ABSTRACT
Naturally enough, the problem of the decision that had to be made dominated that period of these two women’s thoughts, and of their analysis. The analyst took no position-as should normally be the case when a patient stands before an option or decision-even though she had an interior opinion of her own. It is clear that an analyst’s unexpressed opinion has an indirect influence on a patient, but sufficient care and caution in the course of analysis should make it possible for the energy of both to be directed less towards the decision to be made than to the process of choosing and to its forms of expression, both conscious and unconscious. Since the analyst offers no support or assistance in the making of a decision, attempting instead to limit himself or herself to clarifying the patient’s experience, the patient tends to interrogate dreams or in other ways to ask the unconscious ‘how things stand’, and to press it into service as an alternative interlocutor. This waiting is like that of children expecting our parents or God to show us how to behave. One starts from the presupposition that a proper decision and a wrong one already and in any case exist. And yet precisely which decision one makes might not be essential. The result could depend less on the decision made than on the fact that one assumes the responsibilities which derive from it, and does not attempt to avoid its consequences. Either of the two choices could prove to be right or wrong, not as facts in themselves, or a priori, but in terms of the consistency with which one follows the paths that necessarily stem from them. It is a question of the attitude that Max Weber describes as an ‘ethics of responsibility’, as opposed to an ‘ethics of convictions’. Acting in terms of convictions implies the possibility of establishing from the start that something is right and something else is wrong, since they can be seen in the light of established norms. The ethics of responsibility implies, on the other hand, that the choice is more complex and personal, and that its moral status does not entirely depend on extant principles: it is only by bearing the weight of the consequences of an act that one can discover whether one has acted ethically or not.
