Jeffrey Bloechl

forthcoming in in D. Goodman and M. Freeman (eds.), Psychology and the Other: A Dialogue at the Crossroad of an Emerging Field (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

The otherness of the other person and the otherness of God are only two features among the many found on what Bernhard Waldenfels has called the “topography of the alien”¹—of our relation to what lies outside of one’s own domain and strikes us as if external or heterogeneous. Yet we spontaneously consider them the most important, and they have probably claimed much more attention than any other figure on that field—these including the otherness of myself to myself that is integral to memory, the otherness of a future that can astonish us with the unexpected and the new, and the otherness of impulses that one would like to disavow but is powerless to suppress. Psychology may well be capable of parsing the differences between these phenomena, working along lines that are particular to its self-understanding as, for example, the science of human motivation and development (theology would certainly follow very different lines).  But it can also do so working from within the rules of the practice that it has devised in order to address, again for example, human suffering.  By “practice,” I mean of course psychotherapy.  What will be the otherness of the other person as encountered in psychotherapy?  What, if any, will distinguish it from the otherness of God?

And indeed, how will psychotherapy respond to the proposal, heard often during the treatment, that God truly exists and enters into the domain of human experience?

I.

Psychotherapy appears to begin with a banality.  The patient wants something, and in order to get it entrusts herself to the therapist.   One might think that the matter is straightforward enough: the patient enters or remains in therapy in order to express and then overcome some complaint, and in that sense would seem to respect the authority of the therapist or at any rate of the rules and the procedure.  Yet things are not often as simple as this, and soon enough one learns that at least some patients are all too willing to remain in therapy without any sign of actually working at it, and indeed that some may lose their desire for healing altogether.  This did not escape the attention of Freud, who already quite early in the development of his thinking expresses considerable doubt that the patient’s complaint is necessarily to be taken at face value.²  This observation, it seems to me, is crucial for any therapy that wishes to take seriously the full complexity of human motivation.  It also touches on a basic axiom of specifically psychoanalytical therapy, which admits the possibility that the patient herself may not know that her own complaint is disingenuous.  It hardly needs mention that Freud interprets this phenomenon as clinical verification of the existence of the unconscious, and it is well known that when in course of his metapsychological reflections on clinical experience he applies himself to the strange tendency in many patients to resist a positive conclusion of their own therapy, he is led toward the unsettling thesis of a drive that is aggressive and indeed self-destructive (in effect, something in the analysand works against the cure, and in fact against his well-being).  But rather than exploring these very difficult matters, we might instead pause over the much simpler question of what the uncertain status of the analysand’s complaint implies for the practice of the therapy itself.  In short, if one cannot be sure of the analysand’s clarity about his own intentions—if one must instead take seriously the possibility that he may not know what he wants, or perhaps cannot face its proper meaning, but in any case therefore does not necessarily speak the truth—then there is no reason to suppose that the patient will work consistently and sincerely at his own therapy.  Under such a condition, it cannot be the desire of the analysand that necessarily provides the therapy with its movement and direction.  To the contrary, it must be the desire of the therapist—or, since it is psychoanalysis that makes this claim most vigorously—it must be the desire of the analyst that allows the patient to continue.

What can this mean?  With regard to the analysand, it means that at some point, when the various conflicts invested in his symptoms and expressed in his pain are at last affected by the therapy, his desire to continue therapy will probably at least weaken for a time.  With regard to the analyst, it means understanding that an analysand’s wish to end therapy may have less to do with anything the analyst herself has said or done than with a real struggle that might well be a sign of progress.  But it also leaves the analyst with an important question: how should she respond to an analysand’s evident lack of interest in continuing the therapy, or more generally, how should she comport herself toward an analysand who resists or denies any sense that she is evidently in need of support?  It is with good reason that most analysts take great care about what they may say to an analysand, and it is not incomprehensible that some few of them argue that one ought to say as little as possible.  Yet no one will pretend that such a silence could ever be neutral or empty of significance to the analysand, and so the question of how to speak or act in a manner that best supports the continuation of the therapy is finally a matter for the judgment of the analyst.  As for what sort of ethics that might accompany the proper sort of judgment, it says only very little to observe that the analyst plainly seeks the well-being of the patient.  But we can easily make progress by reminding ourselves that strictly within the limits of the talking cure, thus leaving aside psycho-pharmaceutical intervention (which is undoubtedly necessary in many cases), a primary goal will be for the analysand to recognize and accept the causes of his own malady.  In short, it is the responsibility of the analyst to facilitate a process in which the analysand comes to terms with the truth of his condition.  And this responsibility should provide focus and definition to her desire that the analysand continue in therapy.

