The Ethical Turn

Otherness and Subjectivity in Contemporary Psychoanalysis

David M. Goodman, Eric R. Severson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317605225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Levinas (1969) claims that "morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy" and if he is right about this, might ethics also serve as a first psychology? This possibility is explored by the authors in this volume who seek to bring the "ethical turn" into the world of psychoanalysis. This phenomenologically rich and socially conscious ethics has taken centre stage in a variety of academic disciplines, inspired by the work of philosophers and theologians concerned with the moral fabric of subjectivity, human relationship, and socio-political life. At the heart of this movement is a reconsideration of the other person, and the dangers created when the question of the "Other" is subsumed by grander themes.

The authors showcased here represent the exceptional work being done by both scholars and practitioners working at the crossroads between psychology and philosophy in order to rethink the foundations of their disciplines. The Ethical Turn: Otherness and subjectivity in contemporary psychoanalysis guides readers into the heart of this fresh and exciting movement and includes contributions from many leading thinkers, who provide fascinating new avenues for enriching our responses to suffering and understandings of human identity. It will be of use to psychoanalysts, professionals in psychology, postgraduate students, professors and other academics in the field.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Ethics as first psychology

David M. Goodman and Eric R. Severson

According to Elie Wiesel, “Madness is the result not of uncertainty, but certainty” (Wiesel, 1992). Thought does not begin with knowledge. Knowing and understanding arise from exchange, address, and a person in front of me – always saturated with the ethical. Said differently, it is our very boundedness to one another, our vulnerability of living in this world as fleshly and small, and the calling and address made by one another’s vulnerabilities that are the starting points of rationality, personhood, and subjectivity. Emmanuel Levinas makes the assertion that ethics precedes ontology and that “ethics is first philosophy” (Levinas, 1989). We begin with the encounter and then theory, systems, and ontological paradigms stagger forward into words, definitions, and institutions. This is a radical notion, which upsets knowledge claims and foundational rubrics that frequently guide conceptualizations about the human subject. It is this type of assertion, one among many, that has fueled an ethical turn in the humanities during the second half of the 20th century. A phenomenologically rich and socially conscious ethics has taken center stage in a variety of academic disciplines, inspired by the work of philosophers and theologians concerned with the moral fabric of subjectivity, human relationships, and socio-political life.

Throughout the modern era, and particularly since the enlightenment, the Western idea of the “self” has leaned heavily on autonomy, self-sufficiency, and individualism. This masterfully bounded and rationally consolidated self has lost significant ground in the second half of the 20th century (Cushman, 1995; Cushman & Gilford, 1999).¹ Problematic on many levels – political, social, economic, religious, familial, and psychological – this hegemonic paradigm has been unsettled by new paradigms of intersubjectivity, social constructivism, hermeneutical theory, gender studies, and ethical phenomenology which have forced a more sophisticated approach to understanding the self’s origins – origins that are inescapably bounded to Others (Butler, 2005), always and inevitably ethical. Though called by many different names, this recognition is at the heart of the ethical turn that has impacted a variety of academic disciplines.

A “turn” implies unresolved transition – a movement that has not yet reached a destination, yet also cannot return to the security of its origin. A “turn” of any sort moves both toward and away from something. The ethical turn is a movement away from a situation that has dominated the history of thinking, across the disciplines, across the centuries. From the earliest stirrings of philosophy, ethicists have derived the principles of morality from grander principles and universal paradigms. Ethics has been secondary, and rarely primary, for philosophy. Thinkers such as Levinas express considerable concern about the ways that the relation to the other person has, therefore, always been conditioned by larger frameworks of philosophical ideas. Propositions, abstractions, conceptualizations, and detached inquiry become foundations for truth and morality. They are several steps removed, distant and untouched by the ethical imperatives resident in sensate encounter. Levinas goes so far as to link this paradigmatic propensity to the Shoah (Levinas, 1982).

In the ethical turn, however, philosophy has moved toward relation to the other person as an origin point from which notions and conceptualizations emerge. It is from the encounter in the face-to-face relation with the particular other, the one who is before me, that philosophy has its origins. Theories and systems take shape in the wake of this encounter; they are not the origin of philosophy but the efforts of philosophers to come to grips with a responsibility that begins before thinking has initiated (Levinas, 1998). Hannah Arendt (1998) directed attention to political theory, for instance, pointing out the great distance between the grand notions of the human condition and the lived experience of human beings. She wrote: “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (p. 7). Arendt points to the experiences of a person in the singular, and demonstrates the abstractions and complications that arise when the encounter with the singular other is conditioned by political theories. The ethical turn is not a matter of positioning some theory of ethics at the forefront of philosophy; this movement is about the primacy of the suffering other. It is a turn toward the one who sufferings, along with the awareness that this suffering calls into question any philosophical framework that might make sense of it.

