Responsibility (psychoanalysis)

In psychoanalysis, responsibility concerns the subject’s relation to their desire, symptoms, and unconscious determinations rather than moral culpability or juridical accountability. Psychoanalysis does not presuppose a fully transparent, rational, autonomous agent; it begins from the claim that psychic life is structured by an unconscious that speaks in dreams, slips, symptoms, and repetitions that occur “against” conscious intention. Yet Freud does not treat unconscious determination as an excuse that abolishes responsibility; rather, analysis aims to make the subject answerable for formations they experience as alien—by locating how a symptom functions as a meaningful compromise within the subject’s psychic economy.

Responsibility in psychoanalysis is therefore typically framed as assumption rather than mastery: the subject cannot eliminate the unconscious, but can come to assume a position in relation to what they say and do, including the ways they repeat, suffer, and (in Lacanian terms) enjoy. The concept acquires particular importance in Freudian metapsychology through the development of guilt and the super-ego, and in Jacques Lacan’s “ethics of psychoanalysis,” where responsibility is bound to the subject’s relation to desire, castration, and jouissance, and to the analytic demand that the subject not retreat from what structures their desire.

Overview

Psychoanalysis challenges the view that individuals are fully conscious authors of their actions. Symptoms, inhibitions, compulsions, and repetitive relational patterns often persist despite conscious intentions, and may be sustained by conflict and defense. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious undermines the idea that responsibility can be grounded solely in conscious intention, but it does not entail that the subject is absolved. Instead, responsibility is reformulated as an internal clinical-ethical problem: how the subject is implicated in formations they do not recognize as “theirs.”

In many analytic traditions, responsibility is distinguished from both blame and guilt:

• Blame (moral condemnation) assigns fault and typically forecloses inquiry.
• Guilt may be conscious or unconscious and can be disproportionate, misplaced, or used defensively.
• Responsibility (in the analytic sense) concerns the subject’s position in relation to desire, enjoyment, and repetition, and the possibility of change through speech, interpretation, and working-through.

Responsibility, in this framework, is not equivalent to self-reproach; indeed, analytic responsibility may require loosening a punitive relation to oneself (harsh superego guilt) in order to encounter desire and to relinquish repetitive self-punishment.

Responsibility and the unconscious

Freudian discovery and the question of agency

Freud’s account of symptoms, dreams, and parapraxes implies that psychic life is largely unconscious and that meaningful formations can occur without conscious intention. This immediately raises questions about agency: if a symptom is not consciously willed, can the subject be responsible for it?

Freud rejects the notion that unconscious determination “excuses” the subject in the sense of removing responsibility. In his clinical exposition, the symptom is a compromise formation: it expresses an unconscious wish and defense, a conflictual solution that belongs to the subject’s psychic economy even when it is experienced as foreign or imposed. Responsibility, on this view, is interpretive and clinical: the subject becomes responsible insofar as they can recognize and work with the meaning and function of what they suffer.

Repetition compulsion and responsibility without choice

Freud further complicates responsibility through the concept of repetition compulsion, in which the subject repeats painful experiences or relational patterns without conscious benefit or intention. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud treats repetition as evidence of forces that exceed the pleasure principle and later relates it to the dualism of drives (including the death drive).

Here responsibility cannot mean “choosing repetition.” Instead, analytic responsibility is the capacity to recognize one’s implication in a pattern that persists beyond conscious control, and to work through the resistances that sustain it. Freud’s technical account of working-through frames responsibility as a process: the patient moves from enactment to recognition, and from recognition to the slow modification of entrenched repetitions.

Responsibility, guilt, and moral judgment

A central psychoanalytic distinction is between responsibility and guilt. Freud’s structural model links guilt to the development of the super-ego, an internal agency formed through identifications and internalized prohibitions. In this model, guilt is not a reliable index of responsibility:

• A subject may experience intense guilt without conscious wrongdoing (including unconscious guilt expressed through inhibition or self-punishment).
• Another may act destructively while feeling little conscious guilt, especially where guilt is disavowed or projected.
• Guilt can serve defensive purposes, including moral masochism—an unconscious “need for punishment” that binds the subject to suffering and failure as if satisfying superego demands.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud expands guilt beyond the individual: the superego is intensified by cultural renunciation and internalized aggression, producing a chronic guilt that helps maintain social order but also generates discontent and neurotic suffering. From this angle, responsibility is easily distorted: what appears as “taking responsibility” may in fact be submission to superego cruelty, while genuine responsibility may involve relinquishing punitive guilt in order to assume desire and to change one’s relation to aggression, dependence, and loss.

Freud: responsibility in technique and ethics

Freud’s technical writings clarify how responsibility is cultivated in analysis. In “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis” (1912), Freud articulates the analyst’s responsibility to maintain a method that minimizes suggestion and preserves conditions for free association and interpretation. The patient’s responsibility is not moral confession but participation in a specific practice: speaking, associating, and encountering resistances.

