Main description:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: Ethics as First Psychology 1. Mutual Vulnerability: An Ethic of Clinical Practice 2. Kissing Disciplines: Relational Architecture 3. Is Ethics Masochism? Or Infinite Ethical Responsibility and Finite Human Capacity 4. Yale or Jail: Class Struggles in Neoliberal Times 5. Psychoanalysis in Neoliberal Times: A Renewed Dialogue With Madness 6. The Complications of Caring and the Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis 7. "Screams and Shouts": Trauma, Uncertainty, and the Ethical Turn 8. Can one be a Jew without Sartre? Levinas, Jewish Education, and the Crisis of Humanism 9. A Wandering Jew with or without Sartre: Discussion of Claire Katz's Can One Still Be a Jew without Sartre? Levinas, Jewish Education, and the Crisis of Humanism. 10. The Witnessing Gaze Turned Inward: My Jewish History as the Forgotten Other 11. Gender and the Jew: The Other Within 12. Trauma, Jews, and Gender: How They are Transmitted, Imagined, and Reconceived 13. Beyond Betrayal: On Responsibility in Heidegger, Loewald, and Levinas 14. Changing the Subject by Addressing the Other: Mikhail Bakhtin and Psychoanalytic Therapy 15. I got grand things in me and America won't let me give nothing: Constructing and Resisting a Standard American Identity 16. Creativity and Hospitality: Negotiating who or what is known in psychoanalytic psychotherapy 17. The Disabled: The Most Othered Others 18. What Fascinates: Re-reading Winnicott Reading Blanchot