Entertaining the stranger

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2011, 56, 92–108 Entertaining the stranger Mark Saban, Oxford, UK Abstract: This paper attempts to address the problematic of the other in analytical psychology. Despite the important contributions of Papadopoulos (1991, 2002) and Huskinson (2000, 2002) this question has not received the attention it warrants. Read in the light of Levinas’ writings on otherness, Jung’s tendency to characterize the self as unitary, autonomous and undivided may be seen as a defence against or even an erasure of otherness. However, a Derridean revisioning of this approach suggests that the ambiguities and paradoxes which Jung insisted were intrinsic to his intuitions about the self-concept have the potential to evoke a remarkably subtle vision of Selfhood manifesting within the very tensions generated between Same and Other. In conclusion, this experience of Selfhood is amplified in the light of some of the insights of contemporary German philosopher Waldenfels, with particular attention to the role of pathos in the encounter with alterity. Key words: alterity, Derrida, Levinas, otherness, pathos, Self, Waldenfels Introduction My intention is to contribute to the ongoing debate within the Journal of Analytical Psychology on the subject of the Jungian Self. Eccentrically, I aim to do so from the direction of the Other. Alterity has been the theme par excellence of post-structuralist thought because of its key significance in rethinking fundamental notions of ontology and anthropology, and unravelling modernist assumptions about identity (see Taylor 1987). However, within the field of analytical psychology the problematic of the other has not received as much attention as it deserves. The reasons for this will become apparent as we proceed. Papadopoulos (1991, 2002) and Huskinson (2000, 2002) have both made substantial contributions to initiating such a process, and I intend to begin by surveying them. I shall then re-examine Jung’s Self in the light of Levinas’ writings on otherness and will show that from this perspective Jung’s unitary, autonomous and undivided Self suggests a defence against or even an erasure of otherness. However, having considered Derrida’s penetrating deconstruction of Levinas, it will be seen that the ambiguities and paradoxes which Jung insisted were intrinsic to his intuitions about the self-concept have the potential to suggest a remarkably subtle vision of Selfhood manifesting precisely within the tensions generated between Same and Other. Finally I shall attempt to amplify this vision of Selfhood in the light of some of the insights of the contemporary German philosopher Waldenfels. 0021-8774/2011/5601/92  C 2011, The Society of Analytical Psychology Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Entertaining the stranger 93 Encountering the Other Each of the several roots of psychoanalysis may be said to derive in some way from an encounter with the Other. As Ellenberger has documented, the growing confidence of the secular and scientific in the 19th century meant that dynamic psychiatry inherited responsibility for phenomena which had previously been deemed religious, such as possession, madness, spiritism, and multiple personality (Ellenberger 1970). Hitherto, disturbing otherness manifesting within an individual would have been assigned to the realm of that greatest and most other of others: God (ibid.). But in a scientific age new causes and explanations were sought, and particularly in the realm of psychiatric medicine. The explanatory hypothesis which was ultimately to gain favour was that of the Unconscious, which henceforth became, as it were, the matrix of the Other-within, and as such achieved a central place in depth psychology. So we became aware that not only were we no longer masters in our own house, but that there was an Other within us, an Other whose enigmatic presence rendered it alarmingly powerful. While in its Freudian form the Other achieved conceptual maturity in the shape of the ‘it’ (id), for Jung the question of the other attained an entirely different complexion. Papadopoulos has undertaken a thorough investigation of the development of what he describes as ‘the problematic of the Other’ in Jung’s writings (Papadopoulos 1991). He traces the close relation which inheres between the development of Jung’s personal relationship to Other and the elaboration of his theoretical ideas. He begins with the account Jung gives in Memories, Dreams, Reflections of his various childhood games: the fire in the garden, the stone on which he sat wondering, ‘Am I the one who is sitting on the stone or am I the stone on which he is sitting?’ and the carved manikin and pebble from the Rhine (Jung 1961, pp. 35–36 & 38). Papadopoulos suggests that these objects represented ‘an other in Jung’s own personality’ (Papadopoulos 1991, p. 58) and that the purpose of the games was ‘to restore the threatened unity of his being’ (ibid.). Later, Jung came to realize that he ‘was actually two different persons’ (Jung 1961, p. 50): number 1 personality and number 2 personality. It was the latter which ‘had all the qualities of the previous Others’ and which afforded him a reassuring sense of peace and solitude (Papadopoulos 1991, p. 59). The cosmic, timeless nature of his number 2 personality, combined with the insight that such a personality was common to all people, gave Jung ‘an increased feeling of inner security and a sense of belonging to the human community’ (Jung 1961, p. 107). Conceptualized as a deeper layer of the unconscious, unaffected by any split in the personality, this later became what Papadopoulos calls the ‘anticipated whole other’ (Papadopoulos 1991, p. 61). After the break with Freud, in the midst of his ‘confrontation with the unconscious’, Jung’s inner split was reawakened with a vengeance. His encounter with Philemon brought him into contact with a figure who personified 94 Mark Saban this much needed anticipated state of wholeness, later to be described as a ‘Self image’, and his mandala drawings helped him toward his mature formulation of the Self, the ‘wholeness of the personality’. Papadopoulos concludes, ‘The problematic of the Other which Jung embarked on in an attempt to isolate and identify the Other gradually grew to reveal the whole dialectical process of the individual’s arriving at the Self’ (ibid., p. 88). In this account Jung’s story seems to be a narrative about synthesis: Jung succeeds in overcoming fragmentation by becoming aware of, and ultimately integrating those parts of his personality which, while first appearing as Other, eventually become consolidated into a greater whole. In this light, the goal of Jungian psychology is given as the reconciliation of opposites, and the incorporation of the Other. The process which enables this goal, that of becoming undivided, un-split, is given the name ‘individuation’. Jung’s theoretical development of complex and archetype culminates in the concept of the Self which serves as a final transcendent synthesis, whereby we reach a psychic level on which any apparent split is revealed as an illusion. Jung’s quest to heal his personal split between personalities 1 and 2 becomes transmuted into a quest to heal a perceived split in all of us (the decision to enter the field of psychiatry was a deliberate attempt to bring together numbers 1 and 2, psychiatry being ‘the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found’ (Jung 1961, p. 130)) and ultimately to heal the split in mankind as a whole. Papadopoulos’ account of the problematic of the Other in Jung’s work can be read as a description of Jung’s ongoing attempt to overcome his sense of inner division. The objects which Papadopoulos says represent the other in Jung’s childhood, fire, stone, manikin etc. do seem to have helped to salve this inner disunity. But, to the extent that they represent otherness, this is a relative otherness, an otherness which is already on the way, perhaps prematurely, to becoming own-ness. On the face of it, this account sheds little light upon the problem in Jung’s psychology of the absolute Other (as formulated, as we shall see, in the philosophy of Levinas)1 . With regard to personality number 2 as Other, Jung says from the beginning: ‘Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons’ (Jung 1961, p. 61). It would seem that the problematic of the other as such thus becomes obscured by that of disunity of personality. If we can define Jung’s problem as an awareness that he is ‘two persons’, then his own development, and that of his psychology, may be seen as an attempt to heal his split and indeed to posit a transcendent level on which there is no split. However, the difficulty 1 Elsewhere, Papadopoulos (2002) does invoke Levinas to support a distinction between what he describes as the familiar other and the exotic other. However, in my reading, Levinas is less interested in the familiarity or exoticism of the other than in whether or not it is recognized as radically other. For all its exoticism the exotic other still remains only relatively other and therefore, according to Levinas, not truly Other. Entertaining the stranger 95 is that when we regard analytical psychology from this perspective the question of the other remains all the more glaring because it has been in effect erased. Freud’s encounter with the Other At this point it is important to point out that it would be a mistake to reductively portray the problem of the Other in analytical psychology as merely the outcome of Jung’s personal psychological difficulty, even though in this case (as in many other aspects) it achieves its particular hue in the light of its founder’s experiences. In fact, there are good reasons for thinking that Freudian psychoanalysis too was, and continues to be, confronted with a very similar problem, though