Description
For Emmanuel Levinas the danger of Western thought is that, if we start with ourselves, we end with ourselves. Psychotherapy and counselling would be for the sole purpose of strengthening self-initiated and self-directed fulfilment, resulting in individual and societal forms of totalitarianism. Levinas suggests that ethics should be about putting the Other first, but not in some fundamentalist Christian sense of the self-choosing to give one’s life for others. The origin of authentic ethical behaviour is not from the self but from the Other.
Levinas offers us a fundamental shift in our thinking about therapeutic practices. His writings call on us to have an ethical responsibility in the very way we practice therapy. This is with all the complexities of negotiating from nearness and distance, involvement and boundaries, and how we view ourselves in attempting to do this. Levinas inspires us towards ontological, epistemological and methodological shifts. The attempt to put the Other first can significantly change our notion of being. It can help us be taken away from the dangers of a therapy based on ego psychology, which seems to permeate so much of our therapies whether classified as humanistic, psychoanalytic, behavioural or existential. All except the Introduction and two of the chapters were originally published in the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Levinas and the Other in psychotherapy and counselling
Del Loewenthal and George Kunz
1. Levinas (1905–1995): His life and some key ideas
Del Loewenthal and Robert Snell
2. Emmanuel Levinas (2003) On Escape
Richard A. Cohen
3. Knowledge of the Other
James E. Faulconer
4. Self-betraying emotions and the psychology of heteronomy
Richard N. Williams
5. Towards an ethical-hermeneutics
Jeff Warren
6. Beyond therapy: Levinas and ethical therapeutics
Robert D. Walsh
7. Toward a therapy for the Other
George Sayre
8. Epistemology and the hither side: A Levinasian account of relational knowing
Joshua W. Clegg and Brent D. Slife
9. The difficulty of being: A partial reading of E. Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant
Jeffrey Bloechl
10. The idea of a possibility
Helen Douglas
11. Taking therapy beyond modernity? The promise and limitations of a Levinasian understanding
Richard House
12. The ethics of the relational
Del Loewenthal
