Ethics and psychoanalysis. -The article revolves around the question of the extent to which there can be such a thing as a psychoanalytic ethic derived from the theory and practice of psychoanalysis itself. The author considers the design of a formal moral law in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (178 8) to be central turning point in the history of ethics. What militates against the option of a genuine analytic ethic is the element of destructiveness that can turn against others in the psychic process. Lacan's language- and sign-oriented ethics of desire is helpful in embarking on an exploration of the problem. But one drawback of Lacan's approach is that it leaves desire unspecified. We cannot rule out the eventuality that there are varieties of desire in which the autonomous nature of the human other is negated. One possible solution is an much greater thanethics of acknowledgementmuch less than, where the psychic foundation is seen as residing in the active engagement of the subject with the sexually symbolic pact of the parents. Such an ethic might conceivably produce a form of interpersonal alterity that can claim to be unsubsumable and noncircumventible, and thus serve as a guide for ethically determined analytic action.
