Episode 48: The Other Side of Symmetry

I don't need, for example, if you're sitting homeless outside my building in New York and I bring you a sandwich. I don't need you to say thank you. I don't. You might do it. Derrida has written a lot about this. A gift that includes a demand for reciprocity is not a gift. It's not a gift. Grace, we've been doing this for two years. Two years of your life. I have never seen a guy tell a woman that she is dumb thought to myself, "Wow, they must really be in love." And he keeps telling me how grady as well I saw him. He's not that great. His muscles are too big. His shirts are too tight. Nobody likes that. It's gross. And what's the word? What's that word? What's the word? I don't know. Where are you talking about? Fugley. He's a fugly, fugly man, fugly inside and out. I am sorry. I don't know what's happening because I was talking to him. Grace? Your husband is emotionally abusive. He's not working on him. He doesn't intend to. He's made you think it's all you deserve. It's not. Just fucking leave him. It's not that easy. It is that easy. You don't have any kids. Just go to your sisters in Vancouver. Leave him on. I'm done being your therapist. Okay. I'm John Totten, and this is between us. Hi, John. Hi. Yes, hello. I'm glad to meet you. Good to meet you too. I started listening to your conversation with Karen Marota. And of course, you came highly recommended by Lynn Jacob, so I decided. But the other thing you did is you interviewed Lane Gerber, who in my view is a saint. I absolutely love that man, and I'm so sorry to have missed his passing from us. He's a real loss. You couldn't have started off with a more warm association. I've been to Seattle a couple of times to teach and within the last 10, 15 years. When I was there in 1978 to '82, I was teaching philosophy at Seattle. After that, I went back to graduate school and studied clinical psychology. But I have this astonishing memory of one of the times I was in Seattle in more recent years. He and his wife invited me to their home for Shabbos meal, and it was really an amazing experience. Wow. I just kind of had a sense. He was my therapist for 13 years. That's how you are connected. It's not an academic connection. I met with him in that little tiny office at the right of his front door on Lake Washington. I've been in there. Yeah. He showed it to me and the view of Washington, of course, from their houses is wonderful. But when I met with Lynn, we connected over the experience, being very different, hers being sudden and mine being much more prepared to lose a therapist. Her experience with Daphne and my experience with Lane, but we went 13 years and ended not even a year ago in February, and then he passed in May. Oh, this is a recent loss for you, really, in double loss. Oh. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, you don't have to answer this question, of course. I'm happy to. Did you end with him because you knew he was sick or dying? I think we had a tacit agreement, not to really address the severity of it, which felt right. I feel like, because his first diagnosis was a couple of years prior to passing. And I felt like we were stubborn for each other. We persisted through some hard treatments that he was going through. And I had kind of said, I'm not going to fire him. He's going to have to fire me. And I think he might have been saying the same thing. The last time I saw him was February 29, 2020, the first day of COVID when COVID was discovered in Seattle, that I was there that day, I was teaching all day. And I believe that he and I and somebody else that I can't recall had dinner that night. The irony might be that your last time seeing him face to face might have been around my last time seeing him face to face because we transitioned to the phone. And then by the time COVID was starting to get more manageable, he was in treatment. Yeah. When he was in treatment, some of our sessions, they could be rough. And I was fine with that. I felt like this is the nature of our relationship it was changing. And because of our dual relationship of being colleagues and practitioner and patient, I felt even more okay with it. Because you know, you see each other at conferences, you have shared colleagues. I didn't feel weird about it. But the gift that he really gave me and I described this to Lynn when I talked to her is that when he came to our last session on the phone, he was more lucid than I had seen him in years. And I wonder if he was like mustering it. I was shocked that he passed in May because of that last session being so alive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But what a gift. Wow. It sounds trivial to say this, but I'm sorry for your loss. Thank you. And I'm envious that you had this work with him. I feel like I do have something to envy like I feel very lucky. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very special person. And I think you know that better than I do probably. It's so nice to talk to people who know that. And this is maybe not what we're here to talk about, but. I went to Pasadena to interview Lynn Jacobs in October of 2023. The attacks by Palestinian leadership group Hamas against Israeli civilians had just happened and the Israeli response was beginning. I was still in a days of having conversations with my leftist friends in which the violence was talked about as necessary political action. And I could see my Jewish friends and colleagues beginning to exit that dialogue. As a mutual dialogue shut down into a locked in doubling down of stances, I noticed similar dynamics taking place in my professional spaces. Those who saw their work as political locked in to supporting the oppressed Palestinian people and identifying Israel with colonial imperialist forces. And frankly, many of those who identified as Jewish or who were too intimidated by the dialogue locked in to not talking about it at all. In several conversations I had, the word unsafe was used to describe the discourse. Now it's my opinion that discourse is rarely unsafe, but I do often find it exhausting. In our previous conversation with British existentialist Mick Cooper, we discussed what I thought of as a tangential question. The idea of differences between Martin Boober and Emmanuel Levinos. The comparison came up again in my interview with Lynn Jacobs. She and I seemed to agree that we preferred a barbarian stance, but that many people we respect might have other opinions, including today's guest. For those who are uninitiated, let me try and give you a bit of a primer. Martin Boober wasn't a psychoanalyst. He was an Austrian Jewish theologian who has greatly influenced the field of humanistic psychology. His concepts revolve around a life of dialogue and a relational stance. He taught that humankind has two ways of relating. The eye-it stance in which we encounter people and things in abstraction that live as representations in our minds, and the eye-dow stance in which we encounter each other in mutual dialogue, where we are allowed to be authentically ourselves. He believed that we also experienced the divine when relating through this stance. Emmanuel Levinos, on the other hand, was a Lithuanian-born French-Jewish philosopher whose work centered around ethical stance and the importance of the other with a capital O. The stance he promoted contrasts with Boobers and that it is purposefully hierarchical, placing the other as more important than the self. Both of these men were Zionists, although what that meant to each of them and in the mid-century does not have the connotation that it does today. Buber's vision of Zionism was maybe a naive one, but altruistic. At the very least it was consistent with his own concepts. He dreamed of a peaceful, bicultural