I was invited by Psychoanalytic Inquiry to write an article for an upcoming issue of the journal that will feature contemporary voices engaging with classic psychoanalytic papers. The consulting editors for the issue, Nicole Nelson and Adrian Sanchez, suggested Psychoanalysis and Moral Values (1960) by Heinz Hartmann as a suitable target for my commentary, a classic text on how moral values intersect with psychoanalysis, and I accepted. The article has now been published online ahead of print.
I am sharing an excerpt here for the readers of Psychiatry at the Margins.
What Psychoanalysis Can and Cannot Tell Us About Morality
Consider a hypothetical scenario. A woman meets with a psychoanalyst for an initial consultation. Her main reason for seeking psychotherapy is, “I want to be a more ethical person. I realize that for much of my life I’ve acted in a selfish and self-centered manner. Can you help me become a more moral person?” When asked to clarify her conception of a moral person, she says, “Someone close to God, who follows God’s word, is an obedient daughter and obedient wife, a selfless mother, and one who is not vulnerable to temptation.” How might the analyst respond to her, and what should the therapist say about what, if anything, psychoanalytic psychotherapy can do for her in her pursuit?
The classical psychoanalytic answer to this would be that psychoanalysis is not primarily about morality or ethics; it is instead about a certain sort of mental freedom and self-knowledge. The analyst cannot promise any moral improvement whatsoever. They can, however, potentially help the person better understand what motivates their inquiry, why this inquiry has acquired a sense of urgency at this particular moment in life, and why they are drawn to these particular moral values.
Instead of giving an answer about the relationship between psychotherapy and morality, another analyst might focus on discussing the particular vision of morality she brings up. Her moral worldview appears centered around relationships to authority, whether it is God, father, husband, or children. Her own desires and judgments are not only absent, they seem to be a threat. Perhaps what she needs is less guilt and less obedience. Maybe she needs to embrace a degree of healthy selfishness that she has so far rejected.
And yet another analyst might say: psychoanalysis is indeed an ethical undertaking, and genuine concern for others is a developmental psychological achievement, while mere compliance with rules indicates something has gone awry. Psychoanalysis carries its own ethics. It values candor, preaches tolerance of ambivalence, a greater willingness to see one’s real desires. This ethic is not neutral towards patriarchal and religious ideas of obedience. So while the answer to whether psychoanalysis can help her be a better person is yes, the outcome won’t resemble her description of morality at all. It may, in fact, subvert it.
If you, dear reader, are a psychotherapist, how would you respond? In contemplating this clinical scenario, you are also contemplating an old question about the relationship between psychoanalysis and moral values, and one of the first comprehensive treatments of this question comes from Heinz Hartmann.
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Heinz Hartmann was an Austrian-born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and was the leading theorist of ego psychology in the mid-20th century. Psychoanalysis and Moral Values is a short book by Hartmann, published in 1960, as an expanded version of a Freud Anniversary Lecture he gave in New York in 1959. It was an attempt to clarify what psychoanalysis can and cannot contribute to our understanding of morality. The central thesis of the book is that psychoanalysis gives us a psychological account of moral behavior (how moral values and the superego develop, etc.), but it cannot by itself tell us what is morally right or wrong.
As a theory of personality, psychoanalysis is, in Hartmann’s view, well placed to explain the psychological origins of moral feelings and conflicts. It can do so, however, only by maintaining a separation between psychoanalytic practice and the personal moral worldview of the analyst. The analyst’s role is to be a scientific student of morality. To determine how moral valuations arise and are maintained, and how they interact with other psychological processes. The analyst’s role is not prescriptive, it is not to prescribe what ought to be value ultimately.
Hartmann reconstructs Freud’s view on ethics using various scattered sources such as Freud’s theoretical writings, letters, biographies, etc. Freud was not an ethicist and did not concern himself with building moral systems. However, he also saw morality as indispensable to the cohesion of civilization. Freud believed psychoanalysis to be a descriptive science which could, in theory, explain morality in psychological terms, but one that could not offer a moral vision itself. Per Hartmann, any analyst who treats psychoanalysis as a source of moral values is misreading Freud.
In Hartmann’s analysis, moral behavior develops out of early relationships with adults, characterized by a tangle of emotions such as dependence and resentment, love and fear, and identification and resistance. Efforts to manage early sexual and aggressive impulses as well as the internalization of external imperatives from caregivers develop into superego. While Freudian theories provided a description of how moral behavior develops, the explanations do not say and do not determine what should be valued.