in this case it can in no way be traced back to a division in Freud’s personality. Contemporary psychoanalytic theorist Jean Laplanche, who has written widely on the subject of otherness, has made the point that, while Freud’s psychoanalytic revolution was characterized as Copernican in that its discovery of the unconscious radically decentred the psyche and relativized the ego, in practice Freud had great difficulty in consistently maintaining such a revolutionary position, and often fell into more conventional ‘Ptolemaic’ thinking: ‘“Internal foreign body”, “reminiscence”: the unconscious as an alien inside me and even one put inside me by an alien. At his most prophetic, Freud does not hesitate over formulations which go back to the idea of possession. . . But on the other side of these Copernican advances. . . the dominant tendency is always to relativize the discovery and to re-assimilate and re-integrate the alien, so to speak’ (Laplanche & Fletcher 1999, p. 65). Laplanche argues that the tension between these two tendencies (on the one hand a disturbing perception of otherness and on the other a need to domesticate it) accounts for a certain incoherence in some of Freud’s central concepts. This persuasive insight is helpful because an equivalent tension seems to be also present in Jungian psychology, although it reveals itself in a characteristically different way. From this perspective one might tentatively suggest that the problematic split within Jung’s personality, subsequently amplified, as we have seen, in the development of the basic concepts of analytical psychology, rather than being merely a psychopathological problem inflated to the level of theory, in fact itself played out, ‘within’ Jung, one of the fundamental tensions not only of the discipline, but indeed of the age. Levinas and the Other The philosopher who has most uncompromisingly emphasized the problem of the Other and has thought alterity to its extreme limits (and beyond?) is Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas our encounter with the face of the other ‘is an experience in the strongest sense of the term: a contact with a reality that does not fit into any a priori idea, which overflows all of them. . .’ (Levinas & Lingis 1987, p. 59). He attempts to use this experience of absolute otherness to 96 Mark Saban establish ethics as ontologically primary2 and to undermine what he sees as a tendency towards totalization which proceeds inevitably from the metaphysical and ontological tradition in modernist philosophy. Huskinson has attempted in two separate articles to apply a Levinasian approach to the problem of otherness in analytical psychology, and specifically to the question of the opposites and to the relation of ego to Self (2000, 2002). She rightly points out that Levinas maintains that Same and Other can never exist in a union, ‘otherwise both Same and Other would be part of a greater totality or whole which would invade and invalidate their separateness. Levinas therefore says they are paradoxically related as a relation without relation. It is a relation because an encounter does take place; but it is ‘without relation’ because that encounter does not establish any understanding, the Other remains resolutely Other’ (Huskinson 2002, p. 445). Huskinson then takes the step of interpreting the encounter between Same and Other in psychological terms, paralleling Same with Ego and Other with Self. Because Same (ego) cannot integrate Other (self), a kind of violent transformation occurs: ‘The I loses its hold before the absolutely Other. . . (it) can no longer be powerful’ (ibid.). The Other (Self) therefore overturns the very egoism of the individual and puts consciousness into question. As Huskinson points out, Levinas’ description of the transformative and violent effect of Other on Same does indeed seem to strikingly parallel Jung’s description of the impact of Self on Ego. However, this insight alone does not allow us to conclude, with Huskinson, that Jung’s Self and Levinas’ Other are somehow equivalent. While Huskinson’s attempt to bring a Levinasian perspective to bear upon Jung’s psychology is creditable, the issue cannot be allowed to rest with such an unsatisfactory identification. Levinas’ repeated emphasis on the impossibility of a relation between Same and Other on any level, (let alone a union between them) makes such a parallel unsustainable. Moreover, it is hard to see how Jung’s union of opposites via the transcendent function, whereby the opposites are claimed to encounter one another on equal terms, can be reconciled with Levinas’ insistence on the asymmetrical nature of such an encounter. The encounter of same and other can never, in Levinas’ view, result in a state of higher wholeness. He would have regarded such a process as totalizing and therefore inevitably tending toward the erasure of the Other. As Derrida puts it, for Levinas ‘The ego and the other