Introduction

structure and overview of the book's main themes

pp. 1-12

in: Uri Hadar, Psychoanalysis and social involvement, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

What are the human values, the life values, which may offer psychoanalytic psychotherapy some general guidelines about its goals and the reasons that make it worthwhile for a person to take up such an expansive and expensive process? The classic answer to this question is based on the medical model and it is formulated in the "technical" terms of mental health. Our aim is to cure the mind of its diseases or, in a milder formulation, to enable the individual to function better in such contexts as work, family and social intercourse. The stronger, medical formulation is problematic because the psyche is not a machine, not even a biological one, and hence it is hard to define what constitutes a disease, a cure or a mental health. Similar considerations apply to social functioning, where mostly we feel our way around in the absence of well-defined standards. If half a century of cultural criticism and the critique of modernism have taught us anything, it is that in the sphere of culture, meaning and the psyche there are no external criteria of functionality and our choices are ethical rather than technical. To the extent that psychoanalytic psychotherapy has a technical dimension — and I believe that it does — the technical subserves the ethical and it is the latter that dominates our decisions on the macro level, whether we are therapists or patients.