Abstract
Emmanuel Levinas proposed a philosophical critique that worked to unsettle and decenter generalizing, totalizing, and thematizing attempts to define the self. However, on the other hand, Levinas provides the space for the formation of a configuration of the self that has been conditioned by ethical relation and even points to some of the ingredients for (or shape of) such a self. Throughout Levinas’ work, the concept of hineni (“Here I am”) is used to illustrate the moral event that best characterizes the “psyche.” In the following paper, we consider how to apply the notion of hineni to modern psychological constructs of the human self. In the first section, we flesh out the characteristics of a self lived as hineni. We argue that such a self is “shaped” or oriented morally toward the outside and is radically exposed to the Other (not merely a bearer of moral consciousness or moral attributes). It is a remembering of the preoriginal and primordial ethical relation. In the second section, we use the psychoanalytic concept of transference to illustrate how the moral shape of the self can be forgotten, and how the self enters a state of “mineness” wherein the Other is reduced to one’s own history (Levinas 1990). In this state of forgetfulness, we argue that a “concreteness of egoism” (Levinas 1969) is maintained and a self lived toward the outside remains untenable. Transference, we argue, is an impoverished relation and a forgetting of and violence to the Other. Its proper use, however, in the therapeutic alliance allows for the possibility of a remembering of the Other and a calling beyond oneself.
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Notes
This paper considers what a morally-shaped self looks like within Levinas’ thought. It is obvious from the start that describing the self as having a specific “structure” with certain definite characteristics already stands in fundamental opposition to Levinas’ work. On the other hand, Levinas provides the space for the formation of a configuration of the self that has been conditioned by ethical relation and even points to some of the ingredients for (or shape of) such a self. Using Levinas’ own words, “Here we are trying to express the unconditionality of a subject, which does not have the status of a principle” (Levinas 1989, p. 105).
Transference involves a constituting of reality as ultimate which reduces the encounter with the Other. Atwood and Stolorow (1984) wrote, “[I]n the absence of reflection, a person is unaware of his role as a constitutive subject in elaborating his personal reality. The world in which he lives and moves presents itself as though it were something independently and objectively real. The patterning and thematizing of events that uniquely characterize his personal reality are thus seen as if they were properties of these events rather than products of his own subjective interpretations and constructions” (as cited in Stolorow et al. 1994, p. 79). Transference is lived and enacted as if experience and reality were entirely my construction, it becomes a circularity where all things are interpreted and acted upon in such a manner that is consistent with my own circuitry.
By “forgotten” here, we speak more specifically of a repressed or disowned history, not of the forgotten pre-original and pre-historical calling referred to earlier.
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Goodman, D.M., Grover, S.F. Hineni and Transference: The Remembering and Forgetting of the Other. Pastoral Psychol 56, 561–571 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-008-0143-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-008-0143-0