Psychoanalytic ethics, maintaining psychic reality in the intermediate space

The author reflects on the ethical status of psychoanalysis. He argues that the ethical specificity of psychoanalysis is determined by its method. He distinguishes between concepts tied to the analytic frame - the protocol, technique and method. The method is the main guarantee of the ethical engagement between analyst and patient - in particular through the transference. The conditions of opening up the transference are maintained by a particular aspect of the analytic method, namely stating the fundamental rule of free association, which turns the setting into a process. The author illustrates his remarks by discussing Sophie's psychoanalytic treatment in which a passionate transference emerges. A chance external event brings about a rupture in the transitional space of the session's psychic reality, and thereby makes the specific status of the transference fall away and compromises the analytic work. Consequently, the analyst is deprived of his ethical status as object of the patient's psychic reality, and as the recipient of the transference, and becomes an ordinary object in the field of everyday objectality. He simply becomes the person he is in external reality, with his various physical attributes.