Therapeutic discourse as moral conversation: Psychoanalysis, modernity, and the ideal of authenticity

Psychoanalytic therapy is a conversation about the “good life”; with particular moral aims. In its relational variants, it both presupposes and seeks to bring about a sense of trueness to oneself which reflects the widely held modern ideal of authenticity. Objectivistic perspectives on psychoanalytic therapy attempt to secure both the analyst's epistemological position and moral neutrality. In contrast, the social‐constructivist turn in psychoanalysis opens onto an account which locates both the subject matter and the goals of therapy in the moral frameworks within which our lives are led. Viewing psychoanalytic therapy as a “genuine conversation”; in Gadamer's hermeneutic sense provides such a culturally situated theory. From this standpoint, the belief that analysis may rely upon a theoretical discourse to provide context‐transcendent descriptions of an absolute unconscious is both unsustainable and morally corrosive. Instead, what the analyst does is attempt to convince the analysand of the advantages of being a decentered social‐constructivist who, in her concern for where she begins and ends in relation to others, broadens her realm of self‐acknowledgment and enriches her moral vocabulary. This advocacy of authenticity, as opposed to irony, is reflective of a modern, as contrasted with a postmodern, therapeutics.