The Ethical Seduction of the Analytic Situation: The Feminine-Maternal Origins of Responsibility for the Other

According to Jacques André, “the patient’s encounter with the analyst is a scene of seduction, the seductive statement being that of the fundamental rule or the invitation to address that which is most intimate or personal to a complete stranger.” But the practice of psychoanalysis can only unfold if there is a strict respect for ethics. The words seduction and ethics, which at first sight seem mutually exclusive, are thus, as Viviane Chetrit-Vatine shows, at the heart of the analytic perspective.

Viviane Chetrit-Vatine takes as her starting-point an encounter, which is not necessarily consensual, between Emmanuel Levinas’ thought and his conception of philosophy as ethics – ethics understood as responsibility for the other – and that of the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who posits the first adult other as a seducer of the young psyche from the outset, due to the transmission of enigmatic messages compromised by his or her unconscious. The analyst’s ethical position is re-examined and with it the feminine/maternal origins of the human capacity for responsibility for the other.

The question of the asymmetry of the analytic situation is no longer raised in terms of power, but of responsibility: responsibility for the analytic setting of which the analyst remains the guardian, responsibility for the analytic process of which he or she is an integral part owing to the effects of seduction inherent to the situation and to his or her own and necessary passion. The ethical stance of the contemporary analyst implies both the need to preserve “good enough” or sufficient distance and a readiness to assume affective responsibility for the other, this stranger, the patient.