Of course, this is easier said than done.  To begin with, the analyst is unlikely to truly feel this

sort of concern for an analysand at all times and without qualification.  She is also unlikely to truly feel as concerned for some analysands as for others.   As a matter of plain fact, admitting these factors into the therapy would of course be tantamount to presenting oneself to the analysand as one genuinely is, in other words as a human being with his or her own wishes, aversions, interests and indeed, his or her own desire.  But to the degree that one does so, one risks signaling to the analysand that one is not entirely interested in his well- being.  With this in view, I think that Freud’s concern with the effects of “counter-transference” are motivated in part by compassion for the suffering patient: when or to the degree that the analyst suspends every expression of a desire that would not support the analysand, the analyst adopts a particular role—or as the Lacanians prefer, a “function”—in which the analyst gives the impression of desiring only or purely that the therapy continues.³

Now we need only understand that such a desire by necessity refuses to promote any hunch or preference coming from the analyst herself, to then conclude that it will likely have the effect of drawing out into the open the desire of the analysand—who, after all, would then have no other recourse than to ascribe to the analyst particular goals, wishes and knowledge that she for her part does almost nothing to confirm or deny.  In short, the pure desire is necessarily an undetermined desire, and this leaves the analysand in the position of having to determine it himself, which is to say: provide his own interpretation of it simply in order to relate himself to his analyst.  When the analysand speaks, for example, he does so in response to what he takes to be the expectations of the analyst who listens, and in the relationship between those imagined expectations and his wish to either meet or resist them he reveals some of the drama of his own desire.  In one and the same instance, the pure desire of the analyst both stabilizes the therapeutic relation and opens the field within which the desire of the patient then circulates.

More can be said about this, and I propose to do so shortly, but only after having deepened my account of these matters by way of some contrast with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas that it only appears to resemble on some key points.   So let me first summarize what I have already proposed.  Psychoanalytic therapy directs the analyst to seek the well-being of the analysand—or, according to an older notion, his happiness—but without predetermining either how the analysand should achieve it or what might finally constitute it.  In order to conduct the therapy, the analyst expresses a desire that, in its pure concern for the progress of the therapy, does not coincide with what we may expect to be her own desire outside and apart from the therapeutic relation.  In her function as analyst, she presents herself other than her human self, and indeed she as an Other who seems not to have many of the features of any human self.  If this account of the practice is accurate, then we can be certain that the analysand therefore projects onto the analyst a definition that must eventually be relinquished if the therapy is truly to bring the analysand to genuine insight into his complaint, its underlying processes, and the truth of his condition.  For if the projected, or let me say fantasied image of the analyst is inevitably an expression of the illness in which it is generated, then it is also part of the illness that one wishes to overcome.  Moreover, it is an especially deep and powerful part, since for a considerable time the analysand speaks on condition of this understanding of the analyst.  It is not without reason that dissolution of the fantasied image of the analyst is commonly associated with the end of the analysis and the achievement of happiness.⁴

II.

I have just noted that the patient’s well-being and in that sense his happiness is the aim of psychoanalytic therapy.  I have also associated the achievement of that happiness with a capacity to recognize and relate to another person as she truly is, which is to say in her unique personhood.  It is at this simple level that one may be tempted to forge a rapprochement with the philosophy of Levinas. One might think that only a few adjustments are in order, and that these are a matter only of terminological differences: with a bow to Hegel and Sartre, Levinas generally approaches the uniqueness of another human being in terms of the otherness of the Other person; and working in a deeply religious register, he often prefers to define our respect for that otherness by “holiness” rather than “happiness” or “well-being.”  Finally, one might even expect some added clarity from Levinas’s celebrated notion that the face of the other person both reveals her uniqueness and calls the subject to greater holiness.  To this it could be added, as if by way of confirmation, that in accordance with the rules of at least some Lacanian analysis the human face of the analyst, strictly in her function as analyst, remains out of sight of the analysand (the thought being that the analysis ends—and a relation with the real other person begins—when the analysand truly sees the face of the analyst).

