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An other in psychoanalysis: Emmanuel Levinass critique of knowledge and analytic sense
Abstract
The paper engages the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his critique of ontological thought and knowing, to examine some of the basic premises of psychoanalysis. The author argues that, viewed through Levinas's notions of The Other and of ethics, traditional psychoanalysis represents an ethically problematic discursive position since it conforms unambivalently to socialknowledge-power structures. The author suggests that psychoanalysis is inherently a conflicted discourse. He traces the development of psychoanalytic awareness to the concerns of otherness in the shift from one- to two-person psychology and in the thought made possible in the relational school. Bringing together Levinas's critical-ethical considerations and contemporary psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity and intersubjective relations, the author argues for more awareness of the ethical implications of different aspects of analytic theory and practice, and against the limitations of Levinas's extreme ethics. He concludes in suggesting deliberate ambivalence as the best-possible theoretical and clinical position. © 2007 William Alanson White Institute, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
... The problem with this position, in my view, is that, when we read Kohut and Levinas side-by-side, it becomes clear that Kohut's self psychology problematizes Levinas radical portrayal of the self as a hostage molded by his responsibility for the other. As I attempt to demonstrate, self psychology falls in line with other critics of Levinas, including Ricoeur (1992), Putnam (2002), and Rozmarin (2007), who argue that Levinas misses the ethical importance of self-love and the assertion of one's own needs. Kohut (1971Kohut ( , 1977 complicates this critique by demonstrating that our self-love, or narcissism, includes the other's response, for example, the gleam in the mother's eye. ...
... Other writers portray the other as any of the other people in the analysand's life: his spouse, child, parent, analyst, and so on (Alford, 2007;Hutchens, 2007;Marcus, 2007). Still others portray the other as both the other people in the analysand's life and the other within the psyche (Rozmarin, 2007). Once we have identified a first-person perspective, an "I," the other becomes the other before me, and within the self, in so far as the self is relational in its structure. ...
Self psychologists and self-psychologically informed philosophers have shown a recent interest in Emmamuel Levinas' work on ethics as a starting place for thinking about our responsibility for the other. I argue that, from a Kohutian perspective, the recognition of the other must emerge against the backdrop of a selfobject milieu in which narcissism is affirmed and not shunned. If we deny the subject's narcissistic needs in the service of an ethic of responsibility for the other, then we risk inducing a condition of moral masochism, a failure, not a success, of ethics.
... Further light is shed on the ethical embodied 'self' by psychoanalysts making the 'relational turn', and taking an interest in Levinas (Beebe & Lachmann, 2003;Rozmarin, 2007;Williams, 2007). Recent discussions amongst some post-Kleinians suggests that most communication can be regarded as projective identification, and most of it non-pathological (Spillius & O'Shaugnessy, 2011;Melanie Klein Trust, 2012). ...
... (This is not the first time he has brought philosophy to psychoanalysis. He has written on Levinas and psychoanalysis [Rozmarin, 2007] and has used the work of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault to show how families function as social agents [Rozmarin, 2009]). Philosophy has often found its way into psychoanalytic thought, but more frequently into metapsychology than into the warp and weft of clinical work. ...
In this discussion of Eyal Rozmarin's “To Be Is to Betray,” I focus, along with Rozmarin, on the reconciliation of guilt and love, the embeddedness of our individual lives in the social world, and the significance of ethics in the creation of the kind of liberation that psychoanalysis can offer.
... Our own freedom to recognize and understand an-Other is constrained by our discursive horizons. Importing the ideas of Levinas into psychoanalytic discourse, Rozmarin (2007) described how the act of knowing is necessarily an act of aggressive appropriation. There is no way for one subject to comprehend an other than through her own lens. ...
