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2003
2003
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2003
Presenters
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Bettina Bergo.
Duquesne University
What is Levinas Doing? Ethical ‘Subjectivity’ between
Phenomenology and Psycho-analysis
Is Levinas rewriting psychoanalysis, where the ego never achieves
even the relative solidity promised it in Freudian and neo-Freudian
therapies? The experience of substitution cannot be described conceptually,
so Levinas uses hyperbole to overstate an experience affectively
excessive to any linguistic form. Substitution is a sort of psychosis.
Levinas gives us a genesis of desire that is an alternative to the
desire of psychoanalysis. Bergo uses Julia Kristeva’s “aporia
of sensation” to understand why Levinas exaggerates almost
to the point of absurdity. Aporia: sensation must enter into language
to become meaningful, but in translation sensation as non-discursive
meaning is betrayed. Levinas overwrites Freudian psychology by rethinking
the psyche as agonistically intersubjective. The ego is sensuous
vulnerability, like a permanent narcissistic wound. He constructs
an aesthetic style that enacts Saying, or the giving of responsibility.
He sets the framework of the performance of therapy as an acute
expression of ‘prophetism.’
James
Faulconer.
BrighamYoung University.
What Kind of Knowledge is Knowledge of the Other?
Two kinds of knowledge of the Other: 1) object of knowledge with
its properties, and, 2) an event of the immediate interruption of
the Other of self. This allows for two kinds of psychology: 1) objective
psychology, and, 2) hermeneutic psychology of the encounter with
persons as “saturated phenomena.” The second psychology
(hermeneutics) is fundamental to the first psychology (objective
descriptions).
Ed
Gantt and Stan Knapp.
Brigham Young University
The Ethics of Marriage: Contract, Commitment, and Covenant
First part challenges modernist notions of individuals in marriage
to maximize personal benefit, and Aristotelian “virtue ethics”
and some hermeneutics. Second part offers Levinasian concepts for
marriage as being-for-the-Other in service and responsibility. Authors
replace the metaphor of the market with the metaphor of covenant.
Joe
Guppy, M.A. Seattle University, practicing therapist
A Levinasian Perspective on Psychopatholody/Addiction and its implications
for Psychotherapy/12 Step Recovery, through the works of Emmanuel
Levinas, J.H. van den Berg, and Bill W.
The pathological and addicts totalize others as they become more
tolerant of their pathologies and drugs, and both progress in dependency
on their pathologies. Therapy happens as both reach out in service
to others as they recognize a “power greater than themselves,”
Bill W. and the “infinity of the Other,” Levinas.
Dillon Inouye.
Brigham Young University
Primordial Responsibility and Psychology
Asks four questions: 1) What is the relationship between psychology
and responsibility? (Ans.: Psychology has neglected primordial responsibility.)
2) What are the consequences of this neglect for psychology? (Ans.:
Psychology’s generalizing theories cannot predict and control,
and its interpretive theories cannot understand humans.) 3) What
are the consequences for society? (Ans.: This neglect has aided
the forces of catabolism and breakdown in responsibility in society.)
4) What should be done to correct the relationship and develop a
more adequate psychology of responsibility? (Ans.: develop a new
science of the soul that looks at least four exemplary portrayals
of responsibility: a) rites of passage of cosmogonic creation myths;
b) religious laws and ordinances; c) hagiography of saints; and,
d) confessional testimonies of pilgrims.
Michel Juffe.
University of Paris-Marne-la-Vallee
Levinas and Passivity
Contrary to Western tradition where passivity is weakness, Levinas
places it at the beginning of humans and not as a result of weakness.
Juffe points to three ways of passivity, 1) meeting suffering and
death; 2) meeting the feminine (or masculine) as the other gender;
3) meeting ones own children. Psychology must face three problems
from these, 1) continuity between living and the dead, 2) differentiating
of sexes and other dualisms, 3) novelty from one generation to another.
Juffe points out three corresponding pathologies: 1) dereliction
(neglected state, feeling of pettiness, obsessions, loss, etc.),
2) conflict (incest, domination, possessiveness); and, 3) sterility
(instrumentation of the other, idolatry, depression).
Sheridan
Phillips.