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Can analysis lead to moral improvements in a person? Hartmann concedes that this is possible. There are routes from psychological health to ethical behavior. Through enhanced self-knowledge. Integration of previously suppressed or denied impulses and ideals. Better insight into motives and conflicts, such that moral code and actual conduct are brought into closer alignment. Psychoanalysis can produce a more integrated personality, one that is less vulnerable to problematic oscillations between rebellion and submission to authority figures. But Hartmann remains critical of the assumption that successful psychoanalysis necessarily improves moral behavior. The aims of psychoanalysis are clinical; any moral gains are indirect and these moral gains must not become the explicit goal of treatment.
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Hartmann’s conclusion is that psychoanalysis is a psychological science of moral behavior that can’t itself yield a moral system. This conclusion remains true and is still persuasive. Today, it is understood more readily as a specific application of a more general thesis in philosophy, known as the “is-ought problem.” This philosophical problem was famously articulated by David Hume, and while it continues to be actively debated by philosophers, the core point is now widely accepted. The core is that purely descriptive premises cannot by themselves entail a normative conclusion, unless some normative assumption has already been smuggled in (Sayre-McCord, 2023). In scientific practice, empirical inquiry is usually infused with values of one sort or another, making it difficult to state facts in isolation without values in the background. “Thick concepts” that combine values and facts (Väyrynen, 2025) also complicate this philosophical picture. Classical philosophical examples of thick concepts include character terms like generous, cruel, and tactful. Health is arguably a thick concept as it combines descriptions of physiological and psychological state of affairs with ideas of what is optimal and desirable.
I am more intrigued by Hartmann’s claim that psychoanalysis can explain the ontogenesis of moral values and moral behavior. This is because subsequent scientific and psychological research on moral development has largely displaced psychoanalysis as the central explanatory framework and this raises the question of how much of Hartmann’s claim still holds up…
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What do we know about the effects of undergoing psychoanalysis on moral judgment and behavior? In terms of clinical studies, we know surprisingly little. While there is an abundant literature on the efficacy of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapies, studies have not systematically studied moral behavior as an outcome. What we can say with some confidence is that long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy is associated with improvements in personality functioning (De Maat, et al, 2009; Lindfors, et al. 2015; Leichsenring et al, 2023). Personality pathology involves impairments in self and interpersonal functioning, including unstable or exploitative value systems and difficulties with guilt and responsibility. While we cannot really say anything confidently about whether psychoanalysis improves moral judgment and behavior, undergoing intensive analytic/psychodynamic work can improve the psychological conditions under which moral judgments are made. Psychoanalytic treatment can nudge a rigid or fragmented psyche towards more integration and self-reflection, strengthening the patient’s capacity for mentalization and affect regulation. Those changes can, in principle, reduce impulsive or retaliatory behavior, decrease covert exploitation, and soothe self-sacrificing “moral” enactments that are driven by unconscious guilt. Undergoing psychoanalysis can foster a more coherent and humane conscience and thereby tilt moral judgment and behavior in a prosocial direction, but Hartmann is correct that psychoanalysis cannot be pursued as a moral treatment. The aim of psychoanalysis is psychological health, not morality, and any moral benefits are secondary to that.
Hartmann got the conclusions right in 1960, although anyone producing a similar work today would have to focus more on the relationship between moral psychology and moral values. Moral psychology as a scientific discipline can explain how we develop our moral sense without telling us what’s morally correct. While cognitive psychology, social psychology, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, and neuroscience have now replaced psychoanalysis as the primary lens for understanding moral development, core insights from psychoanalysis remain important to our contemporary understanding. The internalization of moral values from relationships with caregivers, the influence of unconscious conflicts, the opacity of moral motivations, and moral behaviors as reaction formations are insights that remain alive within moral psychology. Psychoanalysis brings a unique attitude of respect for the idiographic developmental complexity of the moral self that distinguishes it from other disciplines and ensures its continued relevance.
Read the paper here.
See also:
So grateful that you have written this article. Do we ask whether the people that are treating / guiding us have values that align with our own? This speaks to the issue of true consent. It applies also to general psychiatry. An impossible task but worthwhile to consider nonetheless.