On the certainty of hidden moralism: Rethinking the ethical turn in psychoanalysis

Abstract

ABSTRACT It is well known that Heinz Kohut’s papers on narcissism brought forth a re-evaluation of a patient’s healthy self-regard. Indeed, those pivotal essays open up a novel perspective and, with it, clinical possibility by ceasing to cast a patient’s narcissistic concern in a purely pejorative light—as more primitive or less adaptive mode of being—to seeing it as an approvable sign of psychic health. Less well known, however, is Kohut’s corollary insight, notably that an emotional climate, what he calls the deeply ingrained value system of the Occident, is responsible, in large part, for the wholesale devaluation of narcissism. My focus in this paper is with this less well known but equally important insight, and my aim is to properly understand Kohut’s observation that an allegiance to this deeply ingrained value system may have a deleterious impact on clinical practice. I close by suggesting that we let Kohut caution us that smuggling in altruistic moral presuppositions can be a hindrance to clinical work, and that we pause before we follow the trend in contemporary psychoanalysis that encourages us to take an ethical turn.