Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

 

Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, originally delivered as Seminar VII (1959–1960), is a powerful and complex examination of ethics through the lens of psychoanalysis, structured primarily around a reinterpretation of Freud, and enriched with references to Aristotle, Kant, Sade, and Antigone. Rather than presenting ethics as a set of moral injunctions or duties, Lacan explores the ethical dimension of desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. The seminar reveals Lacan’s commitment to radicalizing Freudian theory, as well as his philosophical engagement with the question of how one is to live and act in the face of the Real—what lies outside the symbolic order.

Lacan begins by challenging traditional moral frameworks. He distances psychoanalysis from both Aristotelian virtue ethics and Kantian deontology. For Lacan, ethics in psychoanalysis is not about achieving the Good or following moral law; rather, it revolves around the subject’s relationship to their desire. The central ethical imperative he proposes is: do not give up on your desire. This is not an endorsement of hedonism or self-indulgence but a complex call to confront the truth of one’s unconscious, even if it leads to discomfort, sacrifice, or confrontation with the limits of the symbolic order.

Desire, in Lacan’s system, is not reducible to biological need or conscious want. It is mediated by language, the symbolic order, and the Other. Desire is structured by lack, and its object (the objet petit a) is never fully attainable. The ethical challenge, then, is not to fulfill desire in a conventional sense but to remain faithful to the truth it reveals about the subject. This faithfulness entails facing the void at the center of subjectivity—the Real—and resisting the temptation to retreat into fantasy or ideological comfort.

One of Lacan’s key innovations in this seminar is the introduction of the concept of the Thing (das Ding), drawn from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and beyond. The Thing is the primordial object of desire, lost and inaccessible, representing the traumatic core of the Real. It is what the symbolic system cannot represent, yet it structures desire by its very absence. The Thing is simultaneously attractive and terrifying, producing both fascination and anxiety. Lacan’s ethics revolves around the subject’s proximity to this Thing, especially how one navigates its pull without succumbing to either repression or self-annihilation.

Lacan also draws heavily on Sophocles’ Antigone to illustrate his ethical concerns. Antigone becomes, for Lacan, the figure of the ethical subject par excellence. She acts in fidelity to her desire—to bury her brother, even against the laws of the city and at the cost of her own life. Her act confronts the symbolic order with the absolute, exposing the limits of law, politics, and morality. Lacan admires her ethical stance, not because it is noble or tragic, but because it unmasks the Real and reveals the structural logic of desire. Her gesture affirms a position “beyond the Good,” pointing to a space of radical ethical integrity that is not reducible to utilitarian or normative frameworks.

In contrast, Lacan critiques the Enlightenment’s moral philosophies, particularly Kantian ethics, for their reliance on universal rational principles that ignore the unconscious. He also provocatively connects Kant and the Marquis de Sade, arguing that Sade represents the obscene truth of Kantian formalism. For Lacan, Sade’s fantasy of absolute jouissance—pleasure beyond limits—exposes the latent violence and repression inherent in moral law. Both Kant and Sade articulate positions of ethical extremity, but psychoanalysis, according to Lacan, charts a different path by situating ethics in the singular, divided subject rather than in abstract universality.

Lacan develops the idea of jouissance—a term referring to excessive, transgressive pleasure that often borders on pain—as a crucial ethical category. Jouissance is what arises when the subject approaches the Real, when the symbolic order breaks down. It is not pleasure in the ordinary sense, but a traumatic kind of enjoyment that resists regulation. The ethical subject, Lacan insists, must risk encountering jouissance without being consumed by it. This requires a delicate balance: too much repression leads to neurosis, too much proximity to the Thing leads to psychosis or perversion.

Lacan’s ethics is therefore about navigating between these extremes. The analyst, in the psychoanalytic cure, is ethically responsible not for interpreting in the name of truth or morality, but for holding the space in which the analysand can come into contact with their desire. The goal is not to heal in the conventional sense, but to produce a transformation in the subject’s relationship to their unconscious, their symptom, and their enjoyment. The analyst's position is fundamentally one of non-knowledge, a refusal to impose meaning or morality, allowing the subject to encounter the Real on their own terms.

The seminar also emphasizes the structural role of fantasy in mediating desire. Fantasy serves as a defense against the Real and provides a narrative framework for the subject to relate to the Thing. Lacan warns, however, that fantasy can become a trap—a means of evading the ethical confrontation with the truth of desire. The analyst must carefully interpret and traverse the subject’s fantasy, enabling them to shift from a passive position within fantasy to an active stance toward their own desire.

Lacan’s ethical vision ultimately opposes any form of conformity, normalization, or compromise that sacrifices desire to social norms. He is not proposing an anarchic freedom or unrestrained indulgence, but a rigorous fidelity to the unconscious, to the singular truth of the subject. His ethics demands courage—the courage to face lack, contradiction, and the impossibility of full satisfaction. It demands a recognition that ethical action is not grounded in the Good, but in the gap between the symbolic and the Real.