Psychoanalysis: an ethics of desire

Abstract

The article explores the thesis of Lacan, that the only thing one can be blamed, at least from an analytical perspective, is to have yielded to his desire. It questions what was the desire Lacan talked about. Was it the same sexual desire that Freud also spoke? It states that sexual desire, as Freud and Lacan showed us, is always contentious, since their first objects are prohibited. Desire can cause distress, every desire involves, in its origin, something denied by the subject. From this point the author continues to ask why Lacan tells us we can be blamed for yielding to desire if we refuse to some extent this desire? The answer is that we are responsible for it, even if this desire is unconscious. This means to say that the unconscious is part of us and that perhaps it is even our very essence. The author calls also attention to the fact that since the invention of psychoanalysis, Freud put us facing a reality that definitely changes the conception we have of man and his ethical dimension. It concludes that, since Freud, the man is confronted by the fact that he is no longer sovereign in his own home and he doesn’t own his deeper motives and that can be mistaken in what concerns the meaning of his actions and that according to Lacan, the judgment that man makes of his actions can not fail to consider the question of desire, even if it is unconscious.