Freudian psychoanalysis: an ethics of the divided subject

Abstract

The objective of this text is to expose the conception of ethics in psychoanalysis. Freud’s work is characterized by elaborating an ethic of the subject, but of the subject understood not in a traditional sense, as a given and complete subject, but on the contrary, as a divided, unfinished and contingent subject. It is an ethic that privileges the principles of singularity, difference and subjective irreducibility in practical action, over any kind of subordination of this to group ideals, external prescriptive duties or universal obligations.