holy land consisting of a federation of Jewish and Arab states. As we'll discuss later, Levinoss' form of Zionism was less consistent with his philosophies. Both of these philosophers are important to a niche of applied psychology that we highlight very much on this show, Inter-subjective psychoanalysis. They had a lot of respect for each other and their differences were minor, but the kind of differences that lines might get drawn along in my field. When I've seen community mental health clinicians who bend over backwards to take care of their patients, at their own expense, I self-righteously think of Levinoss, myself firmly a legion to Buber. There's a story of a famous psychoanalyst, Heinz Cohet, who we've discussed on the show before. When a patient told him about getting pulled over for speeding on his way to the session, Cohet said, "You are a complete idiot." You see, that's kind of me. I know if I said that phrase, it would be from a place of concern, but I might say it. That doesn't mean I'm not open to being wrong about that level of authenticity. If I'm going to reconsider my commitment to compassionate authenticity and mutuality, the idea that my subjectivity is just as important as yours, today's guess is probably the one to get me to reconsider it. And our next three episodes will talk a lot about our ethical stance as practitioners. In particular, in relation to violence, trauma, and the violence and trauma happening in the Middle East right now. As our production has gone on through the emergence of what academics are calling an ensuing genocide, and I use the word ensuing because it's almost always a designation determined in retrospect, I've become more shocked at the shutdown of dialogue. This commentary is one of the final things I'm recording for this season, and I'll say this, as Mason and our guests have joined me, as I slog through a reconsideration of mutuality and its benefits, I'm still in shock that our dialogue is either missing or lacking Jessica Benjamin's concept of mutual recognition. That as peers we have a hard time on this topic, recognizing the injuries of others, whether or not those injuries be equal in size, and I know they often aren't. While it may be a limited concept in different contexts, as therapists it seems like we should be able to engage in mutual dialogue. But I'm being wooed by different perspectives. The perspective that the ethical stance is one that relinquishes my own need to be recognized. Our guests today did more to convince me than anyone I've spoken to, and ultimately what you'll hear as you listen to this episode is me coming to a place where I believe both are necessary. Donna Orange is a foundational theorist and writer in the field of inter-subjective psychoanalysis. A philosopher practitioner, her career is expansive and spans a broad spectrum of topics, from trauma to epistemology, but she has most notably carved out her place as the ethical backbone of the contemporary psychoanalytic body. These days, however, she spends most of her time volunteering and taking part in the leadership of her retirement community in California, and she was kind enough to take a break from retirement to discuss with me ethical stance and our favorite philosophers, as well as our favorite mutual important person, Lane Gerber. I think that maybe you're from the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, I was born in Port Angeles, Washington. My father was in the merchant marine at that time during World War II, and that's where they would let him off for a couple of weeks while I was being born in a hospital there, and that's why I was born there. There has to be a connection between being from the Olympic Peninsula and your interest. I'm sure. I've not spent a lot of time during my life in the Olympic Peninsula that I've looked longingly at those mountains, and I'd like to spend more time there, but anyway, quick biography, I'm the oldest of 10 children, born to very disturbed parents, both of them. That probably is what primed me for the work. I'm very used to looking after people who are disturbed, who are hurt, who are essentially parentless, or picking them up after they've been beaten to a pulp. That's shapes, if you will, some of the way I think and work. I don't think with any of us, it's by accident that we came into this kind of work. I grew up mostly in Lama Valley in Oregon, picking berries and beans and milk and cows, and because of my position in the family, there was never any expectation that I would go to college. I was too useful. The geniuses were other kids in the family. Every child was designated. This one is Mad Mary, or that one is Terrible Teresa, or this one is the genius, or whatever, but Donna was just useful, so I could see that there was food on the table and shoes on the children, and essentially parenting from a young age. From about the age of two. Wow. So it's not so surprising that I ended up in this work, and a good psychoanalyst could explain to you now why I have written the kinds of things I have, given that that's where I'd come from. I'm no longer working as a psychoanalyst, I'll be 80 next month, and I'm working mainly now in the leadership of my retirement community here in Claremont, California. So when you say disturbing that your parents were disturbed, was there a particular flavor to that disturbing? Different flavors with the two of them, an authoritarian kind of violence with my father, which led most of us, they're all of us, I think, really to live in fear. The experience of sitting at the dining room table and reaching for something and having a knife launched at your eye, and almost put your eye out because you were supposed to ask for it, you weren't supposed to reach for it, things that could just happen, it would feel like out of the blue, that's one that happened to me, but there are other ones for other people. Right. Constant terror. Yeah, it's a terror, the one who got a haircut that my father didn't like and he took the scissors and just chopped her hair to pieces, and then she had to go school like that, things like that that are sort of endless. And every one of us has our stories, and once in a while we'll really get together now, after the parents are gone, thank God, we've become much closer, we do our survival stories, but we don't always have to do that anymore, we've done it over the years now, and we can just enjoy each other a lot more. So that's really nice. For years we had to do those survival stories because I wouldn't say nobody else would believe us, but nobody else would really have the sense of what it was like to be in that family. So we had to talk to each other just to validate, to restore our own sense of reality. One of the things I've thought about over the years and written little bits about is Farency wrote a wonderful paper early on in his career about the development of a child sense of reality, and I've thought about how trauma and violence destroy that, but also certain types of parental disturbance can lead you to disbelieve yourself to have no trust in your own perceptions and everything like that. I think that I got interested in that particular topic because that's our family. You're so hyper vigilant for any sense of danger. I think the thing that comes later, maybe with therapy, is that you have to determine your own sense of what is self and what is other and what is real. Yes, that's really true. I think when you're busy being afraid, you haven't got any bandwidth for that. The other thing is when you've got parents who are invalidators who impose their sense of the real on you, and that's really the cost of connection to them. It's another version of the pathological accommodation story that Bernie Branch have wrote so