Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective is an attempt to look deeply into the relationship between psychoanalysis and ethics, and in particular into the failure of traditional psychoanalytic thinking to recognise the foundational character of ethical values.

David M. Black is a Scottish writer and psychoanalyst, author of Why Things Matter: The Place of Values in Science, Psychoanalysis and Religion and editor of Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators? In 2022, his translation and commentary on Dante's Purgatorio received the American National Translation Award for Poetry.

1. Introduction 2. The Working of Values in Ethics and Religion 3. Jonathan Lear: Heir to a Different Legacy 4. Who Founded Buddhism? Notes on the Psychological Action of Religious Objects 5. Dante's Two Suns: the Psychological Sources of the Divine Comedy 6. Dante, Duality and the Function of Allegory 7. Freud and Idealization 8. The Transcendent in Everyday Life 9. Religion as the Affirmation of Values 10. Levinas's Re-Basing of Religion