and a theory. Thompson argues that the claim about theoretical developments in psychoanalysis have on the contrary obscured the basic premise of psychoanalytic experience. For Thompson, psychoanalysis is not a matter of a one person psychology or a two person psychology or relational psychology, it is a matter of letting and helping the patient speak the truth about him or herself. Third, the book makes a radical claim for ethicists. According to Thompson, ethics is not in the first place the search of the good (Aristotle or Aquinas), nor the search for the greatest amount of utility (Bentham, Mill), nor the attempt to do one's duty as prescribed by practical reason (Kant), nor finally the search for freedom (Hegel). Thompson sees ethics as the attempt to speak the truth about oneself. Thompson claims that all human beings have secrets which are the cause of suffering. Ethics is about the willingness to face, and speak about one's secrets. In some cases, one needs to speak first to another before one can speak about them to oneself.

Let me concentrate on Thompson's basic insight: psychoanalysis is an ethical experience. For this thesis Thompson finds support in Freud's writings. He builds upon his previous study of the technical papers of Freud in articles and a book: The Truth about Freud's Technique: The Encounter with the Real. Freud originally used hypnosis with great but limited success. Symptoms disappeared but were replaced by other ones. Freud even learned that Charcot, the great master of hypnosis, was not successful with hypnosis in his private practice. He was only successful in the hospital where theatrical effects were possible. Freud then changed his technique to touching the head of the patient and ordering them to remember. That method also had only limited successes. Freud then introduced a new technique: free association, often referred to as the fundamental rule. There are several parts to this fundamental rule as is clear from the quotation of Freud given by Thompson (7): 1. "The patient must be left...