fabulously about. He was also my teacher and very important to me. the price of connection to this pair. is that you absorb and adopt as your own, their view of reality, and you don't ask yourself, is this true, is this real? What do I think about this? How do I perceive this? That's just not on the table in families where the parents are like that. - I wonder if that kind of environment develops a lot of people in our field, a lot of us come out of those kinds of environments, and if we become hypervisual to the other, the part that is scanning the self needs to be developed more. - Well, yeah, and one of the things a good therapist does over in Oregon is says, "What do you think? What does that feel like to you?" And a patient who comes out of the family like that will look at you like you're crazy. What's the you? - Even your just physical perceptions, one of my memories from being in my training analysis was that my analyst would occasionally ask me if the room was too cold or too hot, thinking she might open a window or something. And I would say, "I don't know." - I hadn't thought about it. - I don't perceive things like that. I'm still like that to a great degree. And the thing is that nobody was ever interested in whether I was cold or hot. So I didn't learn how to be interested in it myself. I didn't ask myself, I'm a little better now, but not much. If my husband wants the room at a certain temperature, I just say, "Oh, I can adjust to that." Whatever it is, you know, I'm not gonna get an argument about something like that because my perceptions of the temperature and the room are just not important. - But I hear that and I think, well, there's Levinos. - Yeah. - The orientation to the other. - Yeah. - How is it that an important figure in the world of inter-subjective psychoanalysis can place such a premium on a manual Levinos who seemingly contradicts inter-subjectivity? Inter-subjectivity is the idea that I am not an object who is objectively studying you, the subject of my experiment, but that we are two subjects who relate to each other in a mutually influential dynamic embedded in our context. Donna addresses this. In her book, The Suffering Stranger, she describes how Levinos saw the reverse hierarchy in which the other is higher than us, as quote, "The curvature of inter-subjective space." She also writes about how Levinos saw responsibility for the other as the essential structure of subjectivity. Whereas Buber saw mutuality as a window into the divine, Levinos saw this curvature as a transcendence. Donna quotes Levinos saying, "To welcome the other is to put in question my freedom." She then writes, "This surrender will clearly great on a generation that grew up with European existentialism and with American therapies inspired by it." These words, freedom, agency and authenticity, became our core vocabulary. These words also resonate with the emphasis on individual achievement and independence from others and their needs, that American culture generally idealizes. Even for those of us inspired by the kinds of clinicians and ideas we study in the following chapters, it seems that we want to feel that we agentically take responsibility, not that we simply are responsible. Levinos did not see those who do not respond as agentic, that is, as choosing not to respond. For him, the subject is subject only as subjection. Instead, he spoke of evasion. I was already thinking about Levinos because when you talked about the violence in your home, I thought, well, that's. Well, that's the origin story for him. Right. For his whole work. Right. We can get to Levinos. I was gonna say one more thing though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why I am so kind of committed to the distinction between the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of trust, is that the hermeneutics of suspicion, whether it's held by parents or therapists or anybody else, teaches us not to trust ourselves. It teaches us to suspect ourselves of all kinds of bad things. And of course, spreading climb really sent us down that road. I'm not anti-froidian, no friend of climb. In fact, I've learned so much from Freud. I can't even say. But the idea that a therapist who trusts the patient to be communicating their own trouble in the only ways that they can, doesn't sit there with a critical eye or a critical ear saying, well, that's not real. You know, there's no ghost in the corner over there. They say, oh, as George Allen would have said, tell me about the ghost. Introduce me to the ghost. There's just a kind of radical shift when you take the patient seriously. - Tell me more about the hermeneutic of trust and the hermeneutics of suspicion. - Well, it's a distinction that Paul recur. French philosopher who also was a friend of love and else, by the way, developed in his book on Freud in 1960. The people he called the masters of suspicion were Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Because each of them suspects you or me of nasty motivations. In the case of Marx, it's economic motivations for pushing down other people. In the case of Nietzsche, it's power and disguising your will to power that you were disguising from other people. And with Freud, of course, it's all the instinctual life that your dreams and your free associations are hiding but also making available to the analysts to comment on all the nasty motivations behind your symptoms and everything you say. So Freud has wonderful passages that I quote in the suffering stranger where he says, if the patient says it's not my mother in the dream, the analyst should say, but it is your mother. That sets up a kind of conflict rather than a mutual exploration. Now, I think most analysts have gone beyond that. Nevertheless, there are remnants. And if you read much psychoanalytic literature, which I no longer do, I read a lot more philosophy and literature and other stuff now in my old age. If you read psychoanalytic literature with an ear for suspicion or an ear for attributing more nasty motivations to the other person, you can pick this up. And the analyst who's shaped by dialogic folks like Godamer and Boober, or by the ethics of somebody like Levin us, is going to welcome. There's a sense of welcome and hospitality toward the other, you know, like come into my house that is to say my space, mental space and physical space and so on, and be okay there, you know. And as you will and as it suits you, tell me about the trouble that brings you here. And how it started and how long it's been going on and what you've been able to make of it so far and what you're hoping we might be able to do together and so on, but the tone shifts. It's not judgmental, it's not investigatory. A lot of analysts will say, well, we investigated this or that. I think, leave that word out. Investigations are great for police work. - Right, I often say that I'm not interested in objective truth, I'm interested in subjective truth that I'm interested in my patient's experience. - I wanna know how this feels to you. The other thing that I really like to do to talk with people in order. ordinary language, as much as possible. And of course, that gets me in trouble with the publishers. They want something very scholarly. I can't much produce that anymore. But I still know how to be with people. I've been doing supervision and writing here and there in my retirement years. But I'm not as capable of doing the strictly sort of scholarly writing that has become the norm. In psychoanalytic and in philosophical publications. My love is for interdisciplinary work really. I like to go between philosophy and other things. I'm interested in that. I'm interested in how you go from being on the philosophical scholarly track to getting interested in psychoanalysis. And