In “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914), Freud describes how patients “repeat” rather than remember: they enact unconscious conflict in their current life and in the transference. The analytic task is to interpret these repetitions and facilitate working-through, which implies a gradual assumption of what is enacted as if it were external fate.

Freud also emphasizes ethical responsibilities around transference. In “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915), he warns that intense transference demands may pressure the analyst toward gratification or exploitation; analytic responsibility requires maintaining the frame and interpreting the demand rather than acting it out.

Object relations and post-Freudian approaches

Post-Freudian traditions often shift responsibility away from Oedipal guilt alone and toward the development of concern, reparation, and the capacity to hold ambivalence.

Melanie Klein: guilt, reparation, and responsibility for the object

In Kleinian theory, responsibility is linked to the emergence of depressive-position guilt and reparative concern. In “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940), Klein argues that the capacity to mourn and to love depends on recognizing that one’s aggressive impulses and fantasies have threatened the loved object. Depressive guilt can motivate reparation—efforts to restore the object internally and in reality.

Responsibility, in this view, is inseparable from the ability to perceive the other as a whole person (not merely a part-object) and to tolerate love and hate toward the same object without resorting to manic denial or persecutory guilt. Excessive guilt may remain persecutory, but mature responsibility is oriented toward concern and repair rather than punishment.

Winnicott: capacity for concern and environmental reliability

Winnicott frames responsibility as an achievement of emotional development supported by a “facilitating environment.” In “The Development of the Capacity for Concern” (1963), he argues that concern arises when the infant can integrate aggression and love toward the same caregiver and recognize that impulses have consequences. This produces a wish to repair that is not simply compliance with moral rules but a spontaneous ethical capacity grounded in reliability and holding.

Winnicott also warns that apparent responsibility can be “false” when it is based on premature compliance or fear of collapse. Where early failures are severe, responsibility may be experienced as annihilating obligation or as impossible demand, rather than as concern that can be enacted creatively within play and symbolization.

Lacan: responsibility and the ethics of psychoanalysis

Responsibility becomes an explicit ethical concept in Lacan, especially from the late 1950s onward.

Ethics beyond the good

In Seminar VII (1959–1960), Lacan rejects ethical systems grounded in a universal “good” and argues that psychoanalysis confronts the subject with something more radical: desire and its relation to law and enjoyment. Lacan’s ethical maxim is often condensed as an injunction not to give ground relative to one’s desire. This does not mean indulging impulses or pursuing satisfaction at any cost; it means assuming responsibility for desire rather than disavowing it through conformity, moralization, or fantasies of purity.

Responsibility here is not obedience to an external rule but fidelity to the truth of desire as it emerges in analysis. Ethical failure is framed less as transgression of norms than as betrayal or disavowal of desire—often by taking refuge in ideals, duties, or demands of the Other that mask desire’s inconsistency and the subject’s own implication.

The subject of the signifier: responsibility for enunciation

Lacan redefines the Freudian subject as a subject constituted in language and divided by the signifier. Because the subject is not identical with conscious intention, responsibility is tied to enunciation—what is said “in one’s name”—rather than to transparent self-mastery.

In this view, the subject is responsible for what emerges in slips, jokes, symptomatic utterances, and repetitions in speech—not because the subject consciously chose them, but because they express the logic of the subject’s desire and symptom within the symbolic order. Analysis aims to shift the subject’s position from “this happens to me” to “this speaks through me, and I must answer for it.”

Traversal of fantasy and assumption of symptom

Lacanian clinical writing often associates responsibility with transformations in the relation to fantasy and symptom. While terminology varies, a common orientation is that analytic work moves the subject from complaint and projection (locating causality entirely in the Other) toward subjective implication: how the fantasy organizes desire, how the symptom provides a mode of enjoyment, and how the subject participates in repeated scenarios that sustain suffering.

This is not a call to self-blame. It is a method for loosening repetition by making its satisfactions and costs legible. In later Lacanian orientations, responsibility may also be described as “assuming one’s symptom” or learning how to do with it—finding a livable relation to what cannot be fully cured or normalized without imposing moral ideals as therapeutic goals.

Responsibility and jouissance

Responsibility in Lacanian theory is inseparable from jouissance—a paradoxical enjoyment that exceeds the pleasure principle and may include suffering, compulsion, or self-sabotage.

Enjoyment and subjective implication

Jouissance is often experienced by the subject as imposed—by the body, by circumstances, by an intrusive Other. Psychoanalytic responsibility does not mean endorsing suffering; it means recognizing how the subject is implicated in a mode of enjoyment that sustains symptoms and repetitions (including moral masochism, compulsive failure, or recurring relational impasses).

This formulation links Lacanian responsibility to Freudian repetition compulsion and to the later drive theory: responsibility involves encountering the attachment to what undermines the subject, not simply resisting it as an “error.”