As philosophy re-directs itself to examine and question these foundations for the relation to the other person, a similar awakening has taken place in other disciplines. There is a lot more to this “turn” – more history, nuance, and diversity – than we can touch upon here. In this volume our concern lies with the impact of the ethical turn upon mental health disciplines, psychoanalysis more specifically. Psychology, psychiatry, and social work have had a complex relationship to the ethical turn. On the one hand, no professions are ostensibly more concerned with the dynamics of interpersonal relationships than these. On the other hand, mental health disciplines have longstanding commitments to grand psychological theories and philosophies of science that problematize Levinas’s contention that “ethics is first philosophy.” The literature on “evidence-based practice” is illustrative of the many entanglements that prevent a dimensional ethics from serving as the starting point of clinical formulations and decision-making (Hoffman, 2009; Wachtel, 2010, 2014). Ethics remains a consideration for mental health practitioners, but for the most part this simply means concern about professional liabilities, accreditation, and a discipline’s reputation [i.e., procedural ethics] (Birrell, 2006; Brown, 1997). There are occasional forays into eruptive moral issues, such as the involvement of psychologists in torture practices (Soldz, 2010). Yet for the most part, the ethical turn we are describing goes beyond these understandings, and threatens the stability of a system that requires practitioners to be first and foremost scientists, clinicians, or evidence-informed technicians. The proximity of mental health practice to the medical community further complicates any turn toward fundamental ethics. Allured by the placements, appointments, titles, funding, and legitimizations inherent in medicine, the mental health disciplines have often been seduced by its metrics and forms of epistemological authority. However, inasmuch as psychology conforms to a medical model, it is pushed toward quantification, diagnosis, and generalization, and away from the unique encounter with the other person (Conrad, 2007). So while the mental health professions seem poised to participate in the ethical turn, there has not been much epistemological or practical space to allow a substantive response to this movement.

Ethics has, however, made something of a comeback in particular quarters of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The rise of attachment and mentalization research, neuroscientific emphasis on our “social” brains, and the “relational turn” in several dominant theoretical models have all contributed to an emphasis on moral considerations in human identity, development, and relationships. Relationality has become the occasion for ethics to be considered anew.

This volume provides a granulated analysis of this burgeoning trend in psychoanalysis, and the conceptual lineage that contributed to its formation.

The ethical turn in psychoanalysis: three dimensions

What created the ethical turn in psychoanalysis and what was the “clearing” that allowed it to take shape? The relational turn surely laid the foundation for the ethical turn (Mitchell & Aron, 1999; Corpt, this volume; Orange, 2010, 2011), but there is more to it than that. There are, no doubt, widely diverse entry points and angles from which to approach the turn to ethics within the psychoanalytic tradition. We propose that there are three cross-pollinating dimensions, which we will name and briefly describe. The main braids that interweave include: (1) attachment, mentalization, and evolutionary biological research (e.g., Bowlby, Bucci, Fonagy, Slavin, Target), (2) scholarship related to critical theory and political positioning (e.g., Benjamin, Dimen, Harris, Layton), and (3) phenomenological, hermeneutical, social constructionist, and dialogical literatures (e.g., Butler, Cushman, Foehl, Gergen, Hoffman, Orange, Stern, Saporta, Summers). These three strands do not serve to demarcate separate aspects of this ethical turn as much as demonstrate a diverse set of tributaries feeding into this conversation. Each brings a different angle, unique voices, and a possibility of new ethical insights emergent from human boundedness.

The inextricable field of two: neuroscience, attachment, and the social bond

The ethical turn points, unrelentingly, to the encounter with the specific other. This movement has also been known as the “relational” turn in psychoanalysis because it has directed attention to the central role of relationality in psychoanalytic approaches. We have come to realize that we are biologically, anatomically, and developmentally structured in such a way that ties us to one another. This realization is reflected by trending emphases on the dynamics of attachment, mentalization research, infant-caretaker studies, and neuroscientific principles regarding our “social” brains. We are not rational beings, first and foremost. We are beings whose psyches are shaped and linked to the maintenance of connection, love, recognition, and attachment (Brandchaft, Doctors, & Sorter, 2010; Brandchaft, 2007; Stolorow, Atwood, & Brandchaft, 1994). These needs frame the very shape of moral subjectivity. Rather than a collection of drives pressing for discharge, as Freud might have it, we are first of all creatures in relation. Relationality precedes rationality, drives, and passions. It frames them and gives them the meaning that they come to have (Mitchell, 1988). The implication, then, is that morality and ethics are defined through notions of empathic response, our ability to recognize others’ cognitive and emotional states (mentalization), and the formation of developmental pathways that lead to or away from integrative and open responsiveness to the world around us.

These discourses are enticing and exciting because they provide new and credible ways of thinking about the intersubjective realm. These avenues are also sexy from both political and academic standpoints, because they can be legitimized by research and by apparent connections to science. Beautiful and compelling claims can be made about the ways we are bound together, socially constituted by a relational dynamic that is easily overlooked in atomistic culture (Frie & Orange, 2009). By leaning on research, this avenue of psychoanalytic development tends to point toward developmental processes and hard-wired psychological tendencies. Rendering the relational turn in scientific terminology has the added benefit of maintaining contact with the language and culture familiar to the discipline of neuroscience, along with all the funding, reimbursement, and credibility privileges this entails.

