In recent years the noun “other” has worked its way through the culture and emerged as the verb “to other” – meaning to reduce someone to a mere external representation, lacking depth and interiority, and thus easing the way for us to discount or destroy that person. The phenomenon of othering goes so against the ethos of our psychoanalytic tribe (which claims to self the other, as opposed to other the self) and yet has become such a prominent experience in our world that many of us have put the problem of the other on a par with that of the self, a problem that lights up core values in our field and core vulnerabilities in the individual. The writers in this issue have confronted the problem from two positions, one positive, one negative. We can describe the two positions by the questions they bring up. On the positive side, what does it mean to try to know or love an other as one would know or love oneself? What does that do for the other? What does that do for the self? On the negative side, what does it mean to other a person or a group? What does that do to the other? What does that do to the self?
John Riker opens the issue with a bird’s eye view of the self/other problem from the perspective of Hegel, who sees the human animal as split between being a subject and an object. As subjects, we are “sheer openness” and feel ourselves to be infinite. As objects, we are finite mortals, formed by social and physical forces, not so much free as defined, prejudiced, limited in vision. For Hegel, the self-consciousness necessary for a human being to become a subject depends on recognition by others, leading to a futile life and death struggle through history in which one will emerge as a “master” and another as a “slave,” but in which neither is free, as neither can be fully recognized by the other. Hegel’s answer: the management of desire by a rational mind devoted to a universal ideal of mutual recognition. In an important critique, Riker argues that Hegel (and Freud for that matter) failed to take into account a tendency for the master/slave dynamic to split around core differences – of skin tone, of religion, etc. Our aggression is not random but toward “the other.” Riker finds a partial answer in Kohut’s concept of the twinship transference, which describes our fundamental human need to be in companionship with people we perceive as just like us; therein lies our tendency to experience otherness as a narcissistic blow. He begins the task of finding ways to bridge the gap – felt often as a wound – opened up by otherness.
Donna Orange struggles to understand our moment of plague and racism by immersing herself in the work of others. She finds solace in Camus’ Plague, whose author stand-in Dr. Rieux expresses his belief in “man’s health” and “doing my job.” To understand structural racisim, she turns to Wilkerson’s Caste, finding insight particularly in Wilkerson’s metaphor “of an old house full of rot in the basement and seeming to be fine upstairs.” We live in this house, even if we didn’t build it, and have an obligation to care for it; we can’t afford the status of bystander. To consider a radical ethics in this time of crisis, she turns to the work of the Talmudist phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas and to that of the Danish Lutheran philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup, both of whom argued for the primacy of the ethical obligation to the other and for a literal interpretation of “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Unlike the enlightenment ethics of Hegel and Kant, which sought to instill in humanity a reason-based loyalty to universal law, these philosophers argued that the content of our obligation to the other must be discovered each time in the context of the particular circumstances of a unique relationship. Orange argues for an experiential ethics that puts the other first in their infinite specificity. Buber’s famous I-thou relationship thus becomes a thou-I relationship.
Eyal Rozmarin draws from a feature in the Israeli legal code consigning non-displaced Palestinians the status of “present-absent,” citizens in name but who exist in a state of exception to Israeli property law. He understands this state of exception, this otherness that is also a part of things, as simultaneously “a social and a psychological constellation.” The nether realm of the unconscious exists in the mind and in the world as a state of shadowy exclusion from the law. Rozmarin sees an example that proves the rule in the status of children in Western culture. Children are present-absent in our culture in ways that go unmarked, although the status mystifies and manipulates our most vulnerable subjects.
“Just as, existentially, we are ‘always dying already,’ so too are we always already grieving.” Bob Stolorow stretches Heidegger’s ethos of authenticity away from one’s own death to the anticipatory loss of a beloved other. He proposes that this beloved other constitutes a world; to lose the other is therefore to lose the world. Stolorow takes very seriously the metaphor of the other as a world when he urges therapists facing the existential pain of a patient to engage in a kind of being-with he calls “emotional dwelling,” to live with the other within a shared horizon, however painful.
Cynthia Chalker’s elegant prose-poem-essay explores the experience of being effaced as a woman of color in the field of psychoanalysis – and elsewhere. Her story brings new meaning to Shakespeare’s famous question, “What’s in a name?” Sometimes, everything.
Also in an autobiographical mode, I discuss two meanings of the word “identity.” The first meaning involves maintaining self-continuity through time, a sameness that emerges through the putting together of stories. The second meaning involves an identification with another or a group. I explore my confrontation with these two tangled “identities” in the course of describing my development as a twin.
Influenced by the Taoist concept of nothingness, Koichi Togashi understands the self/other distinction as contingent. Had the accident of my birth been different and the events that befell me different, I could be you. Togashi advocates cultivating what he calls the “psychoanalytic zero,” an attitude that allows us to see otherness as just another prejudice, another category through which we divide the world. “‘The other,’” Togashi writes, is just “another form of ‘I.’”
Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D.
Issue Editor
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Notes on contributors
Daniel Goldin
Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D., is a training and supervising psychoanalyst practicing in South Pasadena, California. He serves as the editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and associate editor of Psychoanalysis: Self and Context and is on the faculty of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He has written many articles for a variety of publications.