your experience in both worlds and not to mention as a woman who was having one foot in each door at the time, can you tell me about that transition and some of the roadblocks you faced? Well, it wasn't easy. In several respects, early on, I went study clinical psychology and then psychoanalytic training because my philosophy students in Seattle were coming to me with all their personal problems. They would say, I want to come in and talk with you about my paper or about, you know, this or that. But in five minutes, it was clear that they wanted to talk about their family. How was the family going to react when they came home and said they believed in evolution? All of this kind of thing. So I thought, you know, if I'm going to be helping people with this kind of stuff, I need to get trained for it. I've never lost being a philosopher. I like to read philosophy. I have as many philosophy books here in my house as I do psychoanalytic ones. Two shelves of vacation shine right in front of me. And so on. I went to the Shabie University and ate kosher food for five years. And then I got into psychoanalytic training with people that had founded an institute in New York for sort of dissidents, if you will. Otherwise known as intersubjectivists. And can imagine who some of the faculty might have been, you know, they was Stoller Road. And that would, yeah. Baby, a branch aft. Who am I missing? Fasaghi. But what drew you to that school of thought? Well, it was partly the people because they had taught me at Isheva some of these people. Okay. And I knew I didn't want to go classical Freudian. And most of the institutes at that time wouldn't accept psychologists because the lawsuit hadn't happened yet. People like me had very few options. And this was one of them. If I had known more about interpersonal psychoanalysis and the William Owens and White Institute, I would have looked into that for sure, because I have really good friends over there. But it was fate that you ended up with the intersubjectivist. It seems to be, yes. And that seems like it has been a fit that has served you well. Well, except that I'm always a rebel and even where I land, I don't stay. Frank Lackman says I'm a troublemaker. Well, but when I think of people who really have a handle on philosophy and psychoanalysis, I think of you and I think of Bob. And when it comes to philosophy, I think of myself as maybe like a musician who can play three songs in guitar, but play them pretty well. You know, psychoanalysis can also be a window into some of that stuff to help. Oh, indeed. Indeed. A lot of my work has been to try to make philosophical ideas and philosophical writing more user-friendly to psychoanalysis and psychotherapists. And that's been a kind of central thing. I mean, suffering stranger was that. And then the second book, right after that, the nourishing, the interlives of clinicians. Oh, and before that, the thinking for clinicians book was just to help psychotherapists know that they could think and not only that, it would help them to figure out their psychotherapeutic problems, both clinical and theoretical. If they train their minds with thinking, you know, logic and whatnot. Right. Was there a point at which you in your career either planned on or maybe looked around and realized that you were carving out a niche for yourself in ethics? Because when I think of you, I think of in your work, I think of, you know, as grounded in the ethical. I think that's a really interesting question to me. I mean, your others have been too. But, you know, in the early 2000s and the late 1900s, I was working with Bob and George. And we produced some stuff together. But little by little, I realized that I was going to have to go my own way if I was going to find where I needed to go. And it was right in those, about that time that I had begun to read Levin House, that went to the new school and took a course, a graduate course that Simon Critchley was teaching on Levin House and not kind of something clicked on. He's very, very difficult to read for English speakers, especially. We're waiting for new translations of the major works. But anyhow, he's really hard to read. So it has taken me years of teaching him, reading him, studying him, to have some confidence about my capacity to work with his work. And right now I'm working on a Levin House dictionary for the Bloomsbury Philosophical Dictionaries, which is quite prestigious thing. And this is an enormous job. I can only imagine my goodness. I think I was always a bit oriented to the ethical. I came out of Roman Catholicism and I knew a fair amount about natural law ethics and Kantian duty ethics and the utilitarian's ethics and all of that ethics and the different ways of thinking about ethics had always interested me. But I had never sort of focused till I started studying Levin House. And then I realized that that was in some ways the only thing that interest should make. That's not quite true. As I get older, one way in which I feel myself turning into my father is that I hear the same phrases and mantras repeated over and over. You'll hear me say an embarrassing amount this season that the theories say more about the theorist than they do about reality. It's something I believe, but I should probably find a different way to say it every once in a while. Martin Boober was a perfect example. He and his family made it through the Holocaust in an relatively good condition. And his vision of Zionism was a much more utopian vision. Boober was a spiritual Zionist who was not concerned with a sovereign Israeli state as much as he hoped for peace in the Holy Land amongst Jews and Muslims. In a 2018 book called Martin Boober's Theopolitics, Samuel Hayem Brody writes about the Israeli leftist political party, Brit Shalom. In the autumn of 1925, Brit Shalom was founded in Palestine and Boober, though still in Germany, became a member. Its founding charter published in English, Arabic, and Hebrew proclaimed that the object of the association is to arrive at an understanding between Jews and Arabs as to the form of their mutual social relations in Palestine. On the basis of absolute political equality of two culturally autonomous peoples, and to determine the lines of their cooperation for the development of the country. Its ideological uniqueness among Zionists is best explained by focusing on several major concrete and practical issues. Issues that coincided with the major Arab grievances against Zionism, land acquisition, the rate and scale of immigration, and the policy known as Kabush-Avada, the conquest of labor. On all these matters, Brit Shalom's stance, i.e. that of its radical codery, was undergirded by its opposition to sovereignty as a Zionist goal, and its conviction that honoring Arab rights was a necessity for the fulfillment of Zionism and not an obstacle to its achievements. After recording this season, it does seem as those practitioners and theorists who seem to prefer mutuality, myself among them, tend to have more optimistic ambitions. In our final episode of this season, we'll talk to Israeli-American psychoanalyst Orna Goronik about her work with a Palestinian and Lebanese couple, and how her work with them was fueled by fantasies that their respective collectives could all Just get along. I think of Boober as a foundational influence on me. And I think early on, when I was devouring philosophy and psychoanalysis, and I would read some Levenos, I'd read some Boober. There's this tension between them. I think there's a tension between their followers and their people. Sometimes it can feel like nitpicking. Sometimes it can just feel like preferences. I mean, Boober's been a big influence on me. He ended up, as you know, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I