Yet on closer inspection, Levinas’s conception of ethical responsibility can hardly prove amenable to the concerns that must preoccupy a psychoanalyst.  Moving quickly from a claim that the other person is absolutely other with respect to the subjectivity of the subject, on to argue that the subject is therefore always already responding to the other person, Levinas takes responsibility to be radical, which is to say the very definition of our being.  The subject, he says, is for-the-other all the way to being responsible for the very responsibility of the other.⁵  The face of the other awakens the subject to this responsibility, and unless one fully accedes to it one is guilty of disrespect and suppression.  This is already enough to raise considerable doubt about the degree to which these proposals truly speak to the experience of psychoanalysis.  At best, they seem to preempt serious attention to the fact that a patient frequently does not know what he wants and sometimes desperately wants things that he ought not be given.  Of course, one might still contend that whatever the analyst offers or withholds, she always acts in response to the absolute otherness of the suffering other who is the analysand.  But either this is only hyperbole (this is Ricoeur’s word), or at last it underlines an essential point: the analyst only facilitates a passage to well-being that the analysand must make on his or her own.  While the analyst may perhaps recognize in the face of her patient an otherness that is irreducible to anything she finds within herself, still that otherness does not itself stand over her as if it were some external law or criterion for her actions (and about this, Levinas is quite clear: the face of the other commands me from on high with “the Mastery of the Master”⁶).  This is true even strictly within the limits of the therapy.  It is not that the analyst does everything for the other person who is the analysand, but only that everything she does is aimed at helping the patient find a means to take care of himself.

This is a difference that truly matters, since it directs us to ask just what one would hope transpires in the life of the other person—the analysand–in need of help.  In truth, Levinas has not often applied himself to this sort of question (does not often ask about the response of the other in need), but nothing prevents us from supposing that he would expect the analysand who is not only an other person but also of course a subject to respond to the analyst precisely as an Other.  Could therapy help the analysand to reach what Levinas understands by ethical subjectivity?  Let me rehearse some of what this would entail.  According to Levinas, the call to responsibility for the other person is a call to reverse all self-interest in lesser goods into a desire to serve the other person.  This is not a conversion so much as an awakening, for the face is not the arrival of the other person into our world as if literally from some other territory, but the announcement of his presence already before we caught sight of him.  If the other person is thus “the first one on the scene,”⁷ each of us, as a subject, has always already been responding to the others, though often enough we forget or deny that fact. And so for Levinas the face of the other person can offer us an important insight into our own condition: we are always already in relation with the others even as we begin to take care of ourselves. Would caring for oneself already presuppose but suspend care for my neighbor?  If so, then the free choice to be one-for-the-other would represent not only a commitment to some good thought to be higher than those that serve one’s own self-interest, but also the realization of our authentic humanity.

If psychoanalytic therapy is to support these results in a patient, everything depends on an assimilation of the function of the analyst-as-Other with what Levinas has described as the Other as stranger.  Let us not insist on the appearance or non-appearance of the face of the analyst, and instead ask whether his function does not imply an otherness that approximates that of the Levinasian stranger.  If we accept the Lacanian proposal that an analyst should, in as much as possible, express only his desire that the analysis should continue, and should also severely restrict any indication of precisely how he thinks the analysis should go, then indeed the patient finds herself confronted with someone whose identity, at least for the purposes of the therapy, is known almost exclusively through the expression of a persistent and only barely defined desire.  The analysand does not know what the analyst wants, and the question of the analyst’s desire hangs over everything that the analysand says and does in the therapy.  That desire, moreover, cannot be exhausted by anything that the analysand may say during the therapy—that is anything the analysand may say in response to the analyst’s simple and constant expectation that he try to commit his every urge, feeling, and thought to speech.  In that sense, the desire of the analyst seems impossible to satisfy except by simply remaining present in the relationship.  It should be evident, then, that, at least for a considerable amount of time, the analysand’s commitment to remaining in the therapy is fundamentally a commitment to the desire of the analyst.  Lacan’s famous che vuoi?—what do you want?—may well be posed to the patient himself as he enters therapy, but it is undoubtedly also something that the analysand wants to know of the analyst.

What determines the desire of Levinas’s ethical subject?: the other desire of the stranger, whose need exceeds any qualification.  What determines the desire of the analysand?: the other desire of the analyst, which she refuses to qualify in any specific way.  These are not the same thing.  To the contrary, precisely what the Levinasian ethics forbids the responsible subject—any specification of what the other person may in fact call for—the practice of psychoanalytic therapy seems to virtually necessitate.  The analysand cannot not act on some assumed understanding of what the analyst wants. As we have already observed, it is more than possible that a great deal of early work in the analysand will take place according to that projected, or fantasied understanding.  And this is work in no small part because that understanding is given little to know support by the analyst himself.  Under those conditions, the therapy seems bound to serve expectations that, for their part, are ever in need of confirmation, shoring up, and so forth.