do not permit themselves to be dominated or made into totalities by a concept of relationship’ (Derrida & Bass 2 Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the encounter with the ‘face of the Other’ makes an irreducible ethical demand. This relation with the Other is inherently asymmetrical: before I react to it, love it or kill it, the face of the Other ‘speaks’ to me: ‘thou shalt not kill me’. For Levinas this demand is prior to any response or any assertion of freedom by a subject. The primary nature of such an ethics means that it antecedes not only morality (a set of rules which emerges from a social situation) but ontology itself. For Levinas the ethical relation with the Other is beyond being. Entertaining the stranger 97 1990, p. 117). This means also that the Other can never be ‘understood’ since it exceeds all my categories of knowledge or understanding. It can therefore never be added to Same in order to create a totality, it must always exist outside unity. From a Levinasian perspective, Jung’s Self, in all its self-identity, centrality and indivisibility, begins to resemble the transcendent absolute of Hegel, which is as distant from Levinas’ Other as it is possible to get. However, such a characterization would be a profound misrepresentation. It is true that we have hitherto emphasized the Ptolemaic side of Jung, and have thus stressed what we might describe as the modernist character of Jung’s Self, with a focus on wholeness, singleness, and autonomy. But anyone who has read widely in Jung will know that there lurks another Jung, a more Copernican Jung who likes to highlight the plurality, ambiguity, alterity and heteronomy of the Self. What then do we make of such a contradiction? Faced by a thinker who, depending on the light by which we read him, seems to be making wildly contradictory points about the same subject it is tempting merely to shrug our shoulders and murmur, ‘It’s a paradox!’ Derrida’s deconstruction of Levinas In Violence and Metaphysics Derrida performed a fascinating critical analysis of Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, an analysis so effective that Levinas spent much of the rest of his philosophical career attempting to respond to it. Derrida was not attempting to demolish Levinas’ arguments about otherness. Indeed he later listed Levinas amongst the five thinkers who had contributed most to his (non-)concept différance, commenting, ‘the thought of différance implies the whole critique of classical ontology undertaken by Levinas’ (Derrida 1973, p. 152). Derrida was concerned to point to the ways in which Levinas’ writings failed to perform what Levinas wanted them to do. Specifically Derrida wants to indicate Levinas’ tendency in Totality and Infinity to fall back into a language and ontology which his concept of the Other was intended to extricate him from, and that this therefore compromised his radical intentions. In particular, Derrida finds that Totality and Infinity utilizes metaphysical discourse in its use of absolute oppositions: specifically, same and other, interiority and exteriority, but implicitly, truth and falsity, being and seeming, the natural and the social. Derrida is suggesting that Levinas, in his attempt to undermine a totalizing ontology, has fallen into an oppositional stance whereby he valorizes Other as opposed to Same, and that this risks falling into what is simply another form of totalization. After all, Other can only carry meaning for us if we acknowledge its différance from Same. If we extend this critique to the Levinasian analysis of Jung’s Self outlined above then we can see that a similar oppositional move has been made, in that Other has simply been preferred to (self)Same. Derrida’s point is that if we really want to avoid a totalizing approach what is required 98 Mark Saban is for us to attend to the tension between same and other (or indeed interiority and exteriority), rather than making a choice for either one or the other. Jung and the Other When regarded from this angle, Jung’s insistence on his own difference from himself (‘Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons’ [Jung 1961, p. 61]) perhaps gives us a clue as to how to approach his psychology most fruitfully. Rather than seeing the apparent contradictions within analytical psychology as problematic, and therefore attempting to iron them out into consistency, we should rather regard them as pointing to an ineradicable space of tension which no overarching theoretical structure will or can erase. For Jung irreducible difference is inherent to the psyche: The language I speak must be ambiguous, must have two meanings, in order to do justice to the dual aspect of our psychic nature. I strive quite consciously and deliberately for ambiguity of expression, because it is superior to unequivocalness and reflects the nature of life. (Jung et al. 1973, pp. 69–70) This is consistent with Jung’s treatment of