ABSTRACT
In M. Schneider’s terms, “it is this experience, which is not exempt from effects of interference and contagion, that Freud places at the foundations of ethics”. Schneider has made a very penetrating examination of E. L. Freud’s thought concerning guilt and its function, with reference to The Interpretation of Dreams and Totem and Taboo. In the Project, Freud touched, then, upon the self-preservative origin of ethics. In The Ego and the Id, Freud writes, “Psycho-analysis has been reproached time after time with ignoring the higher, suprapersonal side of human nature”. The desire for ethics in Levinas results from the violence felt by the ethical subject. This desire will correspond, in the patient and at the beginning of a child’s life, to an “ethical exigency”. One can speak of a desire for ethics that is solicited in the adult environment by the infant’s distress, which is experienced by the adult as an ethical exigency or requirement of the newborn infant.