Depersonalization is the experience of profound estrangement and alienation from Self and Reality. Although highly prevalent in our postmodern world, the syndrome of depersonalization has been systematically understudied, misdiagnosed, and unsuccessfully treated. In this paper we summarize our theoretical conclusions after a decade-long empirical study of this population and discuss both etiology and recommendations for treatment. Our main objective here is to place what psychiatrically we would consider pathologies of personhood within the larger context of culture. We include a clinical vignette to demonstrate how we work with the premise that depersonalization is not only a private event. Perhaps more than other problems-in-living, it reveals the centrality of the individual's relationship to discourse, the State, and the culture in which we breathe. We discuss depersonalization and the dissociative structuring of the mind as psychological responses to particularly problematic experiences around subjection and conclude with the function of shame and humiliation in maintaining and resisting (in the political sense) this pressure to fragment.
... And in this fundamental respect, we are all the same. From a contrary perspective, Levinas (1974) and Rozmarin (2007) have suggested that it is our differences that make intersubjectivity possible. I would suggest that authentic intersubjectivity results from neither of these perspectives alone but rather from a dialectical relationship between the two. ...
The cultural diversity of Western society has created an increasingly complex psychoanalytic intersubjective field. Cultural, class, racial, and familial dimensions of experience can never be separated in the psyche of the patient or analyst or in the analytic relationship. But the melding of these influences results in particular meanings for each patient, analyst, and analytic couple, and may be crucial to address for authentic connection and change to occur. A clinical case is presented in which uniquely melded cultural, class, and psychological meanings became enacted between patient and analyst, stimulating unexpected feelings in both, which enabled the emergence of a bridge across an apparent gulf of “otherness.” (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In the last decade there has been a great outburst of ethics upon the psychoanalytic scene, with the appearance of several books and many scholarly articles making a claim for a central role for ethics in our theorizing and practice. One might ask, Why now? In attempting to answer this question, the author considers the position of psychoanalytic therapists as “implicated subjects” (from Rothberg) within the neoliberal political economy, aware of our passive participation in causing widespread harm. Discomfort with this awareness has provoked strenuous assertions of our goodness, which are undercut, however, by some serious ethical lapses. These include our investment as private practitioners in a manner of service delivery that has contributed to a crisis of public access to mental health care; the lack of accountability for harm caused to LGBTQ people by decades of homophobic theorizing and practice; and the concentration of power in our professional organizations.
Freud’s understanding of science allowed no origin for commitment to ethical values except via the superego. Recently, some psychoanalysts have found a more persuasive source in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In this paper, using in particular Viviane Chetrit-Vatine’s notion of “matricial space,” I attempt to look further at the implications of Levinas’s idea of “transcendence,” not as something special but as the ordinary horizon of seriously-held ethical values. To work as such, it must involve an affective dimension. Referencing Derrida’s Adieu for Levinas, I discuss this in terms of different meanings of the word “love,” in particular a certain sort of love for the unique “being” of the other, rather than for his or her “doing.”
Through intersubjective theory it is possible define perversions as behaviors characterized by the negation of the subjectivity of the Other. In the paper it is observed that perversions are a mode of affective regulation ; especially the perverse individual tries to deny the reality of the Other to avoid the anxiety associated to an intersubjective relationship. According to Jessica Benjamin's intersubjective theory, perversions are a behavioral mode of avoiding intimate development with the Other. In the relations that the perverse establishes there is no mutual recognition of subjectivity. Sexuality is therefore observed from a relational and intersubjective point of view. In the final part, some reflections are proposed on the therapeutic relationship of perverse individuals.
These comments center on two phrases repeated in Chalker’s paper. One is the poignant question “Can I get a witness?” The other phrase claims that difference alters understanding. Current relational literature on collective trauma and witnessing is reviewed, addressing Chalker’s question and clinical case.
Considering the pandemic and the social protest that followed in the United States, this article looks at the history of writing on climate change in psychoanalysis, the different effects of social, mental, and ecological factors, the changing space of clinical work and its meanings and the interweave of the pandemic and social protest movements and analysis of structural racism.