Earlier, I invoked a sense in which the desire of the analyst—expressed, but undefined—opened

a stable field in which the desire of the analysand can circulate in therapy.  At this point, it is possible

to see that that field receives definite shape from the analysand’s own desire, as it projects on to the analyst, as Other, expectations by which the analysand can in turn navigate their relationship (and by which she may even understand herself).  The psychoanalytic conception of this phenomenon is so well known that a summary will suffice for present purposes: the subjectivity of the subject results from the impact of the parents’ desire that brought him into being.  And it is the imprint of this Other desire, the desire of the parents, that is brought forth to define the otherwise undefined desire of the Other who is the analyst.  In other words, the function of the analyst consists in assuming the place of an Other that has asserted itself from within the life of the subject since long before therapy began, and indeed from a depth such that subjectivity itself is constituted in the process of dealing with it. The psychoanalysts would have us say, then—and this is something Levinas would have the greatest difficulty accepting—the Other who the analyst becomes for the patient is only the placeholder and the provocation by which to bring forth the true Other that has hitherto governed the patient’s life from a level that must be prior to any attempt to relate oneself to one’s fellow human beings—and this for the simple reason that it is prior to the very formulation of a discrete and stable self.⁸  With this in view, it becomes clear that the relative silence of the analyst is essential to the working of the therapy which, moreover, is in no small part of journey of self-knowledge. Whenever, or to the degree that, the analyst refuses to verify the analysand’s conception of what the analyst herself wants of him, the analysand comes closer to recognizing that throughout the analysis, he has, without realizing it, followed a pattern that has been determined largely according to the inner disposition of his own psyche.

III.

At this same juncture, psychoanalysis suggests something of much greater importance for ethics than anything that can be witnessed in the deontology of its practice.  It cannot have escaped notice that the refusal of the analyst to support or oppose the direction of the analysand’s desire comes down to a refusal to present that desire with an external limit.  Needless to say, that same analyst should be far from giving the impression that the analysand does not have to contend with any number of objective limits in everyday life, whether in the form of social norms or civil laws.  So let us be precise about this: these very real limits are bound to come up during the analysis, but only as the analysand himself recognizes them as cause for frustration, anxiety, and so forth.  If the analyst neither enforces nor challenges them, the analysand has no other recourse than to define his own relation to them.  In this sense, psychoanalysis, in its very practice, requires the analysand to seek a criterion or rule for limiting his desire entirely within himself.  Again, there are any number of objective limits for him to contend with in this world, but at the end of the day it is he who must decide whether, why and how to submit to them.  And to be sure, there is plenty in the analysand—in any of us—that urges against accepting any such limits.  To a considerable degree, what there is for the analysand to learn about himself in analysis will come down to recognizing and admitting precisely these impulses, which are bound to have attracted every stratagem of repression. But of course, even having come that far, and still left to define for himself the relation of impulses that want only to enjoy with the limits that civilization imposes on them, the analysand can hardly be expected to simply submit or adapt.  To the contrary, adaptation, such as it is, will be undertaken precisely in the service of becoming capable of the greatest sustainable enjoyment.

All of this situates psychoanalysis at the antipodes—some would say in the aftermath—of any claim for a natural ground of law and limit.  Its general tendency to eudaimonism notwithstanding, Freudian thought has clearly broken with the cosmology and metaphysics that support the classical view of, primarily, Aristotle.⁹  The happiness sought in analysis would not elevate the soul but, as I have just put it, enhance the real chances of enjoyment.¹⁰  This also opposes the conception of ethical responsibility defended by Levinas.  The ethics informed by psychoanalysis would still find good reason to respect and even serve the needs of an other person, but ultimately as something that the other person must be helped to manage on his own.  Of course, this in fact has been precisely what the analysis is to have accomplished for the analysand.  Thus informed by the process of the analysis, the analysand is capable of an elevated degree of self-responsibility, and while there is no reason to suppose that that self-responsibility would rule out responsibility for the other person, it seems evident that responsibility for the other cannot be strictly radical, such as Levinas has contended.  It should also be evident, from this perspective, that the otherness of the other person cannot be absolute, though this is not necessarily to say that it is therefore of only secondary importance.  After

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all, an other person, and sometimes even many other people, can be of utmost value to me in my attempt to live well.

 This, finally, is also the basis from which psychoanalysis defines its position on the matter of that other other who may appear in therapy: God (I leave aside the question of the God brought into the speculative texts: Freud’s theoretical writings on religion are regrettable).  If one pursues happiness through the acceptance of an internal limit for desire, then the good that this involves—what one would seek as the highest good—is not, properly speaking, absolute.  Naturally, one might well continue to speak of what is “absolutely good for me,” but this particular absolute is evidently not wholly beyond my being according to the sense of the absolute that is privileged by the classical tradition.  To the contrary, it is inscribed in me as that which only I–as I, as this one person—seek beyond the range of what I can possess or consume.  To define one’s own relation to one’s desire and its objective limits is not only to take up and embrace an internal limit for desire; it is also to take up and embrace a particular good that one elevates to the status of the absolute.  What Bruce Fink has sometimes called “subjectification,”¹¹ the process by which the analysand accepts an internal limit for impulses urging against any limit, is at the same time a process by which she commits herself to a particular absolute.  And this is not God.  Or better, it is “God” only as the name or placeholder for the possibility of achieving the greatest sustainable enjoyment.

