Toward a definition of accountability. Preliminary psychoanalytic investigations.

The author sees the ethical issue of accountability and the preconditions for the acceptance of responsibility on the part of the individual (the Subject) as a latterday extension of the question posed by Theodor W Adorno in 1959 about what it means to come to terms with the past. The accountability topos is located between the rival pulls of destructiveness and alterity, enlarged upon here with reference both to Melanie Klein and to the social philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur. The essential question is how (and whether) psychoanalytic ethics can conceptualize the alterity of the (other) object, and how such a conceptualization relates to Freud's theory of the Subject. The author's ideas on this point take their initial bearings from a passage in Freud's "Project for a Scientific Psychology", where he divides the psychological complexion of the "close other" (Nebenmensch) into two categories, one that can be understood against the background of the self, the other remaining incommensurable.