This article contemplates the tension between apathy and hope, between the dystopic and the utopian as drivers of the human condition, and our theories about it. I look, more specifically, at how these two tendencies manifested in the aftermath of WWI; the dystopic in Freud’s invention of the death drive, the utopian in Ernst Bloch’s exploration of hope. I argue that our present poses a challenge similar to that posed by WWI; a collapse of the frameworks around which subjectivities and societies are organized, and a potential for the development of both better and worse outlooks. I argue that as was the case then, psychoanalysis has crucial theoretical and ethical choices to make. I suggest that rather than follow Freud’s death driven fatalism, we should seek inspiration in Bloch’s view of hope as a driving force of human experience and destiny. I contemplate these ideas as I record events taking place in the world and in my practice during the weeks just before and after the 2020 elections in the US.
Otherness, a state of the unknown and unknowable, is part of gendered, raced, sexual experience. The desire for intelligibility coexists uneasily in a social order that delimits identity and constrains the terms of our knowability. Drawing on Belkin’s vignette of a queer man of color (this issue), I discuss how permutations in knowing and relating to the “other” open up or foreclose possibility in the intersectional space.
A discussion of Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro’s model of fractal epistemology as clinically useful in the exploration of uncanny resonances in clinical dialogue. Arguing for the relevance of fractal epistemology for both the presence of resonance and of complex difference.
This discussion focuses on review of writing about phantom penis and phantom limb, considering how these data and research address the question of pleasure and sexuality in trans and gender-nonbinary persons. Implications of this work on phantom penis and prosthetic penis forms for thinking of brain structure, embodiment, and fantasy as sexuality are shaped and expressed in many different kinds of persons.
This article concerns the relevance of maternal ethics to psychoanalytically inspired practice, particularly the work of protecting open futures. The signifier maternal is used here not as a designation of motherhood, biological or otherwise, but as a descriptor of a kind of dedicated caretaking experienced in a variety of dialogical relationships including that of patient and therapist/analyst. Both the maternal and ethical turns in psychoanalysis and the postmodern shifts in the definition of ethics contribute to a relational ethics that takes into account past, present, and future, and an appreciation of radical perspectives on otherness.
The power of Dante's Divine Comedy is unmistakable, but surprising in view of its theological structure and assumptions that are no longer current among most modern readers. This paper suggests that its power derives from the deep psychological truthfulness with which Dante deals with the painful personal crisis that underlies the poem and is his starting point. It attempts to clarify what may have constituted that crisis, and why the structure of the Comedy, and in particular its use of two guides, Virgil and Beatrice, who might be thought a somewhat incompatible pairing, point significantly to the nature of the solution Dante arrived at. In particular it suggests that the puzzling fictions to do with Statius in the Purgatorio are a clue to Dante's own difficulties in bridging the classical and Christian traditions, and that his highly original solution to these difficulties, by no means conforming to conventional Christian orthodoxy in the 13th/14th century, was needed with special urgency in a time of pervasive civil conflict.
Del Loewenthal’s career has been wide-ranging, spanning existentialism, psychoanalysis, critical psychotherapy, humanism, postmodernism, phototherapy, cognitive behaviour therapy and childhood studies. This collection combines new and recent works with earlier writings, drawing together his outstanding research and contribution to existential theory, practice and research. Containing chapters and papers chosen by Loewenthal himself, the book is divided into the following sections: • Existentialism after postmodernism and the psychological therapies • Practice, ideologies and politics: Now you see it, now you don’t! • Practice, practice issues and the nature of psychotherapeutic knowledge • Practice and theory: Implications not applications • Thoughtful practice and research • Conclusion: Hopefully unending, continually changing and astonishing After an introduction to the overall book, each section is accompanied by the author’s exploration of his further thoughts on the pieces, his own subsequent learning and his comments on developments in the field since the time of writing. Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling after Postmodernism will be inspiring reading for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, counsellors, other mental health professionals in general, and existential therapists in particular.
This essay draws on Winnicott's deep insights developed in a series of texts over the last decade of his life and addressing questions of gender and sexuality, as these phenomena shape and are shaped by core experiences in the evolution of intersubjectivity. Interweaving Winnicott's work with that of Loewald, Laplanche and Matte Blanco, the essay speculates about possible developmental processes through which complex and shifting gender identifications intersect and interact with experiences of sexuality and desiring. The essay tracks Winnicott's evolving ideas about gender and madness and opens a way of thinking about one process by which gender may emerge, in a complex, ‘softly assembled’ encounter with desire and being desired. This approach also seeks to reframe and expand the current move in gender theory ‘from etiology to teleology’. The term ‘etiology’ locates us in causation, diagnosis and the sites of pathology, and I think we should continue to be wary of the intrusion of these socially driven biases and ideas into reflections about sexuality and gender in development.
