Abstract
This is a dazzling book, drawing as it does on a great range in philosophy, history, and psychoanalysis, bringing together things often kept separate. It is of considerable value for the clinical analyst and for anyone with sociopolitical interests. A full accounting of its complexities is beyond a review. Rather, I found, the thing to do is to introduce the book, show what charms it holds for the reader, and urge us on to its more serious digestion in the reading.
The author was given a fine metaphor for this work, having suddenly lost hearing in one ear and undergoing a long process of learning to hear using a cochlear implant. She makes quick work of the distinction between listening and hearing: listening is the act of attention, hearing the resulting inflow.
The reader will be richly rewarded hearing Orange’s explanations of the intersections of psychoanalysis, philosophy (especially ethics and phenomenology), and history, all organized around the concept of radical ethics. I understand her overarching definition of this to be valuing the other as much as or more than the self. This is probably the book’s organizing principle, though it takes some thoughtful penetration to see how that works. Per Orange, psychoanalysis is about learning to hear silenced voices in the unconscious, which requires not only technique, but an attitude of caring, derived not only from analytic love but also a conviction regarding what’s right. Thus enters radical ethics into the clinical scene.
Traversing the book, one needs to hang on to this central idea, for the author mobilizes a great array of sources and weaves a complex web: schools of analysis, experiences, historical episodes, and a host of persons and writers including Emanual Levinas, Howard Bacal, Philip Bromberg, Robert Stolorow, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Franz Fanon, Erik Fromm, Phillip Cushman, Ludwig Wittengenstein, Onno van der Hart, Cathy Caruth, Martin Bergmann, Hans Loewald, Stephen Mitchell, D. W. Winnicott, and Françoise Davoine.
The book will be useful for readers at various levels of philosophical knowledge, but it makes demands on most readers: to expand one’s understanding of ethics and phenomenology; to summon some enthusiasm for how philosophy and history can enliven our clinical work and theory; and to venture into intellectual realms one’s analytic training may not have touched on.
However—and here’s the rub—an unusual feature of this work is that it seems at first to be a collection of disparate essays on disconnected topics: ethics, silence, trauma, hyperorthodoxy in psychoanalysis, the seduction of mystical monisms, ethics in history, the intersection of ethics and psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, on careful (and repeated) reading, as in a good analytic hour or a creative dream, an underlying infrastructure connecting these varied topics comes into focus, and one begins to see how ethics, psychoanalysis, history, silence and its dissolution, and much else, are growing in the same garden. Orange has liberated from silence and obscurity all sorts of issues that underlie our work as analysts, especially as we are attuned to the moral aspects of our lives and cultures. A careful reading, allowing these issues to integrate within one, will ultimately enliven one’s technique.
Consideration of hearing requires consideration of silence, which Orange addresses in her first chapter, making an original contribution. She gives a clinically useful and far-ranging catalog of the factors that can produce silence, a catalog that includes and transcends defenses, affects, character states, and interpersonal situations; one may be made silent by art, by outrageousness, by the holy, and in fact by any of the following: shame, embarrassment, horror, depression, timidity, prayer, heroic silence in the face of torture, trauma, compassion, threat, shyness, grief, guilt, fear, anger, rapt attention, joy, humiliation, social or political oppression, or the wish to protect someone.
With little ado, Orange gives us this clinical tabulation of the causes of silence, which is actually a way to grasp the nature of the psychoanalytic method—that is, what the method basically wants to accomplish: overcoming silence, giving voice to the unspoken. It is interesting to understand the motives for silence as isomorphic in part with, but greatly expanding on, the classical motives for defense, and the parallel expands one’s view of the latter. (This tabulation hints at what is to come in the book, namely, a deep confrontation with failures, in psychoanalysis, to take in and use ethical assessments to be made regarding torture, racial and class oppression, and climate degradation.)
In chapter 2 Orange, with remarkable concision, brings in some current analytic insights about the effects of severe trauma. Freud, she writes, “could not . . . tolerate the idea that traumatic experience caused unconsciousness, so Ferenczi was banished, and dissociation went unrecognized” (p. 30). She points out that now, after many decades, we are aware that “avoiding our own traumatic history can prevent working with patients’ dissociation” (p. 31), and she shows how, on the other hand, dispersing the fog hiding our own traumatic experiences can help our patients give voice to previously silent hurts, often intergenerational.
She makes clear the importance of recognizing the moral offense contained in violence and abuse. The trauma chapter offers analysts an especially useful guide on self-disclosure, including the principle that the more one knows of one’s own traumatic experience, the less one has to say about it, in order for the patient to benefit from the analyst’s self-knowledge (see page 32 on the power of just saying “we”). To effectively treat a trauma victim one must deeply know one’s own history of trauma, and Orange wisely finds an example in the way the French analyst Françoise Davoine helps her patients by mobilizing her own—and thus the patient’s—Holocaust history.
Chapter 3 concerns the stifling effect of hyperorthodoxy and organizational rigidity in some quarters of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Orange gives as examples Erik Fromm’s exclusion from its ranks, its history of medical control, and institutional structures that long silenced gay and lesbian analysts. Orange also writes of the silencing effects of anti-Semitic persecution and forced migration from Europe.