was invited a couple of years to go be this Freud professor there for a lot of reasons that didn't work out. But I would have been so thrilled to be teaching where Boober taught for so many years. In any case, I think Boober's influence, you just can't overstate it. He was a giant. He was absolutely a giant. I may have mentioned it in one of the books. But when free-to-firm Reichmann was old and depressed and she died not long after Martin Boober, who had known her when they were both in their 20s in Frankfurt, I think, or somewhere in Western Germany, came to visit her. And he is saying, which is very much rooted in Judaism. I'm not sure if it's from the Talmud or the Torah, to redeem one person is to redeem the world. That became, if I'm not mistaken, the title of the biography of free-to-firm Reichmann. But Boober brought that saying to her, telling her why her life was so important. As she worked with psychotic people. And I think about how we integrate the political and the ethical into our clinical work. Yes. And it's an area that I'm interested in your opinion on. But I think maybe that's your answer in terms of how we as clinicians, where our training is to work with one person or, you know, to or a group. How that can be a political or ethical act. Yes. It's funny that you say that. I've been reading a biography of three volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. And she was extremely active in the New Deal years on behalf of women's rights. Because the law had encoded that women only needed to be paid half of what men were paid for the same job. And there was a lot of other stuff that went with that. But she pioneered the idea that when women go shopping, they should shop from places that are ethical. And she was saying, every act is an ethical act. Every act is a political act. Going shopping is a political act. And I think that whether we work with single individuals or with groups, our consciousness of what's going on in the world and around us makes us understand that my decision to ride a bike rather than drive somewhere is a political and ethical act and so on. You know, these things are not as separable as we have thought about them. That includes therapy. I'm glad you brought it up. It's something that weighs heavily on me, but maybe in a way that you might not guess in that. So I spent half my life in the southeast and a culture that I would describe as extremely religious, but ethically vacant. Yes, I understand what you're saying. And then I moved to the Pacific Northwest and a place that I would describe as maybe a religiously sparse, but very ethically charged and went to graduate school and everything. The people that I encounter, this is the context I'm in, are burdened in a very heavy way with the everyday ethics of what it means to be. For most of them, white, middle class, privileged people, but for all of us living in an unethical, capitalistic society. And so I encounter a very different thing than I grew up with, which is people who feel anxious and burned out and constantly stressed about the all-encompassing ethics. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. And the thing is, do we permit ourselves even knowing the horrors that are on every evening's news? To enjoy anything. To notice the things that are beautiful, the things that are really gifts and to be grateful for. Is it ethical to have fun, Donna? I hope so. Yeah, there ought to be good ethical jokes. I mean, Jewish people are very good at this. You know, I lived in a Jewish world in New York for about 30 years, where little kids would come up to me in the elevator and say, "Are you a Hanukkah or a Christmas?" [laughs] And then I'd pull out the Hanukkah gelt for them. I write an end of a year newsletter to my patients every year, and it was coming out of the pandemic. I said, "I want everybody to try to have some fun this year." And fun is different for different people, but find your own way to have fun, and to have fun with others, if you can. But one of the ways that we can do that is to laugh at ourselves, every now and then, to make a joke at our own expense. I mean, that creates a climate of permission, as Lynn Jacobs would say, for the other one, to start laughing at themselves as well. And to win a Coddy and two. If we can play, even in the face of misery, look at the children in Gaza. They're miserable. And yet the minute they get a chance, they start playing. Well, yeah, that is a child-like skill that we lose over time, yeah. That we need. I mean, it's like we feel that if we're serious, and angry at the injustice of the world, and so on, that we're not allowed to play, that we can't be funny. I'm not a big expert on this. It is something I do believe in. It all makes sense to me, because there's something about fun and humor and play that keeps us in touch with our humanity. I agree. And thinking of what's happening in Gaza, it feels so devoid of humanity. I know that it's complicated. It's complex, the geopolitics are often beyond me, and certainly beyond an American framework, although with an American influence on the framework, which is part of the complexity. And the way that I've been talking about it to people is that traumatized people traumatized people. I don't see what's happening, happening without the ghosts of the Holocaust still looming over us. No, absolutely. I don't wonder. I think I know what Emanuel Levinos would say about what's happening. In a 2006 article titled "No Air Apparent," in the Jerusalem Post, journalist Talia Halken interviewed Levinos' son, Michael, who tells a story about being stuck on a stranded train with his father. He says, "I remember a very short dialogue that took place between him and a woman seated across from us." The lights went out. There was no heating, and in the dark, I heard the voice of this French woman addressing herself to my father. Most sure she said, "This is unbelievable. It seems as if we were refugees." My father responded, "He had the accent of a refugee, a Russian accent, and there was this fugitive quality to his voice." Madame, he said, "That is perhaps the ultimate form of nobility." There was something in my father that I attributed to this nobility of the refugee. As much as I say that the theories tell us about the theorists, Levinos' own views seem to contradict his philosophies when it came to relations with Palestine. In a 1982 radio interview with Levinos, the journalist Solomon Malca asked the philosopher, "For there is real light, isn't the other above all the Palestinian and Levinos deflected saying, "My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbor who is not necessarily Ken, but who can be. And in that sense, if you're for the other, you're for the neighbor. