Volume 11, Issue 1, Spring 2017
Bogna Choińska
Pages 29-41
Following Desire as the Ethical Postulate of Psychoanalysis
One of the most controversial theses of Jacques Lacan is his conviction that a very specific relationship links ethics and desire. The aim of the article is to present what this new relationship consists in, and, further on, to outline the weaknesses of this concept, which does not take into account the existence of the sovereign good as a category available to cognition. According to my thesis, Lacan believes that the ethics of Supreme Good, or simply traditional ethics of goods, leads the human subject to remain, voluntarily (and perhaps thoughtlessly), within the Imaginary dimension. The idea of the ethical postulate will be treated here not so much as something applied during psychoanalysis, but as a general clue as to how people should behave.