Levinas and psychoanalysis: An antihermeneutic approach.

Abstract

The ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas has been employed to challenge reductionary varieties of clinical work and to think about radical forms of justice in the clinic. Unfortunately, in translating from philosophy to the clinic, therapists leave behind some of Levinas's radical commitments to make it more practicable. The Levinasian ethical imperative is to resist positioning oneself in relation to the Other that in any way collapses alterity. This Other of radical alterity cannot be thought of as another egoic human being like myself without betraying the alterity of the Other. A commitment to Levinasian ethics is difficult to situate within a clinical paradigm premised on alliance and hermeneutic processes of meaning and understanding. I contend that clinical work following Levinas would have to (counterintuitively) prioritize an ethics of alterity above the image of clinical change itself. To make this case, I summarize the hermeneutic approach to Levinasian "therapeutics" exemplified by the intersubjective psychoanalysis of Donna Orange and offer a critique of that approach as somewhat at odds with the radical commitments of Levinasian ethics. I also provide key insights from the work of Lacan and Laplanche, explore critical passages from Levinas which point to an ethics beyond the limits of hermeneutics, and offer an alternative approach to reading Levinas clinically: Antihermeneutic psychoanalysis. Public Significance StatementThis article advances the idea that the ethical philosophy of Levinas is a critique of hermeneutic understanding. Relevant for theorists and clinicians, this rethinking of Levinas (as antihermeneutics) points to a hitherto unexplored connection to the psychoanalysis of Lacan and Laplanche and a new way of taking up Levinas in the clinic.

A language not our own: Derrida and humanistic psychotherapy.

“…Diagnosis, and formulation itself, is at best a human failing (or “falling,” in Heidegger’s term verfallen) which we as clinicians will resort to under the unbearable responsibility we are called into by the other. I confess at the outset that Levinasian clinical formulation is an absurd endeavor; following Benjamin Strosberg’s (2022) argument in his article, such an ethics is indeed difficult to rectify with clinical work, as it will “prioritize an ethics of alterity above hermeneutics and the image of clinical change itself” (p. 147). It may not be inaccurate to say there is no properly Levinasian/Derridean clinical formulation or diagnosis—not just Herculean in effort, but a contradiction in terms—and therefore no such “treatment,” in the logic of the clinic.…”