Sensing and (Analytic) Sensibilities

Abstract

In a discussion of Rozmarin's psychoanalytic engagement of Levinas, I illustrate how Rozmarin has moved Levinas's conception of subjectivity from one of “hostage” to a relational ideal of subjectivity as reciprocity, while maintaining Levinas's commitment to the primacy of ethical relation. I situate Levinas the phenomenologist and his claims regarding otherness as they have been taken up in the more classical analytic tradition and developed into the idea of a traumatic intersubjectivity. These ideas are then contrasted with a position informed by the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, current conceptions of a relational unconscious, and recent findings in neuroscience, all of which seek to make the difference between other and self equivocal.

Keywords:

• subjectivity
• intersubjectivity
• Levinas
• Merleau-Ponty
• relational
• otherness
• flesh

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruce Reis

Bruce Reis, Ph.D. is Relational Faculty, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.