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor, or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then, Alterity takes another character. In Alterity, we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong." I was reading about Boober's own Zionism this morning and how he saw this utopian fantasy for a binding word. nationalism. Oh, absolutely. Boomer believed in a Palestinian state. There, you know, yeah, he was a big two state solution guy before this paratz has had some really good pieces on Boomer over the years and in relation to all this letting us and Boomer are so close in many, many respects. But I think letting us was if you will closer to the Holocaust, he spent five years in camps and lost all of his family. He's more immediately stricken by the Holocaust and his philosophy or his ethics as a result are proportionately more radical than Boopers. Here I am talking with my co-producer Mason Neely about the limits of mutuality. I didn't ever really think of it as being a season where mutuality would be on the chopping block. I didn't think of it as something that was up for debate. What the limits of intersubjectivity? Yeah, the limits of mutuality. I think Len said it best when I talk to her. It's more about being concerned with the others injury more than your own. Are we talking about the limits of intersubjectivity in the therapeutic encounter in life between individual actors, between states, between peoples? Yeah, well, all of it. It's all up for grabs. Well, you know, I think when Jessica Benjamin first came up with these ideas, she probably had really ambitious ideas for how they could be used. And she has done a lot of work with the relationship between Israel and Palestine. I do think as a conflict resolution modality, it can be really useful that it starts with recognizing that the other party has a psychological experience that is valid, even if the facts the two of you are bringing to the table are incompatible. Yeah, and of course, and I suppose whether it's Benjamin's work, certainly whether it's Boomer, I suppose I would associate myself with being having a more critical stance about it because both of those views, whether whether it's I thou or whether it's kind of that relational cycle, an analysis few came about in the 80s about intersubjectivity, it has a teleology about it. It has a teleology, meaning like we're moving towards something. And I do think that somewhat certainly in Boomer, there is like a utopianism embedded it embedded in there. And I'm not sure I'm there. I don't buy that. I'm not sure I buy I certainly don't buy it for for state actors as something to frame human beings and human interactions, the beautiful concepts. I am more on the critical side, I think critical of what? I think critical, the notion of the effects of it, like, you know, I know that you know, Benjamin talks about intersubjectivity is like this mutually affecting experience, you know, to be affected by, to be moved by, to be entangled with. And certainly in a psychic therapeutic context, like, well, yeah, I completely get I think it's a reason this would have come about in a psychoanalytic frame, yeah, to frame the therapeutic meeting, absolutely. I wonder if we're very quick to take these concepts that really make a lot of sense within a consulting room and go, oh, we'll zoom them out to life. And I wonder if life is just considerably more complex and considerably more out of control. I think it is, but in regards to conflict resolution, there has to be some level of recognition. Oh, sure. Mutual recognition of injuries and the size of those injuries and experience. Yeah. When people are not willing, I think that's when violence happens. Absolutely. As a, as a frame to move forward. Yeah. There is a really interesting part in this interview where Donna says that even Levin asked thought that mutuality was a proper fitting stance and certain context and certain relationships. I think one was the spousal or partner relationship, which makes sense that in a more intimate setting, mutual recognition and mutuality would be possible. It is dependent on intimacy. It's dependent on vulnerability. I mean, if you're going to have reconciliation, I suppose it was going to be tied, think of the relationships we're talking about. A marital dyad or a partnership, you know, intimate partnership there and the intimate partnership with the therapeutic space and it requires good faith. Absolutely. And of course, it's, of course, it's possible. I would imagine it's more of an emergent thing that is ephemeral. It doesn't happen all the time and it doesn't happen in all meetings, even intimate ones. And essentially where I land on this topic is both and. Nice. I mean, I think of Lou Aaron's concept of symmetrical asymmetry. It's been mentioned in this season a lot. When my patient comes into my office, there is 11 Nassian stands where I am more concerned with their injury than my own. When I spoke with Nancy McWilliams, she talked about the discomfort of her patients trying to care for her with the loss of her husband. And then I thought, of course, that would be uncomfortable. I don't want my patients trying to care for me like that when I'm here to do a job. Yeah. There is a kind of natural placing the other above me and making their injury primary in regards to the emotional experience of therapy. How many psychologies are involved in the room? I fall very much back on neutrality. If my client tells me that her boyfriend is monitoring her diet so that she could look good, my reaction is, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What? And that neutrality of emotional experience is not only good or allowed. I think it's necessary and it's actually part of the service that I'm providing. Yeah. And how could you argue otherwise? And I think it's important that you and I talk about, you know, we had set out to do this season that was not topical and it became very topical. And I think it would be important to talk a little bit about why. First of all, these topics kind of came up naturally in a lot of the interviews. But then, you know, I started looking around as a half Jewish person in what is a very Jewish field. It felt like a lot of the things that were happening in the Middle East weren't getting addressed. And I don't know why. I don't know if it's because it's too hard to talk about. And so early on, I felt compelled to talk about these things because it actually doesn't feel like rocket science to me, but it gets made into this very difficult thing to talk about. I think because of how the discourse takes place. What's the hard thing to talk about? The geopolitics and the dynamics and to talk about what's happening to Palestinians as wrong. It does seem like some of these psychological and psychoanalytic concepts apply. Now, whether a mutual recognition is at all useful when we're talking about a genocide seems like an important conversation to have. It feels like a huge elephant in the psychoanalytic room. This is why I want to recognize the limits of mutual recognition. But also go, my god, I'm so glad I'm a therapist because there are moments when you actually do get to experience it. You actually do between two actors get to sit in that space of holy shit. We actually found one another because the culture at the moment, I don't know, the level of splitting everywhere, the level of just psychic defense at all times. It seems certainly on a topic like this, almost impossible to find one another. When you think about like Bober's initial, his vision of Zionism is reconciliation, trying to find between Jews and Arabs to make some sense of one another. That seems like fucking Walt Disney shit at this point. It feels very hopeless. And I guess that's what I think I don't know how you move forward without some degree of mutual recognition. When you have two parties who have such projections against each other, how you move forward without validating each other's experience at least in some way. Well, I would say it's impossible. You know, there's another way to think about this in our guest in our next episode, Abi Sekatapulu, has a Laplonche in influence. You know, I am so concerned with moving things forward. There is another way to think about it. And it's just being in a thing with someone. Yeah. A willingness just to listen. A willingness to fall back to reflect and to actively listen to another human being. Back to my conversation with Donna. I have fairly strongly absorbed Levin Us' point of view on this. That is to say that the essential ethical relationship is asymmetrical. It's not mutual recognition. See, Boomer gets absorbed into the mutual recognition gang in psychoanalysis. And Levin Us is not having it in his view. The other one in his earlier