The elephant on the couch: psychoanalysis, moral foundations and institutional segregation

Abstract

This essay investigates why ethically committed psychoanalysts are systematically segregated by traditional psychoanalytic institutions. Using Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory as an analytical framework, the text demonstrates that psychoanalytic societies operate structurally as conservative moral communities, prioritizing binding foundations — Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity — over individualizing foundations — Care, Fairness, Liberty. The essay traces a series of historical cases — Ferenczi, Gross, Tausk, Pellegrino, M. D. Magno, Virgínia Bicudo, Neusa Santos Souza, and Richard Isay — to show that the mechanism of exclusion operates across different eras, geographies, and forms of dissidence, from clinical innovation to racial and sexual identity. The text further examines bystander complicity, the pathologization of dissent as a power instrument, and the institutional production of surplus suffering. As an alternative, it proposes a non-institutional psychoanalysis organized by peer ethics, public witnessing, and the refusal of capital capture, pointing to EPEP — the Psychoanalytic School of Peripheral Listening — as a concrete experience of this inversion.