| Title: | The Ethics of Psychoanalysis |
| Author: | Philip Boxer |
| Category: | Published |
| Publication Year: | 1994 |
| Where Published: | Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research No 3 Winter 94 pp73-87. |
Lacan provides a basis for arriving at some kind of resolution to the difficulties of working with the object-relations based and/or systemic approaches to organisation. In his distinction between Policy, Strategy and Tactics, he calls our attention to the way the tactical effects of intervening with words take place within the context of a transference supported by the presence of the person of the analyst which itself rests on the manner of the person’s being.
The problematic nature of this being shows when we come to consider how it can come to be within the context of organisation. Organisation, following Foucault, itself takes the form of a social apparatus – an architecture of looking and of enunciation, gradients and contours of power determining the relations between things, and lines of subjectivity – the strategies capable of sustaining an “I” position. We as subjects can be taken as much as symptoms of this dispositif as vice versa. But only when operating as a subject at the level of the good – subject to its laws. In formulating the subject in relation to his lack – his want-to-be – and making the ethics of being become the foundation of the subject, we come to a problematique particular to the human subject – the four-sided paradox which conveys something of the impossibility at the heart of human being. And it is in working with the dilemmas of this impossibility that we can formulate an ethics of consultancy.