Time, Lament and Testimony:

Levinas and the Impossible Possibility of Therapy

Eric R. Severson, Ph.D.

erseverson@gmail.com

A number of tensions arise from the alignment of the work of Emmanuel Levinas with

the practices of psychoanalysis and therapy. Levinas’s discussions of the relation between the

other and the self are so meticulous and thorough that nearly every possible feature of the

encounter with the other is called into scrutiny and examination. The practice of therapy, despite

wide diversity in application, follows certain common patterns of interaction. The encounter with

the other, often qualified as “client” or “patient,” occurs with a controlled and defined

environment that psychoanalysts deem most conducive for productive therapy. In this paper I do

not challenge the value or importance of psychotherapy, which strikes me as deeply essential for

healthy human healing and living. What I wish to consider is whether or not the therapy session

facilitates the encounter with the other in her or his alterity, in the sense encouraged by Levinas.

The spatial and especially temporal parameters of therapy appear to stack the deck

against the encounter with alterity; the other whom I counsel has already conformed to my time,

my agenda, my billing schedule and my style of therapy. The encounter with the other, in the

sense advocated by the later works of Levinas, appears to run in the opposite direction. The other

unsettles my agenda, particularly my time, and shames my impulse to define and confine the

parameters of the encounter. The wisdom of Levinas is helpful in therapy, but does the structure

of therapy preclude the possibility of encountering the other in this context? I suggest that if the

Levinasian encounter with the other is possible in therapy, it must be on the other side of a series

  1
of obstacles that surreptitiously work to reduce therapy to an encounter within being.1 My central

thesis is that therapy is an impossible possibility; that the genuine encounter with the other

occurs in therapy only despite the obstacles inherent to this discipline. This paper will describe in

some detail various issues related to alterity and therapy, and ultimately offer some tentative

suggestions for opening therapy to an encounter that is properly labeled “impossible.”

From Space to Time

There are many ways to read and utilize the work of Levinas in the fields that concern

themselves with mental health, human relationships, psychological healing and therapy.

Levinas’s writings abound with meticulous, insightful and groundbreaking assessments of

alterity, the self-other relationship and a host of other themes shared by the field of

psychoanalysis. Levinas’s mid-century work, including the groundbreaking book Totality and

Infinity, is thoroughly consumed by a reconsideration of the self-other relation. Levinas suggests

that throughout its history, western philosophy has allowed the other to be totalized by the field

of the same; the other has been encountered in the modes of appropriation, acquisition and

violence. Alterity, the otherness of the other, has been domesticated by an epistemology of the

same, of the self. Levinas uses primarily spatial metaphors to articulate his critique in the 1950s

and 1960s, relying on the polarities of interiority and exteriority, totality and infinity, and

deploying metaphors of infinite distance and height. Foreign to my “dwelling,” the other person

resides in another land, “a land not of our birth.2 The other dwells on another “shore,”3 a place

                                                                                                               
1
This paper assumes a basic embrace of the overall wager of Levinas’s work. No one, even Levinas’s
staunchest defenders, embrace everything Levinas wrote and said in his long and diverse career. But I lack the time
and space in this presentation to defend the central commitment to the superiority of the other and the centrality of
responsibility that characterizes Levinas’s work.
2
Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961), 34. Levinas uses these
metaphors less than one page into Totality and Infinity.
3
Ibid., 64.

  2
Levinas refers to as “a yonder.”4 Levinas refers to this distance as infinite, so that this

transcendence is so extreme that no journey can traverse the distance. “No journey, no change in

climate or of scenery could satisfy the desire bent toward” this “elsewhere” or “the other.”5 The

other person is “not wholly in my site.”6 These are the images with which Levinas opens Totality

and Infinity. This is a book about infinitude, but the infinitude is first cast as a feature of

distance.

Levinas begins a profound shift in his language and imagery after 1961. Almost

immediately Levinas begins a transition away from the spatiality of the images in Totality and

Infinity toward a new register in which to articulate the encounter with other in her or his alterity.