Jessica Benjamin (1988) has presented a striking and compelling rendition of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as it relates to gender norms and caretaking practices. She then uses neuroscientific findings and affective research to show how these insights are verified in evolutionary principles. Through poetry, literary references, dream interpretations, and gorgeous case studies, Philip Bromberg (2006) walks us through the multiplicity and complex range of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Then, the “open” circuitry of infant brains and core attributes of mentalizing frameworks are invoked to legitimize such insights (see also Baraitser, 2008).

These examples, however, underscore a clear problem: before ethical and relational insights can impact the discipline of psychoanalysis, they must first make solid contact with some ontological, naturalistic, or scientific foundation. This problem has severely hamstrung developments in the ethical turn in psychoanalysis, for we are left with the impression that ethics remains second psychology. The beautiful claims about sociality, boundedness, and connectedness must first be established on the basis of a developmental theory, or some hardwiring of the human psyche. If we are to think of ethics as first psychology, it will be necessary to suspend the requirement that all findings be restricted to that which can be legitimized by ontology and science.

We are implicated: political positioning, definitional violence, and disavowed otherness

Roger Frie and Donna Orange (2009), in their edited book Beyond Postmodernism: New Dimensions in Clinical Theory and Practice, chronicle the many ways that the relational schools of thought have taken on a version of deconstructionism and critical theory inspired by philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Through these thinkers, along with the influences of feminist, multicultural, and postcolonial movements, the psychoanalytic community has found its way into a deep awareness of the ethical and political significance of culture, class, race, sexual preference, gender identification, and a variety of practices that “position” the subject in an oppressive manner (both within the consulting room and in larger social contexts; Altman, 2010; Aron & Starr, 2013; Benjamin, 1988; Cushman, 1995; Dimen, 2011; Grand, 2009; Harris & Botticelli, 2010; Layton, 2009). Furthermore, this group of psychoanalysts has grown concerned with its own historical trends and preoccupations. A growing awareness has emerged of implicitly sexist theoretical claims, ethnocentrism, and even some of the problematic ways that psychoanalysis took shape out of a traumatized, post-holocaust Europe (Aron & Starr, 2013; Aron, this volume).

More broadly, psychoanalysis has become more ethically attuned because of its growing awareness of our inescapable implication in the suffering of others – whether our shared buy-in to neoliberalism (Layton, 2009, 2015), our definitions of masculinity and femininity (Harris, 2008), the limits of our language and imposition of ideologies in the consulting room, and so forth. We are all caught in what Lynne Layton (2015) describes as “normative unconscious processes” that drive our theories, our definitions, our clinical practices, and our values. We are inevitably ethical agents in such a world, though there is no guarantee we are operating ethically. Each person is a subject already caught in power structures, already situated in history and its political tangles. Michael Foucault, Judith Butler, members of the Frankfurt school, and a variety of other thinkers are frequently invoked to advance this trend in the discipline. Ethics, then, becomes about interrupting the motions of normative life and calling into question the ways that one’s subjectivity, practices, and commitments uphold the status quo.

We see here the fingerprints of critical theory, feminist writings, multiculturalism, social constructionism, and the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Ethical Turn
• Relational Perspectives Book Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Ethics as First Psychology
• 2 Mutual Vulnerability: An Ethic of Clinical Practice
• 3 Kissing Disciplines, Relational Architecture
• 4 Is Ethics Masochism? or Infinite Ethical Responsibility and Finite Human Capacity
• 5 Yale or Jail: Class Struggles in Neoliberal Times
• 6 Psychoanalysis in Neoliberal Times – A Renewed Dialogue with Madness: Response to Lynne Layton
• 7 The Complications of Caring and the Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis
• 8 “Screams and Shouts”: Trauma, Uncertainty, and the Ethical Turn
• 9 Can one Still be a Jew without Sartre? Levinas, Jewish Education, and the Crisis of Humanism
• 10 A Wandering Jew with or without Sartre: Discussion of Clairre Katz’s “Can one Still be a Jew without Sartre?”
• 11 The Witnessing Gaze Turned Inward: My Jewish History as the Forgotten Other
• 12 Gender and the Jew: The Other Within
• 13 Trauma, Jews, and gender – how they are transmitted, imagined, and reconceived: response to Judith Alpert and Jill Salberg
• 14 Beyond Betrayal: On Responsibility in Heidegger, Loewald, and Levinas
• 15 Changing the Subject by Addressing the Other: Mikhail Bakhtin and Psychoanalytic Therapy
• 16 I Got Grand Things in me and America won’t let me Give Nothing: Constructing and Resisting a Standard American Identity
• 17 Creativity and Hospitality: Negotiating who or what is known in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
• 18 The Disabled: The Most Othered Others
• 19 What Fascinates: Re-Reading Winnicott Reading Blanchot
• Index