ABSTRACT
This chapter examines psychiatric conceptions of ethics and implications for clinical practice. It reviews the assumption that there is some good to which we should aspire as a state of mind or form of behaviour, and it shows how Lacanian psychoanalysis breaks from that assumption. The importance of ethical questions in the analytic process is explored, to include discussion of how Lacanian psychoanalysts make `diagnoses', including some problematic resonances with the pathologisation of those who dissent from current social norms. There is a focus on speci®c forms of pathology here; on obsessional concerns with compliance, on psychosis in relation to certainty, on hysteria as productive challenge, and on perversion as transgression of a bond with others. Against this backdrop of psychiatrised forms of analytic work it is possible to discern how sexual difference, jouissance, naming of the subject, the phallus and transference are played out, inside and outside the clinic.