Superego, guilt, and “false responsibility”

Lacan reinterprets the superego not primarily as moral conscience but as a paradoxical and often obscene agency that commands enjoyment. In this frame, excessive guilt may signal not responsibility but submission to a superegoic demand that is impossible to satisfy. Psychoanalytic responsibility may therefore require relinquishing guilt—especially guilt that functions as self-punishment or as a defense against desire—in order to assume desire more directly and to reconfigure one’s relation to enjoyment.

Sexuation and responsibility (Lacan)

Lacan’s theory of sexuation situates responsibility within different relations to the phallic function (Φ) and to jouissance. In Encore (Seminar XX), Lacan formalizes two logical positions often called “masculine” and “feminine” based on how the subject relates to Φ and to the “not-all” of symbolic capture.

These positions are not reducible to biological sex. They designate structural relations to law, exception, and enjoyment, and may imply different ethical impasses:

• In the “masculine” position, responsibility often concerns renouncing fantasies of exception, mastery, or guaranteed meaning, and assuming castration as the limit that structures desire and enjoyment.
• In the “feminine” position, responsibility may involve assuming a relation to jouissance that is not fully captured by symbolic norms, without turning that excess into mystification or self-sacrifice.

Because Lacan insists that no universal signifier defines “Woman,” responsibility cannot be grounded in fixed identity ideals but must be worked out singularly, case by case, through the subject’s relation to desire and enjoyment.

Clinical responsibility

Responsibility in the analytic process

In clinical practice, responsibility emerges through speech, interpretation, and working-through. The analysand is not blamed for symptoms, nor absolved by reference to unconscious determination. Instead, analytic work aims to enable the subject to recognize their implication in what they suffer, including the benefits (secondary gains, identifications, enjoyments) that may bind them to a symptom.

A frequently described shift is from the question “Why is this happening to me?” to “How am I involved in this repetition?”—posed without moralization and without erasing external harms. Responsibility is the possibility of a change in position: less submission to symptom and superego, more capacity to interpret and act.

The analyst’s responsibility

Responsibility also concerns the analyst’s position. Classical technique emphasizes abstinence, boundaries, confidentiality, and the management of transference pressures so that analysis does not become suggestion, moral tutoring, or enactment.

Lacanian formulations emphasize that the analyst should not occupy the place of moral authority or mastery; analytic ethics requires sustaining the frame and a position that allows the subject’s desire to emerge, rather than imposing ideals of adaptation or goodness.

Responsibility and society

Freud links responsibility to civilization’s management of desire and aggression. Social order is purchased through renunciation and internalization of prohibition, intensifying guilt and producing discontent. Psychoanalysis thus complicates individual responsibility by showing how conscience and guilt are formed within cultural constraints and family structures.

Lacan’s later cultural remarks (often developed in Lacanian social theory) are frequently read as diagnosing modern forms of social bond that promise direct enjoyment and thereby intensify superegoic pressure (“enjoy!”) rather than relieving it. In this view, responsibility is displaced by fantasies of effortless satisfaction, while symptoms proliferate around failures of enjoyment and recognition.

Critiques and debates

Determinism and moral agency

Critics argue that psychoanalysis risks undermining moral agency by attributing action to unconscious determinants. Analytic responses emphasize that uncovering determinants does not eliminate agency; it expands agency by making compulsive patterns representable and thus modifiable. Responsibility is not the fantasy of full control but the capacity to answer for what one does and says when the unconscious is taken seriously.

Moralism and normative bias

Another critique is that “taking responsibility” can become a moralizing demand, pressuring patients to accept burdens that belong to abusive others or to oppressive structures. Winnicottian and Kleinian perspectives especially stress that genuine responsibility requires psychological integration and environmental reliability; otherwise, responsibility becomes compliance, false self-adaptation, or persecutory guilt.

Individualization of social problems

Psychoanalytic responsibility can be criticized for individualizing social problems. Some analysts respond that psychoanalysis can acknowledge structural determinants while insisting that ethical responsibility cannot be reduced to them: social determination explains constraints, but it does not exhaust the subject’s singular relation to desire, identification, and enjoyment. Debates continue over how to integrate social recognition, power, and oppression into analytic ethics without collapsing analysis into moral or political instruction.

See also

• Ethics of psychoanalysis
• Desire (psychoanalysis)
• Unconscious
• Guilt
• Super-ego
• Repetition compulsion
• Death drive
• Jouissance
• Working through
• Transference
• Countertransference
• Depressive position
• Capacity for concern

Further reading

• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914). Standard Edition, Vol. 12.
• Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916–1917). Standard Edition, Vols. 15–16.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Standard Edition, Vol. 18.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id (1923). Standard Edition, Vol. 19.
• Freud, Sigmund. “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924). Standard Edition, Vol. 19.
• Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Standard Edition, Vol. 21.
• Klein, Melanie. “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940). In Love, Guilt and Reparation. London: Hogarth Press, 1975.
• Winnicott, D. W. “The Development of the Capacity for Concern” (1963). In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press, 1965.
• Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications, 1971.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar, Book XX: Encore. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
• Laplanche, Jean, & Pontalis, J.-B. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth Press, 1973.