In chapter 4 Orange addresses the seduction of mystical monism, that is, the intellectual imperialism of cults and authoritarian movements, which are destructive and claim to explain much too much of life. Psychoanalysis, she argues, has a duty to warn of this danger, a duty it failed to meet, for example, when Jung praised the Nazis in late 1936 and 1939.
Orange calls for a special reading of history “as written from the perspective of those silenced and violated by history’s usual telling” (p. 87). If we answer her call, we are thus involved in a growing understanding of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, reading history so as to overcome “ethical unconsciousness,” that is, our failure, sustained by the structures of society, to hear the voices of the oppressed (whether by poverty, racial or religious hatred, misogyny, or violence), which routinely we do not hear. Ethical reading of history means actively searching out the unheard voices, restoring our lost links to shared humanity, thereby becoming more responsible, more in solidarity with the oppressed.
This is a reparative reading of history, resulting in surprise. Orange would have us search out historians with an ethical and reparative focus, such as D. A. Blackmon, Wendy Warren, Frederick Douglass, and Michelle Alexander. Beyond reading scholarly ethical history, Orange recommends opening our hearing every day by listening to the news and watching films with an ear out for restoring broken links with the oppressed that have confined us to ethical unconsciousness. Orange makes the case that, even today in the United States, enlarging our awareness of history and building resistance to oppression by authoritarian governments can be our enlightened choice, and our chance to act, as psychoanalysts, unlike those who fled, died, or collaborated in the last century.
In confronting the Nazi period in Germany, accompanied by the writings of Emanuel Levinas, Thomas Kohut, Roger Frie, and Primo Levi, Orange shows how reactive caring, with commitment to the other, must precede hearing the ethical violations buried in history. For authentic caring, the inner task of the analyst is to overcome the not wanting to know, which otherwise maintains not knowing.
Chapter 5 takes further shape around the concept of experience, a link between history and psychoanalysis mediated by use of the case study in both history and psychoanalysis. Experiential history “might disturb and disrupt us” (p. 109). The author allows us to experience this directly: “Shouted down once again by demagogues who want to eliminate those different from the ruling white male class from among us; unable, out of fear, to welcome the stranger, to shelter the refugee; continuously blind to inherited privilege created by historical crimes of settler colonialism and chattel slavery; and thus paralyzed in the face of scientific demands for radical change in our way of life to cope with the climate crisis and to protect the world’s most vulnerable people, we are once again endangered as were Europeans, and all of us, in the 1930s” (pp. 109–110).
So what is the cure? Perhaps the capacity for concern (from Winnicott), combined with education and a politics that supports justice.
Grasping Orange’s chapter 6 requires a definition: what, after all, is radical ethics? Orange deals with this with the aid of the philosophers Levinas, Logstup, and Bernasconi, based on the principle that one’s life is a gift, and therefore one is infinitely responsible for others, and should take care of others without limits. She notes, however, with Dostoevsky, that one is therefore forever guilty, being unable to live up to such an infinite demand.
Here Orange becomes especially intent about defining and exploring radical ethics for serious psychoanalysts. Radical ethics places the other first in all respects, deriving from our having received life as a gift, and granting us a second gift of the ethic of full responsibility for the other. I live, therefore I give. The author allows that psychoanalysts are bewildered by radical ethics, and helpfully suggests and prods analysts to aspire to unpretentious service to others as far as possible. She embeds this call in an awareness that we live in times when normal ethics fail us. According to Orange, we are in a state of emergency and everything is at stake. She sounds the alert that for psychoanalysis to survive, we must be fully open to its political, social, and philosophical aspects.
Orange calls on three ethical philosophers to bring out in finer detail the implications of radical ethics. (1) Knud Logstrup: “The good Samaritan is Logstrup’s model,” and his ethical philosopy emerged from his reflections on living through the Nazi occupation in Denmark. And as another writer (P. Stokes) on Logstrup explains, drivers of ethical concerns such as trust, mercy, or sincerity are more to be allowed than cultivated. (2) Emanuel Levinas (as well as Logstrup) “profoundly challenged the individualism underlying Western ontologies, colonialism, and other forms of reductive and murderous violence. . . . Both seemed close to Buddhist compassion and to African Ubuntu” (p. 135), an African intersubjective humanism similar to radical ethics. (3) Bernhard Waldenfels consolidates a view that puts responsiveness before intentionality, clearing a broader path for ethical responsiveness.
Orange concludes this work with refined analyses of the work of Hans Loewald and its influence on Stephen Mitchell, and the ins and outs of self-state theory, asking throughout how psychoanalytic theory influences ethical choices and ethical hearing. She enlivens this with especially vital examples of the inhibition of dialogue about ethical themes of our time, among them embedded white privilege, resistance to learning a second or third language, conveniences that degrade the environment, the lack of reparations to descendants of indigenous peoples.
This book could have been reviewed by someone schooled in philosophy, resulting in different perspectives, rather than, as it happened, by a clinical analyst. However, I think that both categories of readers will enjoy and benefit from the way Orange puts together the pieces of our world. Clinical analysts in particular will have their work deepened and expanded by this book, and will find it a boost in the dark times we are living through.