In his latest texts, Levinas, if I may invoke Levinas one more time, emerges as the most determined advocate of a God who cannot be submitted to even the least vestige of this investment by a subject.  Totality and Infinity had already argued that the desire by which a subject cares for the other person before he cares for himself is precisely not a desire that possesses.  A decade later, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence insists that the being who becomes for-the-other purifies his desire of any concupiscence—and attributes its very possibility to an ordering of subjects to one another that bespeaks a principle that merits the name “God.”  “God,” in short, is a name for the fact that we are bound together already before and outside of any movement to possess one another; we bear witness to this God in the ascent of a desire that reverses self-love into unlimited responsibility. This conception of God makes ethics converge with doxology: it is to the glory of God that one of us can put the other radically before himself.  But this also entails a profound refusal of any investment in the God by whom responsibility is possible.  For Levinas, God is not God unless God is anterior to any

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movement to invest or possess.  It is in earnest when he refers to God as an enigma, for this would be a God who somehow speaks in us “without us counting on any god.”¹²  Now the God we cannot count on would be a God who may truly exist—psychoanalysis need not and perhaps ought not pass judgment on such a question—but His appearance in the analysis must certainly represent an element that refuses or escapes what Fink would have us call “subjectification.”  It is probably not unheard of that an analysand might claim that her love of an other person, perhaps even the analyst, is only in fidelity to the one true God, and thus that her love is at the same time an expression of piety.  But it would be extraordinary indeed if analysis were to simply validate that claim without providing some means for her to eventually to ask herself if she might have some stake in taking this view.

Of course, and I have already suggested, this does not mean that psychoanalysis proves that there is no God.  The therapy championed by Freud and his school overflows its own limits when it prompts theological pronouncements.  What it certainly can make us consider with utmost care, and whether it is a matter of ethics or religion, is any sense in which the one who we experience as Other is nonetheless, at some deep level, very much in agreement with the satisfaction of needs that are entirely our own.  None of this is to say that one must undergo psychoanalysis in order to have a clear and healthy faith.  To be put on warning against the dangers of an unreflective and solitary conception of God is only to be reminded that one speaks to God, in the fullest sense, only in community with others.

Notes

• Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997).
• Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1901), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth, 1963), ed. J. Strachey, et.al., vol. VII, pp. 43-44.
• Freud speaks in these terms in “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis” (1912), in Standard Edition, vol. XII, especially pp. 116ff. Here again, principle would appear to be born from practical experience. A few years prior to offering this advice, Freud had mentioned in his account of the “Rat Man” that he found it necessary to accept his patient’s self-imposed guilt even while strongly under the impression that it was displaced.  Standard Edition, vol. X, pp. 175-176.
• Lacan associates the ethics of psychoanalysis with this broadly eudaimonistic search for happiness on several occasions during his seminar on ethics. See, e.g., J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), pp. 300-301.
• Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 84. I will leave aside the fact that this comes close to a definition of psychosis.  Levinas accepts the term willingly (e.g., pp.  50, 142, 191 note 3).
• Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne university Press, 1969), p. 101.
• Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, p. 87.
• In truth, Levinas’s few statements concerning psychoanalysis are only quite general, and often qualified by a profession to have remained largely ignorant of Freudian thought. His stated reservations are not unexpected. Enforcement of the Oedipus complex, for example, is thought to be an enticement to paganism.  Levinas, “Leçon talmudique. Sur la justice,” in Emmanuel Levinas (Paris : L’Herne, 1991) : no. 60, p. 133.
• My appreciation of this point is indebted to P. Moyaert, Ethiek en Sublimatie. Over de “Ethiek van Psychanalyse” van Jacques Lacan (Nijmegen: SUN, 1994), pp. 86-90.
• This, I think, would be how to understand the plainly ethical thrust of Lacan’s question for the analysand: “Have you given ground in relation to your desire?” Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 319 (translation modified).
• Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 215-216. ¹² E. Levinas, p. 154. Lingis faithfully translates Levinas’s lower-case “aucun dieu” as “any god.”  For Levinas, the god on whom we can count would be a god who is immanent, which is to say not God at all.