The Demanded Self: Levinasian Ethics and Identity in Psychology

7. Hearing “Thou Shalt Not Kill”

145 7 Hearing “Thou Shalt Not Kill” Psychoanalysis, Enactment, and Levinasian Ethics Psychotherapy is a religious event. Levinas says, “We propose to call ‘religion ’ the bond between the same (self) and the Other.”...The primitive meaning of the word religion is to bind oneself in obligation, to transcend the self to serve others. Psychotherapy is “attending to another to heal.” The therapeutic relationship is religious. The goal of therapy is to seek this primitive religion, commitment to others. (Kunz 2006, 10) Looking over my patient’s chart, I read the same disturbing comments found in many of the files: “Sexually molested by grandfather.” “Ritually beaten by his alcoholic father before the abandonment.” “Mother in and out of jail—can’t keep the needle out of her arm.” “Major behavioral and emotional disturbance and difficult to manage .” “Several psychotropic medications already administered by the age of seven, with minimal benefit.” After 14 foster home placements, Samuel (not his real name) had finally been plopped into a residential treatment facility (at the age of seven). It was here that I met him in the special education classroom. He was bright, creative, moody, and energetic. About three months into his time in my classroom, we had several consecutive weeks of exciting progress. His math lessons were coming along with lightning speed. Also, his warmth and ability to connect were becoming more evident—after a very rough start, he was starting to attach. He was beginning to tell the residential staff that I was his favorite. 146 The Demanded Self: Clinical Applications One afternoon, I was kneeling next to Samuel’s desk working on a complicated math problem with him. As usual, elated at his ability to master the equation, he grinned wildly at my encouragement. The moment came quickly with no premeditation, no preparation, and no warning. As I looked down at his page to scribble a note, I felt a fist come across my face and heard the loud crack of his knuckle bones against my cheek bone. I felt a sharp pain, my eyes teared up immediately , and my self-protective systems came fully online. Shock and anger exploded into my consciousness, and my body flooded with powerful instinctual reactions. Protect self. Fight back. What took place next remains seared into my mind. I looked up at Samuel, his face a foot and a half away from mine. His chest was heaving; his eyes were filled with tears. But besides this, there was a look of desperate expectation. His eyes exclaimed, “Hit me! Push me! Shove me away! Hate me! I am truly intolerable, unlovable, and disgusting....I just proved it!” This story is emblematic of particular types of encounters with patients in psychotherapy. Unlike young children, adults often cloak their fear, angst, and brokenness in more hidden and “sophisticated ” forms. Years of socialization give adults less obvious ways to express their fears, repeat their pain, and relive their pasts. However, in these moments, the message to the therapist is the same: “Thou shalt kill.” Levinas argues that the face of the other exclaims the opposite command, “Thou shalt not kill.” But what if this command is so contrary to one’s lived experience that it is no longer recognizable? What if, instead, the face of the other pulls, tugs, and screams to be murdered, strangled, debased, and reduced? What if one’s “way of being” in the world has been nothing but the renunciation of life, worth, and love? From the frame of Levinasian ethics, the psychological violence by which a patient is victimized becomes the responsibility of the therapist . Levinas clearly articulates this ethical framework but is less clear about the developmental and psychological processes involved in enactment—the psychoanalytic notion that past and present violence endured by the patient can become calcified into current relational patterns that lure others (including the therapist) into participating in this reductive violence. On the other hand, psychoanalysts delineate the processes involved in enactment and merely assume an ethical Hearing “Thou Shalt Not Kill” 147 response by the therapist. Conversation between the two might be fruitful. Building on the concept of transference and psychotherapy as remembering put forth in the previous chapter, this chapter provides an example of the translation project inherent in Levinas’s work through a conversation between Levinas’s Jewish ethical phenomenology and one of psychoanalysis’s current conceptual/clinical emphases. ENACTMENT IN PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE: RELATIONSHIP AND REPETITION...