work, he would have said that it isn't a mutual recognition thing. It's the other one is always higher in the ethical situation than I am. He talks about transcendence and height. That's one of his early essays. And the height of the other means that the demand on the responsible one is always asymmetrical. He talks about the curvature of inter-subjective space as if the relationship between two people is going to be curved like this. That is to say that I have to go up toward the other to rescue the other, to support the other, to listen to the other, all the ways that I am in relation to you, you come first. Leving us as whole attitude is that we have to place ourselves on the back burner so that the other's suffering we can hear it and see it and respond to it. If I'm taking up too much space in my own world, you know, American individualism, let's say, there's not going to be enough space for me to really hear you, to really receive you. One way I said this in one of my early writings was to make a hospital home in my own home was hard for you. I have taken in the Levin Ossian ethic pretty seriously and it is radical. People think it's masochistic and the thing is that he would say that I have to be ready to die to save the other one from being picked up and taken to concentration camps, for example. He remembered like all the surviving Europeans and Jews remembered. The Germans who just stood there and watched while their Jewish neighbors were taken away. But just stood there and watched, crystal knocked when all their businesses were burned and synagogues were burned up and destroyed. I've been into the Jewish Museum in Vienna a couple times and there are still all these items from synagogues covered with soot, even now, because they were burned in those synagogues. And then outside the door of the museum, there are soldiers standing to guard it. From Tarot Stats, the Torch Jews, which are pretty common in Austria still. In her book, Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics, Donna Rice. In the late 1980s, Jessica Benjamin influenced by Heigel and the Frankfurt School by when it comes to developmental thinking and bifeminism, began to articulate intersubjectivity as understood by most relational psychoanalysis today. She has described intersubjectivity as a developmental achievement in which the baby or the patient comes to recognize the subjectivity of the mother or the analyst as equivalent to her or his own. More recently, she has described failures in intersubjectivity as occurring when one or both people or parties collapse into doer or done to positions. In the first years of the 21st century, lively debates perhaps owing something to the different sensibilities of some relationalists and self-psychologists, raged about the relative merits of these forms of intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis. Some of us were concerned that mutual recognition intersubjectivists might be setting an agenda for their patients to acknowledge their analysts, whatever the needs of the patient might be. Knowing the patient to acknowledge the analyst and a scheme of mutual recognition understates the essential asymmetry of the clinical situation, where both parties are caught in intersubjective vulnerability, but the therapist or analyst bears outsized responsibility just as parents do. She quotes Levinoss, "To be reduced to having recourse to me is the homelessness or strangeness of the neighbor. It is incumbent upon me." She goes on, "Even Martin Boober, philosopher of dialogue, had acknowledged that pastors, teachers, and therapists have this special and often heavy set of obligations." So it makes sense, right? It makes sense that when we talk particularly about relationships between nations and people groups and governments that mutual recognition, particularly when we talk about violence and when we talk about power dynamics, that mutual recognition would have its limits. And mutual respect, which I like better than recognition, because then the other is up there from both sides. You've got a double curvature of intersubjective space in place of a completely egalitarian or equal or symmetrical relationship. You give me what I give you and only if I give it to you and so on. There's a demand quality for reciprocity, whereas the kind of ethical relationship that I'm talking about demands nothing from you. I don't need, for example, if you're sitting homeless outside my building in New York and I bring you a sandwich, I don't need you to say thank you. I don't, you might do it. Dairy does written a lot about this. It's not a gift. I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about one, the fact that I'm the kind of person that might go, hey, you can say thanks and how I don't feel like it is motivated out of a place of feeling owed as much as it is a place of it does feel like an active equality to me. Yeah. Yeah. Almost as if I'm saying we can interact as equals and but I guess that's what I hear you saying is that what Levenos would describe is not about being equals as much as it is about almost like in the word I want to use a service. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the whole reason I'm doing this three-year job in my community is for service. This is not my cup of tea at all. I'm going to sit in endless meetings. Not at all, whereas I'm, you know, naturally a hermetic scholar, not a person who sits in meetings or leagues meetings or whatever like that, but this is my community service. This is putting my neighbors first and it's the only way I can make myself do this is to see it as a vocational thing. You know, I used to walk through a tunnel between Penn Station and the Port Authority every week when I came in to New York to spend my week doing work. I lived in New Jersey on the weekends and this tiny little woman was most weeks sitting there all hunched up with a bag of some kind clearly needing something and I didn't usually have anything to give her, but I would usually pull out a dollar or two and put it in her hand and I would lean down and kiss her head or do something like that. I didn't want to give her money without touching her and I would go on my way. And this went on for a couple of years and then one day I came along and she had a gift for me. I was some kind of food or something. I can't remember what it was. She said, please take this and absolutely I had to take it because that was again responding to her need to give me something and then she disappeared and I never did see her again. She was my person for a long time. It's hard not to see you as that oldest sister and all these people around you are the younger siblings. It makes sense that there are limits to mutual recognition and this symmetry. Do you also find that there is a limit to the asymmetry, to the curvature? That's a really interesting question, yeah. Yes, there are times when I can't do with any more and I have to hope that somebody else can do better than I can do right now. Do you have an emotional experience about that moment? Oh yeah, I mean just an exhaustion. But what about guilt or shame? Oh yeah, sometimes but not as much as I used to. When I was younger, the other piece that you've made me think about a little bit and I don't know female. to make me think about is that while I'm busy providing for all the kids and all the kids I've had all my life, although I do not have my own children, which is a sorrow for me. But in any case, I needed somebody to look after me. You know, somebody I can look up to, but who really had me in their care and holding, as WinniCop might say. It isn't that the person who gives so much doesn't need it for themselves, too we do. In relation to the next person or to the fourth grade teacher, I need, as