The transition is stimulated by certain problems with earlier configurations, specifically the

vulnerability of spatial language to being reincorporated into a Hegelian synthesis of the same. In

other words, and this is perhaps the heart of Jacques Derrida’s critique from the 1960s, the

concepts of interiority and exteriority require we who consider them to assume a third position

that incorporates both the totality and its beyond in the same panorama. The language of lands,

shores, and infinite distance positions the reader above the relation between the self and the

other. The omniscience and universalism of this perspective draws closer to Hegel than Levinas

may wish, a point not lost on Derrida.7 How can one think of the distance between two points,

even as infinite, without the neutrality of a vantage point? In his examinations of Hegel, Levinas

critiques the “synoptic gaze that encompasses.”8 But is not the posture of the philosopher, who

                                                                                                               
4
Ibid., 33. This is the first page of the text itself (after the preface).
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., 39.
7
“The last question, which indeed could be Levinas’s question to Husserl, would be to demonstrate as soon
as he speaks against Hegel, Levinas can only confirm Hegel, has confirmed him already.” Derrida, “Violence and
Metaphysics” (1964) in Writing and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1981), 120.
8
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 53.

  3
considers the same and the other according to the metaphor of distance, not forced to adopt just

such a “synoptic” gaze?

There are indications that even within the pages of Totality and Infinity, Levinas has

already begun to shift his language back to the register of time and temporality that was so

critical to his earlier works, particularly the twin publications of 1947.9 Still, the spatial language

that thrives in the model for the self-other relation in Totality and Infinity has troubling

consequences in several arenas. Most obviously, Levinas famously treats the feminine as a

component of interiority, as the requisite support and dwelling for the masculine encounter with

the other. The results of this move enclose the feminine into the home, the dwelling, the present

of the self. For Levinas, something needs to make possible the capacity of the self to encounter

the other. And in Totality and Infinity it is the wife, the woman, who provides the nourishment

for this encounter. But she is also therefore denied the alterity granted to the stranger, to the

masculine other.

The feminine creates the condition for ethics, the possibility of the encounter with

exteriority. Before there is ethics, there must be the welcoming and hospitable domicile. Jeffrey

Bloechl summarizes: “Woman, says Levinas, welcomes me; she meets me at my level, and on

my terms.”10 The relation with alterity so vividly apparent in the face of the son presupposes a

relation with the feminine other, whose existence is required for the son to be. However the

desires, needs, and terms of the woman who greets me appear to be literally effaced.11 The

                                                                                                               
9
Existence and Existents (1947) and Time and the Other (1947).
10
Jeffrey Bloechl, Liturgy of the Neighbor (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000), 199. In this
passage Bloechl is summarizing Levinas’s approach to gender in Totality and Infinity.
11
Ibid. Bloechl writes: “Everything that the feminine other does for me by way of rendering my world an
inhabitable place is due to neither her possible intentions nor the specific acts she may or may not commit, but her
presence alone. The familiarity of the world is a direct expression simply of the fact that I am not alone in it.”

  4
woman is consigned to the spatial parameters of a house, a domicile, and this move denies her

the full extent of the ethical relation.

A further problem with this model warrants mentioning, and it is a problem that has

intriguing implications for therapy. Totality and Infinity first positions the ego in original

enjoyment and insularity, and then Levinas narrates the opening of the interior subject to the

infinite, which happens in the encounter with the face. The analogy of the dwelling reinforces

this narrative structure; I am born and nourished in the feminine interiority of the dwelling, the

precondition of my enjoyment, and make forages into the world of experience. The real event,

the ethical event in the life of the ego, is the encounter with the face. This encounter is the apex

of the narrative of the ego. Totality and Infinity itself follows this basic plotline. Levinas scholar

Diane Perpich sees in the transition between 1961 and 1974 an abandonment of this narrative

structure. Her thesis offers an assessment of this transition, and it appears to support the

suspicion that Levinas’s final moves complete the utter abandonment of the time of the self. She

summarizes,

Totality and Infinity engaged in an extended narrative that purported to show how a
separated and atheist ego could nonetheless come to be commanded by and responsible
for the other. If the ego had not been separate, if it were but a dependent moment of the
ethical relation, its becoming ethical would be an unremarkable achievement. [. . .] In
Totality and Infinity the narrative form (in conflict, at times, with its content) leads one to
expect an answer to the skeptic. You are responsible whether you know it or not, says this
text; but the narrative form implies that one could in fact be brought to know, that a
narrative could be produced that would show the ego to itself in the right light, despite its
own attempt to position responsibility outside cognition and intentionality.12

In chapter four of Otherwise than Being, which Levinas calls the book’s “centerpiece,” Levinas

rejects the narrative structure that Perpich identifies as critical to the structure of his own

                                                                                                               
12
Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 118.

