title: [Bioethics on the couch: can Freud help us to deal with the uncertainties of medical ethics?].
abstract: Only recently, bioethics has crystallized into a full-fledged discipline. The aim of this article is to analyze whether Freud is competent to deal with bioethics. Freudian psychoanalysis is reviewed as a global theory that touches culture as a totality. And it is by way of a global theory of culture that Freud takes up the phenomenon of morality. Freud gives not an alternative answer to unchanged questions in bioethics, but delivers a new manner of asking moral questions. The ground rule establishes the conditions for treatment. And secondly, it is a radical elimination of any position of moral existence. Ethics is simply bracketed (put in parenthesis) in the sense that in its regard no position is taken either for or against. What is at stake is self-recognition and Freudian itinerary runs from misunderstanding to recognition. If Freud offers a technique, it is not included in the cycle of techniques of domination; it is a technique of veracity.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psiquiatría, Escuela de Medicina, Universidad de Valparaiso. gufigueroa@vtr.net
authors.forename: Gustavo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Figueroa
mesh_terms: D001675:Bioethics; D028663:Ethical Theory; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D006801:Humans; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations / Q000941:ethics; D011572:Psychoanalysis; D014342:Truth Disclosure / Q000941:ethics