Kohat would have said, that I can idealize, that will support me, that will help me grow, you know, all that. I needed it, too. But it isn't that it was reciprocal. It was, again, it was very one-sided with the teacher, whoever I had fastened on as the object of my need at that point in my life. It was very asymmetrical. Only in this case, I was the one in need. I was the one who was bereft. So I think the thing still remains asymmetrical. It's just that you or I can inhabit both sides of that. It doesn't make it reciprocal. The only place where it seems like it's reciprocal is with our significant other, sometimes with a best friend. And it seems like it's reciprocal, but I suspect that quite a bit actually. And think that it's more like it alternates. One day, I need more. One day, you need more. But if I'm your teacher, your therapist, or your rabbi, and Boober chose those three occupations particular, he said, in those cases, it is asymmetrical. I don't know if I knew that off the top of my head. That's interesting. I think it's the book that was written with his niece or somebody who was a therapist. It doesn't change the life of dialogue to have the asymmetry. No. I think dialogue is what works between us. Whether we're in a situation where one is suffering, where my brother or sister or neighbor is suffering and needs my help. Whether they're calling me from the airport and saying, "My ride filled through, can you help me?" And I jump in the car and go. You could say that's dialogical and dialogue may come out of it. But the capacity to respond to what's needed when someone is bereft or isolated or suffering is a lot of what we're talking about here. There was a French philosopher, younger than me by quite a lot, whose name was Anne Duformont-Tel. And she's written a bunch of books about the psychology of gentleness and different things like that, and you would think she has read her leaveness. And one day, I want to say about eight or ten years ago, she went to the beach in France. And she was sitting there enjoying the beautiful beaches of France. And she saw two little boys getting pulled under by a wave. And nobody helping them. She got on her feet so fast and ran and saved those two kids. And she died. You know, these things happen. Leaveness called them instances of holiness. I often have to remind myself that he was a Jew and not a Christian because there is a Christ-like element to his ethic in the sacrificialness of it. Yes, and he knew that too. His wife and daughter were saved by some French nuns during the Holocaust. And he never forgot. Anyway, there's a lot of Catholic influence. Nevertheless, he would have told you that his sources were primarily the prophets whom I think he could quote back and forth. I kind of want to call a spade of spade here because we're talking about two very different but connected ideas about our ethic as clinicians. We're also talking about what's happening in the world and how mutual recognition and the limits of symmetry apply it particularly to what's happening in Gaza between Israel and Hamas and to innocent people of Palestine. And that essentially, you have one entity that is far more powerful. And while violence and barbs have been traded, they are not symmetrical. No, they're not. I find there to be the events that are happening and then the discourse. And the discourse itself can be uncentered and temperature is high, but that it seems very clear when you think about the ethics of what is happening that there is a need for a turn, I think, of to shoove a turn towards the face of the other. Yes, I couldn't agree more. And people feel, I think, very hopeless about that possibility. Yes, I'm horrified as are many other people to see what I'm seeing. I have been a big supporter of Israel and I have good Israeli friends, closest really friends and who are themselves horrified by what's happening. But there's difference between being an Israeli and being a Zionist and certainly a difference between being Jewish and being a Zionist. And if we can just sort of slow down our discourse that did not conflate all these things, then we might have room to look at the suffering people in Gaza and the suffering people in the West Bank too. I don't know. There's some reason why our country is not applying enough pressure on Netanyahu and his crowd because we couldn't we should. I feel a sense of dread about not only the violence that is happening and the threat of it becoming more widespread. I also feel a sense of dread about the electoral politics of the way we're supporting it. Oh absolutely. There's a certain point each day where I say, what are we thinking here? And then at the same time to wait into the discourse even as someone who has those thoughts, the complexities become simplistic and the simplisms become shouted? Yes. Yes. And it becomes unproductive it feels. Well, and we demonize the people who think different from us. And that's not helpful is it? I don't think you have to be a boober person versus a levinous person. I really believe you can be both. And the different situations really call on us for different emphases. I see them as really different emphases. Levinous so often said, boober is a giant. I just disagree with him on this one point. And that's the way I am with a bunch of people in psychoanalysis, you know. Well, the irony is that boober would have blessed your disagreement. Yeah. Yeah. And and levinous maybe not. Levinous was not as good on Israel as boober was. He thought very, very difficult to say negative things about Israel. It was just too close to his heart as Holocaust survivors, essentially. Right. Well, just one of the many contradictions and complexities that makes him human. Yeah. Yeah. And he was no saint. Langer over was. He really was. He really was. Okay. There aren't a lot. I find the conversation between mutuality and the primacy of otherness to be a rich conversation. And ultimately in the end, I think both stances are necessary to a therapy treatment. And I have to look no further as an example than the mutual person Donna and I share. My late therapist, Lane Gerber. As an ethic, there was never any doubt that I was primary in our relationship that Lane held my interest above his own and my injuries were his main concern. And as a master of dialogue, I could trust that if Lane disagreed with me or felt his own need to challenge me, he would authentically and compassionately share that opinion. As I've mentioned on this show several times, I owe much of my life to those challenges. I shudder to think what my life might be without his own invitation to himself to share his subjectivity with me in an authentic way, and it was always in a way that served me. The mutuality of the dialogue and the freedom he felt to exert his own subjectivity was in my own service. Donna, it's been such a treat to talk to you. I've been reading your writing probably since early on in grad school, which started in 2009. It's just a massive contribution to the field, your compassion and mind for the ethical and to be able to handle philosophy and psychoanalysis one in each hand. Oh, it has always been impressive to me and it's been so nice to meet you and get to ask you questions. Well, I want to wish you all the best with your work and with this project, and thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk with you. You did make it easy. Thank you. All right, take care. Bye-bye. This has been Between Us, our thanks to our guest, Donna Orange. Between Us is produced by myself, John Totten, and Mason Neely, who also composes our music. Our research assistant is Rose Berkdahl. If you like the show, find us where you find podcasts and subscribe, and if you feel like it, leave a review. And until next time, take care.