Winner of the 2012 Gradiva Award!
In times of stress, trauma and crisis—whether on a personal or global scale—it can be all too easy for us to externalize a larger-than-life figure who can assuage our suffering, a Hero who comes to the fore even as we recede into the background. in taking on our collective burden, however, such an omnipotent Hero can actually undermine us, representing as it does the very same characteristics we fail to note in one another. By granting the Hero to power to set things right, we seem to deny it to ourselves, leaving us temporarily lightened but ultimately helpless.
As part of a broader scholarly and political effort to unify clinical psychoanalysis, the author argues that psychoanalysts' presence, engagement, and framing constitute the three overarching features of their work. Additionally, patients' propensity to turn inward, alternatively known as psychic retreat or narcissistic withdrawal, provides a similarly unifying way to view psychoanalytic patients. Narrowing the investigation to a phenomenological one, the author tapers the exploration further by studying the psychoanalytic process as it unfolds in real time. After addressing the problems of diffusion in professional identity and psychoanalytic theory that have plagued psychoanalysis from the start, the author presents three case examples into which he integrates Kafka's short story "A Hunger Artist." These vehicles are utilized to demonstrate how such nomenclature provides the basis for a more cohesive understanding of how psychoanalysts work.
After a brief description of the ethical turn and its historical-political dimension within psychoanalysis, this article will introduce the special issue’s four papers and two responses, all of which were presented at the 2013 Psychology and the Other Conference. These articles represent substantive additions to the burgeoning literature highlighting the intersections of ethical phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis and political life. They provide innovative conceptions of the intergenerational transmission of historical and political practices and the shape and nature of ethical subjectivity and its relationship to the unconscious, and offer new modes for understanding political subversion.
This article offers an outline of the challenges particular to intersubjective approaches to psychoanalytic psychotherapy in South Africa. It focuses on the possibility (and impossibility) of empathic inquiry and the dynamics of shame when racial difference, and all its associated baggage, dominates—for a moment or for months—the interaction of the therapy dyad. It focuses on the limits of empathic immersion when difference confers a fluid, shifting, but ever-present otherness on every encounter. It draws on the work of Allan Schore in relation to affect regulation and self-development, of Philip Bromberg on dissociation, and of Andy Morrison and Melvin Lansky on shame. The article suggests that struggles with empathic attunement in racialized contexts are often deeply affected by shame. This is associated with visceral experience of the social body, positioned by race and gender. Understanding the roots of shame experienced in therapies across racial and cultural divides marks the beginning of shared subjectivity and mutual regulation.
Cyberspace is provoking a dramatic shift in our cultural understanding of reality. A transition is taking place, from a reality marked by loss and limit to one experienced through infinite access. This paper begins to map Reality 2.0 with the conviction that we need to revisit traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as loss and fantasy within the framework of this new reality so that we may appreciate how online experience does and doesn't facilitate the formation of subjectivity and multiplicity. In Reality 2.0, access trumps the need to accept limits as a tool to self-discovery, and networking replaces containment as the bulwark of meaning. How then might we appreciate ways that online life turns what many see as a kind of psychic retreat into a generative space for psychoanalytic dialogue?
A discussion is developed of Lynne Layton's argument regarding the eclipsing of empathic links among individuals and collective identifications within contemporary American culture. In this discussion I raise questions about the rhetorical strategies of this essay, about the analysis of power and of the social climate. I want to engage Layton in a closer consideration of the role of subversion and dissent, the status of developmental processes in a changing culture, the nature and reach of empathy, the role of psychoanalysis as a practice and a theory, and the role of therapeutic process in building opposition and dissent and in creating strong empathic forms of alliance to counter the dominant culture, including the culture of work.