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Time and the Therapeutic Hour
Being itself is articulation of Time. Responsibility of Being is
the behind-the-behind, the just-awakened moment, that psychology
has not yet grasped in its thematizationof individual human solutions
to media-ated cultural adaptation. Phillips challenges depth psychology,
and offers Jean Gebser's cultural phenomenology: without acknowledging
the invisible presence/movement of Time-ings in the consulting room,
psychology, perhaps, serves only the escalation and completion of
Time. Levinas's hypostasis as a rip in the present suggests the
time of psyche-logos, the logic of soul movement that is Time's
own and the very relationship between existing and the existent.
The event of time grips me as everpresent as the grounding of Time
and the event of being, but it does not have to be a blind event.
The invisible Time-ing of the other calls forth the expression of
time, the eventing of being of our face-to-face encounter and the
origination of one's humanity.
Peter
Rosan.
Bronx Children’s Psychiatric Center
The Varieties of Ethical Experience: Empathy, Sympathy and Compassion
A phenomenology of the conditions and forms of ethical experience:
welcoming a world of living with and for the other (cf., Ricoeur,
1990/1992). Both philosophical reflection inspired by Levinas, Ricoeur,
Scheler, Schopenhaur, and others, and by empirical research to 1)
discover the moral sensibility of care believed to be already contextualized
in a field of personal relationships, and, 2) describe the ethical
aims or virtues embodied in a life of passion. The sensibility of
care establishes a context where a person is opened to ways of valuing
the other. Three distinct relational styles, 1) empathically joining-with
and illuminating the meaning of the other’s expressions, including
vicissitudes of the person’s own experience, 2) sympathetically
feeling-for the other and either commiserating over his/her woe
or rejoicing over his/her weal, and, 3) compassionately honoring
the other’s dignity even when his/her suffering threatens
to diminish him/her. The dialectic of giving and receiving, from
this empirical research, does not support a naïve sentimentalism
that disregards “traditional person” accounts of the
role of responsibility and reason, but as a proposal designed to
redress one-sided individualistic and intellectualistic approaches
to the formation of an ethical life.
Steve
Sandbank.
Maryland.
Heidegger and Levinas: Does the Bridge Swing or the World Call the
Bridge?
Heidegger’s notion of human existence as the swinging bridge
between himself and the world prioritizes subjectivity as disclosing
the world, even a subjectivity whose consciousness is defined as
openness. Levinas’s notion of humans as always called by the
other to be responsible for the Other, prioritizes the Other, even
though that Other is always a mystery and can never be known by
subjectivity. Heidegger’s subjectivity can never be fully
escaped. Levinas’s subjectivity as “subjected to...”
opens to the other. Strauss and Boss, after Heidegger, leaves therapy
susceptible to generalizing. Therapists after Levinas work toward
absolute ethical responsibility for the other and freedom as related
to assuming responsibility.
Robert Walsh.
Montana State
Beyond Therapy: Living Otherwise-than-being with Levinas
It is not technique that heals, but the interaction with a therapist
who is not identified as a “therapist.” The “therapist”
reduces the client to a pathological category, objectifies, destroys
the otherness of the other. Claiming to know, to be in charge with
an official office, diploma, fee, to understand the other, all this
is called into question by the face facing, before this facing is
conceptualized into a face-to-face encounter. The therapist disappears;
“therapy,” “counseling,” even the “client”
disappears. Not only the therapist and the client, the whole psychotherapeutic
project is put into question by the unknowing from facing the other.
Both are groping in the dark for some illumination to show the next
thing to be done. It is better than groping alone. Healing happens
on its own, when it will and where it will; in secret, naturally
occurring before “I” arrive on the scene to accomplish
it. Only when therapy disappears can therapy begin.
Richard
Williams. Brigham Young University
Self-Betraying Emotion and the Psychology of Heteronomy
While Levinas has been judged as too austere and too counterintuitive,
Williams links his philosophy of radical heteronomy to Warner’s
study of self-betraying emotions, which grew out of studies of self-deception
and theories on agentive action. In Self-betrayal studies, he developed
the term, “mispresence.” He calls for an “ethical
metaphysics” to understand the ontology of human persons.
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