  5
argument in Totality and Infinity.13 Here Levinas declares that responsibility is not some option

for the ego to measure and consider alongside other options. Responsibility arises before the ego

has its footing, on the “hither side” of the establishment of any self-identity.14 The problem, it

seems, with the narrative structure of Totality and Infinity is that it still locates the ego as a

protagonist in the drama of coming-to-responsibility. There is an evangelistic urgency in Totality

and Infinity, a concerted effort to convert the skeptic to radical responsibility. In this effort,

Levinas may at times, perhaps in spite of himself, credit the ego with a “freedom of

consciousness.”15 Whether this is the remnant of a stylistic effort to convince readers or a

fundamental piece to the arguments of Totality and Infinity is debatable. Perpich appears to be on

track, however, in her assessment of Totality and Infinity’s latent “protagonist” and the (probably

unintended) impression that radical responsibility is optional. Such a conclusion insinuates that

the time of the same, not the time of the other, remains primary.

These are not the only consequences of the changes in language enacted by Levinas

between his two major works, but these and other issues press him toward an even more radical

articulation of alterity. The final major phase in his philosophical development begins in the

middle of the 1960s and culminates in the 1974 publication of Otherwise than Being or Beyond

Essence (hereafter Otherwise than Being). This remarkable new expression of Levinas’s

philosophy does not retreat from the radical articulations of alterity expressed thirteen years

earlier, but instead escalates their intensity. The images and metaphors are mostly new, and he

noticeably abandons metaphors that were critical to his earlier articulations. Spatial metaphors

                                                                                                               
13
Levinas calls the chapter “Substitution” the “centerpiece” of Otherwise than Being in a short note just
prior to the first pages of the book Levinas, Otherwise than Being (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1974),
xlvii.
14
Levinas uses the phrase “hither side” dozens of times in Otherwise than Being. See, for instance,
Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 43-49.
15
Ibid., 114.

  6
are strikingly reduced or eliminated. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas almost completely avoids

the language of exteriority and interiority, and shies away from the language of distance, height

and asymmetry. The metaphors of time return, but now reconfigured and inflected heavily with

new vigor and new themes, including images and language imported from his growing respect

form the Babylonian Talmud. I suspect that scholarship after Levinas has not paid sufficient

attention to what is abandoned between 1961 and 1974, nor the significance of the new and

altered themes that are taken up. I have labored rather extensively on this transition, and traced a

number of developments and their significance. For this presentation I will shift quickly to their

significance for thinking about Levinas together with the practice of therapy.

New Themes

The word diachrony does not appear anywhere in Levinas’s work until the mid-1960s.

He borrows the word from linguistics, though he means something quite different than is meant

by scholars of language.16 Levinas invoked diachrony repeatedly in Otherwise than Being; it is

the cornerstone of his new articulation of the relation with the other. I encounter the other in

diachrony because the other is never present to me as synchrony. The other person is not a

feature of my present, of my “now,” but always before me and after me. This returns Levinas to

themes he began working on in the 1940s but abandoned, probably to focus on the then

immensely important project of differentiating his work from Heidegger’s. But he returns now to

declare that the time of the other and the time of the self are never synchronized. The other is

                                                                                                               
16
Levinas, however, does not seem even slightly interested in de Saussure, the father of structuralism, or
the linguistic structuralism that develops in the wake of de Saussure’s Writings in General Linguistics. Levinas, in
fact, never has anything good to say about structuralism. In Otherwise than Being, he accuses structuralism of being
defined by its preference for “theoretical reason” to the neglect of the “human sphere.” Levinas, Otherwise than
Being, 58.

  7
infinitely prior to the self. I appear on the scene always too late, always tardy, always hearing the

echo that I have missed.

The call is anarchy; they precede any architecture of the self, any story, any assembly or

configuration, however ancient.17 The events of discovery and the moments where I become

aware of my debt and my configuration as “for the other,” are trivial. The most important

component of my dawning awareness is the simple fact that I am too late; I am already cast in

the drama of diachronic time of the other. My role is to be my brother’s keeper, but the question

asked by Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” already misunderstands the situation.18 To ask,

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” is already to “suppose that the ego is concerned only with itself.”19

