ABSTRACT
There are times in life when one finds oneself back at the beginning, when one re-asks old questions, which one wants to examine in terms of more recent experience and knowledge. Just now the author find himself once more concerned with the relationship between general ethics and analytic work, both in terms of the social and political behaviour enacted around us and in terms of the more philosophical speculations. The author explores whether and in what way the people analysts may be committed, in our theories and in our dealings with our patients, be this explicit or implicit, to certain convictions about human nature and to the encouragement of certain psychological qualities as being desirable. Perhaps precisely because both imagination and relationship to meaning and to morals rest upon the same psychic area, moral values and judgements are so often expressed through stories and allegories, as a way of involving the whole person, rational and non-rational, conscious and unconscious.
