The relationship between psychotherapy and ethics can be a subject of deep reflection. Donna Orange, through her interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas, challenges psychotherapists to rethink their role beyond technical expertise and toward ethical responsibility. This perspective aligns in unexpected ways with Lacanian psychoanalysis, despite their distinct frameworks. Here, I explore Orange’s understanding of Levinasian ethics and how a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective intersects with, complements, and perhaps even critiques it.
Ethics as the Foundation of Psychotherapy
Levinas, a 20th-century philosopher, places ethics at the heart of human existence. For him, the ethical relationship begins in the encounter with the face of the Other—an experience that calls us to responsibility. Donna Orange adopts this framework, urging psychotherapists to approach their work with humility, compassion, and an openness to the Other’s suffering.
Key principles from Orange’s interpretation include:
Responsibility Over Technique. Psychotherapy, in Orange’s view, is not primarily about interventions or interpretations but about responding to the Other’s vulnerability.
Witnessing Suffering. The therapist’s role is to bear witness to the patient’s pain, providing a relational presence that prioritises understanding over control.
Infinite Responsibility. Orange draws on Levinas’s notion that responsibility to the Other is infinite and non-reciprocal, meaning the therapist must remain attuned to the patient without expecting anything in return.
For Orange, psychotherapy is a profoundly ethical endeavor. This aligns with contemporary relational psychoanalytic perspectives, which emphasize mutuality and co-constructed meaning.
The Lacanian Perspective. Desire, Subjectivity, and Ethics
Lacan’s ethics, articulated most clearly in his Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, is grounded in the concept of desire and the pursuit of one’s truth as a subject. Lacan’s famous injunction to “not give ground on your desire” invites a reflection on what it means to remain faithful to one’s unconscious, even when confronted with the demands of the Other.
From a Lacanian standpoint, ethics in psychoanalysis involves:
Respect for Subjectivity. The analyst must resist imposing meaning on the patient, allowing their unconscious to speak in its singularity.
Navigating the Real. The analyst’s role is to guide the patient toward confronting the Real—the unassimilable core of their experience—without offering comforting illusions.
Ethics of Desire. While Levinas emphasises the Other’s call, Lacan emphasises the subject’s responsibility to their desire, suggesting a tension between self and Other that complicates Orange’s Levinasian ethics.
The Intersection of Orange and Lacan
While Levinas, through Orange, and Lacan approach ethics from different angles, their perspectives can be seen as complementary in the therapeutic context.
Ethics as Responsibility to the Other
Both frameworks share a commitment to respecting the Other’s alterity. For Orange, this means attending to the patient’s suffering without judgment. For Lacan, this involves respecting the patient’s unconscious and resisting the temptation to provide solutions or totalising interpretations. Both approaches warn against the dangers of reducing the Other to the Same—the Levinasian notion of imposing one’s framework onto another.
The Role of the Therapist
Levinas, via Orange, sees the therapist as a witness to suffering, while Lacan envisions the analyst as a guardian of the patient’s access to their unconscious desire. This difference highlights a tension: Orange emphasises relational attunement, while Lacan stresses the importance of maintaining a certain distance to avoid collusion with the patient’s demand for reassurance.
Non-Knowing and Humility
Both Orange and Lacan advocate for humility in the therapist. Orange draws on Levinas’s critique of mastery, urging therapists to approach their patients without the pretense of full understanding. Lacan, similarly, emphasises the analyst’s position as a “subject supposed to know,” underscoring that this supposed knowledge is a function of transference, not reality.
A Potential Critique. Lacan and the Ethics of Desire
One possible critique from a Lacanian perspective is that Orange’s Levinasian ethics risks prioritising the patient’s demands at the expense of their desire. Lacan would caution against responding too readily to the Other’s call, as this can lead to reinforcing symptomatic structures or perpetuating dependency. Instead, the analyst must facilitate the patient’s encounter with their own unconscious, even when this encounter is painful or disruptive.
At the same time, Orange’s emphasis on relational attunement can enrich Lacanian practice, which is sometimes critiqued as overly abstract or disengaged. By integrating Levinasian ethics, Lacanians might develop a greater sensitivity to the relational and embodied aspects of the therapeutic encounter.
Toward an Ethical Psychoanalysis
Donna Orange’s Levinasian ethics challenges psychotherapists to embrace vulnerability, humility, and infinite responsibility. Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its focus on desire and the unconscious, adds a crucial dimension to this ethical vision, emphasising the importance of allowing the patient’s singular truth to emerge. Together, these perspectives invite us to reimagine psychotherapy not only as a clinical practice but as a profound ethical encounter that navigates the complexities of self and Other.
By weaving together Levinas, Orange, and Lacan, we can cultivate a psychoanalytic practice that is both ethically rigorous and deeply attuned to the intricacies of human subjectivity.