The call of the other, which reaches me in the stupor of half-awareness, summons me to

vigilance. But I am never quick enough. The call of the other, the call of the suffering other, is

ancient, reverberating from time immemorial. It is not just that I was a moment too late to meet

the other in a common, metaphysical “present,” like a camera that snaps a photo just after the

action has occurred. The other’s time is inaccessible to me; I gather the traces of alterity in from

what falls to me as the present. Levinas suggests that the spoken word arrives to me as a Said, as

the ossified remains of a Saying that remains evident only as a trace.20 To attend to the other is to

listen for the Saying that the Said renders almost inaccessible. I awaken to a world where my

very identity reverberates with the echoing call of suffering from the other; I gather myself only

to find that I am already a character in a plot that is not my own. I am not the protagonist; I am

nothing but pure responsibility, and I am responsible in a sense that I can never contain or fulfill

or even know. But whereas in Totality and Infinity this left Levinas in danger of losing the other

                                                                                                               
17
Ibid., 114-15.
18
Ibid., 117.
19
Ibid.
20
The importance of this sometimes-confusing theme is identified by Levinas at various points in
Otherwise than Being. See, especially, 6ff.

  8
person off the radar, Otherwise than Being proposes that the other presses utterly and

overwhelmingly on the self. I am hostage, to the other; I find myself in a time that is not my

own, a character in a play I did not write and which I do not control. This is the ultimate death of

the Western conatus essendi, founded on a right to my life and my struggle to be. For Levinas, at

this sage, my existence is a feature of the time of the other. I have no time, no agenda, no

foundation. I am pure and hyperbolic responsibility, and only that which flows from my

responsibility.

To be “for the other” in Otherwise than Being is to substitute oneself for the suffering of

the other, to forfeit my bread, to give up my warm place in the sun, to die that the other might

live. These are the moves of a character in a plot that is not his or her own, the moves of a person

who has been stripped of independent time. I am responsible not just for my responsibility to the

other, but for the very responsibility of the other. It is her time that now matters, his suffering

and survival which concern me. I encounter the other in the diachrony of her incumbency upon

me; I am too late for his suffering, but must move nonetheless to take his suffering as my own. If

nothing else, Otherwise than Being declares that I must release the other from my efforts of

synchrony, my attempts to consign and confine the other to the present as I understand it.

Therapy and Synchrony

Psychoanalysis is an incredibly diverse discipline, frequently misunderstood and often

poorly characterized. I write of this discipline as an outsider, and respect the various creative

horizons of its application. The Freudian method of psychoanalysis has outlived most of Freud’s

theories of selfhood, transference, sexuality, etc. Despite a wide range of approaches to this

discipline, and diverse opinions about the legacy of Sigmund Freud, there remains a fairly

  9
consistent allegiance to the notion that encouraging clients to speak about their lives will reveal

symptoms and indications of important psychological patterns.21 The structure of the typical

encounter is particularly interesting in light of Levinas’s later work. A client calls the office of a

therapist, moves through encounters with computerized and human receptionists before

conforming her time to the calendar of the mental health professional. The therapy session is

tightly confined into a window of the day that is defined and protected by the therapist. The

client is also a customer; the words and movements of therapy are products delivered at a

financial cost. The other person, encountered in the therapist space and in the therapist’s time, is

in a series of obvious ways being synchronized into the time of the therapist. The therapist

almost always defines the structure of this encounter. A structured encounter, where the client is

keenly aware of sturdy parameters for the appointment, is often considered critical to a

productive session.22 These factors stack high the impression that one does not truly encounter

the other, in a Levinasian sense, in a session of therapy.

At first glance, the encounter with the other in therapy is instead a classic encounter

within being; it is akin to innumerable other encounters where goods are exchanged and

important needs are met. These are not, for Levinas, immoral encounters. This analysis of

therapy in no way doubts its vital importance. Medical doctors meet routinely with patients on

similar grounds. The neurosurgeon schedules surgeries according to the presented needs of a

patient. These needs are assessed by various means, all of which require the patient to submit to

a synchronizing of her symptoms with the knowledge of the physician. This is an exchange
                                                                                                               
21
Sydney E. Pulver provides an extensive summary of the various practices of psychoanalysis in his
chapter “The Technique of Psychoanalysis Proper” in Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts, Burness E. Moore and
Bernard D. Fine, eds. (Hartford: Yale University Press, 1999), 5-25. Pulver describes a wide range of methods and
approaches the psychotherapy, but each method appears to still employ the basic structure of appointments that
feature listening and encouraging clients to speak freely about their lives, stories, thoughts and emotions.
22
Ibid, 8. Pulver outlines each feature of psychoanalytic therapy, including discussions about various
lengths and payment plans for sessions. Pulver is careful to emphasize that the therapist should avoid giving into the
“masochistic patients” who might demand too much time or too many appointments.

