Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology

I am grateful to Hannes Nykänen for his discussion of the important role that I–Thou relationships, as described by Martin Buber, have in shaping a moral life. The author makes a distinction between two very different kinds of moral experience, one based in encounters between mutually engaged subjects (I–Thou relationships), and another based on the internalization of external standards. He argues that only the former can provide a foundation for moral decisions that are guided by conscience. He is careful to limit his use of the term conscience to the sense of moral imperative one feels out of consideration and concern for another subject—one who is appreciated as a unique and immeasurably valuable person. The author identifies this appreciation as the essence of love and that, therefore, “Bad conscience is our awareness of violating this love” (Nykänen 2014, 56).

By contrast, the author uses the term ‘collective pressure’ to distinguish morality rooted in external authority from authentic conscience. Accordingly, he is critical of Freud’s formulation which views morality—or the superego—as arising from an identification with the parents which results in “an internalized fear of authority”(Nykänen 2014, 53). The author is arguing that what Freud calls superego “poses the collective values to the ego” (p. 52); when a person defies these values the result is an experience of being judged (which the author terms ‘guilt’), not an experience of true conscience.

What follows are some reflections from the perspective of a psychoanalytic clinician that explore, and perhaps complicate, the sharp divide between authentically experienced conscience and externally driven guilt. The role of internalization in morality is complex; as such, internalization (of authority and of aspiration) is entwined with experiences of I–Thou relationships. I further suggest that a patient might both strive for, and yet be frightened of, the capacity to engage in the mode of I–Thou relationships.

The author writes that “conscience is neither intra-psychic nor extra-psychic. It is rather, something that constitutes the relationship between the I and the you” (Nykänen 2014, 55). This idea that conscience is located in the space between two subjects might find a more comfortable fit with contemporary psychoanalysis than the author might expect. Ogden (1994), among others, sees a substantial overlap between Winnicott’s conception of the mutuality of ‘good enough’ [End Page 67] parent–infant relations, and Buber’s emphasis on a relationship between oneself and a separate subject who can mutually recognize each other’s subjectivity. Winnicott (1965) once made the provocative statement, “There is no such thing as an infant” (Nykänen 2014), by which he meant that one can never separate out an ‘infant’ identity from the matrix of ‘mother-infant-in-relationship.’ He suggested that the baby and the mother exist as an enmeshed system that does not initially allow for a true I–Thou relationship. Such a relationship is a developmental achievement that first requires the creation of distinctions such as internal/external, subjective/objective, and thought/action.

Winnicott suggested that one of the most important ways that the two differentiate into separate and mutually valued subjects is through the infant’s aggressive and destructive fantasies. If the infant destroys the mother in fantasy, but she survives in reality, there is the beginning of a distinction between ‘objects’ under the infant’s control, and ‘subjects’ which exist and act independently. This outcome depends on the mother neither collapsing nor retaliating. He can begin to feel concern, the mother can begin to recognize the early stirrings of this concern, and this in turn helps in the baby’s recognition of himself or herself as a subject of actions, thoughts, and feelings. Ogden (1994) writes, “In this creatively destructive process, the I-as-subject and the mother-as –subject simultaneously come into being in relation to one another”. This is similar to the experience with patients who need to attack their therapist who they experience largely as an amalgam of projections, and on finding that the therapist remains steadfast throughout can tentatively move toward the appreciation of the...