Suchet's paper is an inspiring demonstration of the power of openness and vulnerability. It offers a clinically daring and theoretically far-reaching account of the transformation that can sometimes occur in the psychoanalytic relationship. My commentary focuses on two of the paper's major threads: the interplay of subjective experience, intersubjective space, and collective forces, and the ethical dimension of the psychoanalytic project. From the outset, the meeting between Ara and Suchet is not only a meeting of bodies and minds, but also a meeting of collective histories and politics. Suchet finds, and in her account powerfully demonstrates, that addressing her patient's trouble requires an exploration of how collective traumas and political narratives infuse the possibilities of intersubjective exchange and subjective meaning. In my commentary I trace and elaborate on the trajectory of this analytic process, contemplating the ways in which identities and identifications involve both familial and social attachments. I attempt to highlight Suchet's contribution to our understanding of how what happens, and is made meaningful, in the register of collective identification and experience, forms the very substance of subjective and intersubjective life, and should be therefore formulated as an intrinsic aspect of the analytic endeavour. Turning to Suchet's engagement with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I consider her drive to reach beyond the traditional boundaries of psychoanalytic discourse. Following the same drive, I add some ideas developed by Theodor Adorno, as means of illustrating the trouble and the potential for reconciliation inherent in the experience and politics of identity.
In “Face to Face,” I explore my work as a Jewish analyst with a Lebanese woman, Ara, who is strongly identified with the Palestinian cause. As the work unfolded I find myself thrust into a psychic and social space I had not wanted to inhabit, into the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the turmoil of Jewish identity. Ara and I were in the midst of ghosts of historical traumas, intersecting and interweaving history and identity between us. It was her history and my history and the history of nations, of broken bonds and damaged victims suddenly all present in the room. I will hold together, in tension, the micro and the macro, the intrapsychic and social, the drama of the encounter between Ara and me and between Palestinians and Jews. I ask what it takes to find one's way into an understanding of the other, a recognition of the other and the legitimacy of their suffering when one's own history is suffused with the trauma of centuries of victimhood. “Face to Face” is an exploration of how to inhabit the Other, how to negotiate difference, moving beyond the dynamics of victim and victimizer, beyond that of oppressor and oppressed to what Emmanuel Levinas refers to as a welcoming of the stranger, a transcendent experience.
In replying to the commentaries I challenge the notion that the analyst can remain an apolitical or dehistoricized subject. As relational analysts our work is to keep broadening our reach, and expanding our thinking including addressing the ethical imperatives of our times. I raise the philosophical issue of collective responsibility which deals with moral rather than causal responsibility and the concept of metaphysical guilt, guilt based on who one is rather than what one has done. I also address the need for more innovative forms of writing in psychoanalysis, and my own style of writing in which language attempts to perform the theory. In creating a more narrative driven style of writing I hope that the reader will be able to experience from the inside, rather than solely from a theoretical position, the concepts I am exploring.
This essay charts the origins, influences, and evolution of the relational tradition in contemporary psychoanalysis. Considering the theoretical and philosophical influences from nineteenth-century Americans like William James and C. S Pierce, and noting the seminal modern work of Steven Mitchell and Jay Greenberg in opening a critique of one-person focused drive theory, the essay follows developments over a quarter century. Hallmarks of the relational approach-social construction, two-person psychologies, multiple self-states, social regulation and construction of identities like gender and sexual orientation, and an evolving theory of clinical practice-are reviewed. New developments in clinical theory, in the study of identity categories, in the work on embodiment and enactment, and in developmental models are also reviewed.
A debate between Lynne Segal and Juliet Mitchell is the starting point of this inquiry into different notions about the nature of the unconscious. The paper argues that unconscious conflict derives both from universal sources and from historical contingencies, but that it is largely the latter that is the origin of neurotic misery (as opposed to common human unhappiness). Using clinical examples, the paper elaborates a relational perspective on unconscious processes and analytic treatment, at the center of which is the repetition compulsion. After discussing different theories about the relation between the psychic and the social, the paper proposes that the concept of normative unconscious processes provides a useful way to think about the link between social norms and subjective psychic reality.Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2004) 9, 3351. doi:10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100001