  10
within the horizon of being, an economic exchange of the highest value and most important

function. Like neurosurgery, psychoanalysis can play an absolutely critical role in mental health.

And synchrony is highly desirable in the medical field; to accurately diagnose ailments and

prescribe successful treatment requires the reduction of mystery and alterity. Hidden information

is dangerous. Ambiguous sensations are probed and questioned until they fit into some pattern or

system for treatment. Pain is registered on a numerical scale. Poor and ineffective doctors leave

such things to mystery; good doctors deliver synchrony.

Psychotherapy, intriguingly, blurs these lines. Certainly, the therapist is charged with the

deep obligation to make careful and accurate diagnoses. The consequences of poor analysis can

be dire. The hope must always be that the therapist gets an accurate and insightful assessment of

crucial issues at stake for the client. Creating and maintaining careful parameters for appointment

times plays a vital role in creating an environment conducive for accurate and helpful analysis.23

In these and many other regards, the psychotherapist must be committed to the economy of the

physician. But therapy also appears to present come possibility of a more radical encounter

between two persons.

Clearly professionals in the field of psychoanalysis can perhaps learn a great deal from

Levinas about the dynamics of human selfhood, the central role of relationships in human

community, and the diverse ways that these forces and factors influence clients.24 Having spent

years of my life studying Levinas, I have the utmost respect for therapists who acknowledge and

incorporate these insights into the critical and necessary practice of psychoanalysis and

psychotherapy. My intent here is to isolate what seems to be an important question: does

psychotherapy preclude, or make unlikely, any genuine encounter with the other? Is the
                                                                                                               
23
Ibid.
24
C. Fred Alford has outlined one such approach to this intersection in Levinas, the Frankfurt School and
Psychoanalysis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).

  11
therapist’s office, or even the group-therapy circle, a setting that strips the other of alterity and

reduces encounters to an economy of exchange?

Lament and Testimony

On face value, one might find Otherwise than Being pronouncing a kind of disdain for

synchrony that is such an obvious component of the encounter with the other in therapy.

Whereas the doctor, banker and pilot show their cards and admit upfront that these encounters

are mostly consigned to exchanges in the economy of being, the therapist’s office appears to

offer an encounter more akin the dynamics of the encounter with the holiness of the other. The

therapist (or therapists) and client (or clients) exchange looks and stories, perhaps sharing deeply

significant issues relating to relationships, life and mental health. Both therapist and client may

well be duped into considering this encounter the paradigm of the self-other relation. But this is

neither accurate nor healthy. And perhaps here we can see some value and insight into Freud’s

prolonged discussion of transference. The therapist often does become a safe face who can hear

and absorb all sorts of displaced emotions and hidden stressors. But this encounter is fixed,

controlled, anticipated, and sanitized, all for the very good causes of providing a safe venue for

discovering and healing.

There is a global reading of Otherwise than Being that might suggest another way to

think about this problem. The language of Totality and Infinity is stark, powerful and daring,

perhaps even defiant. Levinas writes his first major work with a brazen thesis, the boldness of

which invited no shortage of reaction and critique. But there is a shift in both meaning and tone

in Otherwise than Being. This second major work is dedicated to the “memory of those who

  12
were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists.”25 Here Levinas

speaks less of the thundering heights from which the other summons, and more of a tardiness

that cannot be corrected. Otherwise than Being is in this register a book of lament; it is a book

riddled with the guilt of the survivor, whose finds herself or himself situated in a broken world,

already guilty even as awareness dawns. The guilt of the survivor is felt palpably and literally by

Levinas, even if he speaks of it rarely and reluctantly. And in Otherwise than Being the self is

always in the wake of the other, whether that term is applied to the vigilant remembrance of the

death of the other or the aftermath of the other’s passing, as in the wake of a boat.

Some manners of relating to the other can attune the self to this tardiness, and sharpen my

vigilance of the signs of the Saying still reverberating in the Said. But all relationships are late.

There is no perfect reverence, no adequate response; it is not possible to meet the need of the

other perfectly. I am always too late for that. And Otherwise than Being does not merely state

this rather disconcerting situation, but laments this conundrum. I am late to your suffering, living

in the wake of pain and hunger and loss that I am not equipped to address. But I am nonetheless

bound to respond, captive to your passing anarchically before me. My raft rocks in the wake of

the suffering of the other; never out in front of it, even when I am the cause of it.

