FIGURAS DA ALTERIDADE E POSIÇÕES ÉTICAS NA OBRA DE FREUD.

This essay presents and discusses the different configurations of otherness and their implications for a concept of ethics implicit in Freudian thought. It starts with a paradox: if much of the Freudian discourse suggests an ethics close to common sense and takes it mostly in the field of moral conscience development, how can one speak of psychoanalysis' originality in addressing the ethical problem? The answer is not obvious in the theory's manifest discourse, but in its latent content. It is proposed that the problem of ethics in Freud should be related to how the other takes place in the subjective constitution. Starting from some theoretical considerations on the field of otherness and ethics in psychoanalysis, one argues that the most superficial Freudian position is that of an intrapsychic intersubjectivity, where the psychic representation tends to minimize the role of the other in the constitution of subjectivity, since the object is the most contingent and less certain attribute of the instinctual impulses. The role of the other can only be properly addressed with the development of the concepts of narcissism, identification, and death instinct. These developments point towards the traumatic and trans-subjective intersubjectivities, which in turn point towards two different ethical positions: those of responsibility and care [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]