The act of lament, of mourning, and of testifying to my impossible responsibilities

disposes me in a new way to the other person, encountered in any and every setting. If we can

read Otherwise than Being as a text that guides us into lament for our untimely awakening to the

suffering of the other, than we need not consider the realm of the political, the realm of economy,

a barren wasteland devoid of diachrony. Levinas provides here something noticeably absent in

Totality and Infinity: a way to operate in the economy of being despite my impossible

disadvantage, guilt and obligation. I can mourn. I must mourn. I can encounter the doctor, the
                                                                                                               
25
Levinas, Otherwise than Being, inscription.

  13
banker, the pilot, the baker and the plumber within the obvious economies of these encounters.

These encounters are overwhelmingly frequent. They fill my world full of faces that press on me

from time immemorial, bottomless stories that are both prior to me and also my immediate

priority. I must sigh and let the mail carrier walk away without even asking about the pain

written on her face, perhaps evident in her brief words. My baby cries from the other room. The

phone rings. A pipe leaks. A student emails. My stomach grumbles. There is not enough time. I

am guilty, obliged, caught and captive to the suffering of the mail carrier, but I must choose and

attend to some of my responsibilities even as I mourn the responsibilities to which I cannot

attend. The choice may be arbitrary, or it may be clear. But for Levinas, even when I cannot do

anything to help the other because I am caught up attending to other responsibilities, I remain

nonetheless hostage to the suffering of the other. I remain responsible.

This is a heavy and overwhelming philosophy, and I blame no one who would walk away

from it at this point. But there is also jouissance here; there is joy that is also shared from the

story of the other. I am positioned in the story of the other without my awareness or choice, so I

awaken to the laughter and victories and cries of hope from the other as well as the suffering. I

am responsible, therefore, to rejoice and celebrate and laugh with the joy of the other. But this

theme I will leave aside in order to attend to the central question of this essay: what happens in

therapy? Can I encounter the other who comes to my office for therapy? Or do I merely dispense

goods?

Otherwise than Being reminds us that all of our relationships are diachronous. Every

encounter is tardy, not just the ones we are careless about, or the ones that obviously conform to

the synchronous forces of clocks and calendars. So the therapist meets the clients in the context

of an exchange of goods, but inasmuch as the therapist laments the misfortune on this situation

  14
something radically new becomes possible. The context of therapy is economic; it is oriented and

bound by the synchrony of the wristwatch. But the event of encountering the face of the other in

therapy can nevertheless be the node at which the holiness of the other is encountered. This is an

impossible possibility; the other appears in therapy only as pure gift, and despite enough

obstacles to render such an encounter impossible. And the mode of receptivity, open to the

appearance of this pure gift, is lament. To lament even as one provides the services of therapy is

a difficult and challenging undertaking; but we should perhaps expect nothing less from Levinas.

Therapists are schooled to put the stories of the other into categories. But cannot this

important labor be performed while still mourning both the inadequacies of these assessments

and the peril of such attempts? Therapists are advised to confine appointments to clear

parameters, and for good reason. But cannot this obvious gesture toward synchrony also be made

with lament? Perhaps we can dare to hope that when we lament the consignment of our lives to

the labors of being we might become attuned to the rupture of being that can happen even when

we are caught in its throws. Sometimes I can turn lament into responsibility.

Therapy and Mourning

There is some forfeiture required here by therapists who would embrace this notion.

Gone is the confidence that an accurate diagnoses and successful treatment indicates a genuine

encounter with the other. Diagnoses and treatments move from the same to the other, however

effective. They may be necessary, they may be life saving, but these are not the movements

toward the infinite, toward the time of the other. Gone, also, is the sense that the safe and secure

parameters of therapy provide helpful venue for the encounter with the other in his or her

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alterity. Therapy cannot succeed in its aims unless it at least partly attempts to synchronize the

story presented with preconceived ideas about diagnoses and treatments.

To mourn as a therapist is to struggle in an irresolvable tension. After severe physical

trauma the hands of a surgeon can only attend to one wound at once. Nevertheless, a good

physician has an eye on the other wounds, perhaps mourning that she has only one set of hands.

But does not such mourning incline the surgeon to make better use of nurses, bystanders,

equipment and time? My suggestion is that therapists remain mindful of a second layer of

encounter with the other that cannot always be hosted or even intended in the setting of therapy.

Such mourning is an inclination, a disposition, an openness to the irruption of the other in the

midst of the therapy.

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