polarity and the opposites throughout his writing. There is great stress on binary opposition in analytical psychology, from conscious/unconscious through extra/introversion, superior/inferior function, anima/animus, senex/puer etc. On the whole Jung scrupulously avoids attaching positive or negative valency to these opposites, frequently making the point that psychological transformation requires a revaluation of those poles which have been hitherto rejected as negative (e.g., the inferior function, shadow etc) and that each pole contains a secret affinity with the other (Jung 1948, para. 413). When it comes to the polarity ego/other, the radical alterity of the unconscious psyche (and its consequently transformative potential) is a constant theme throughout Jung’s writing. As he describes it in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the ‘confrontation with the unconscious’ ‘brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce but which produce themselves and have their own life’ (Jung 1961, p. 183). This seminal insight coloured his attitude to, for example, dreams (‘One would do well to treat every dream as though it were a totally unknown object’ [Jung 1934, para. 320]) and psychic complexes (described as ‘discordant, unassimilated, and antagonistic’ [Jung 1931, para. 925]). In these passages and many others like them Jung makes it clear that he values an attitude of unmediated openness to psychic phenomena, an approach of ‘not-knowing’, and that the unsettling and disruptive effect of the Other is a kind of gift, which can enable us to avoid becoming muffled and restricted by our own ego-syntonic structures. As Waldenfels describes it, the Other breaks ‘through all kinds of mediations, be it laws, rules, codes, rituals, social roles or any other kind of order’ and the Entertaining the stranger 99 ‘otherness or strangeness of the other manifests itself as the extraordinary par excellence: not as something given or intended, but as a certain disquietude, as a derangement which puts us out of our common tracks’ (Waldenfels 2002, p. 63). When Jung was directly challenged on the question of the other by Buber, who accused Jung of psychologizing man’s relation with an absolute transcendent God, and, through an exclusive concentration on man’s relation with himself of obviating the possibility of relating to what is other than self, Jung responded with characteristic irritability and defensiveness (see Stephens 2001). However, in his response he does make one important point: he draws attention to the autonomy of psychic images, which he says could be described metaphorically as ‘psychic daimonia’. He stresses how important it is to take them seriously: These ‘forces of the unconscious’ are ‘dangerous antagonists which can. . . work frightful devastation in the economy of the personality. They are everything one could wish for or fear in a psychic “opposite”’ (Jung 1952, para. 1504). Jung is here pointing out that there is a phenomenon of Otherness within the psyche which retains radical alterity, and that the encounter with it is a fact of experience which is not reducible to a metaphysical statement: ‘Thanks to its autonomy, it forms the counter-position to the subjective ego, since it represents a piece of the objective psyche. It can therefore be designated as a Thou’ (ibid., para. 1505). Jung implies that Buber’s accusations of psychologism3 depends upon a mistakenly restricted representation of Jung’s conception of psyche which is too limited to allow for the kinds of phenomena of alterity which Jung is dealing with. Such passages indicate that Jung’s concept of the Self is clearly intended to de-centre the ego, and permit the opening up of a space within which meaningful and non-pathological experiences of alterity can be acknowledged and encountered. As we have seen, the radical potential of such a concept has been obscured by Jung’s heavy stress on the Self’s structural function and a constant emphasis on ‘unity, order, organization, wholeness, balance, integration, totality, regulation, pattern, centrality and synthesis’ (Samuels 1985, p. 89). However, Jung’s insistence on the paradoxical quality of the Self (Jung 1959, paras. 124ff) offers us a contrasting perspective. Paradox and the Self experience Micklem has drawn attention to the deceptive ease with which the Self’s essentially paradoxical nature tends to be mentioned, without any real acknowledgement of the difficulties the experience of such paradox entails (Micklem 1990). When Jung calls the Self paradoxical he is attempting not only to ‘describe the indescribable’ but also to evoke the agonizing ‘impossibility’ 3 Psychologism, in this context, means the reduction of metaphysical or religious events (such as the relation between man and god) to ‘nothing but’ a psychological mode of experience, in Jung’s case the experience of the Self. 100 Mark Saban of the Self experience: ‘Whenever the archetype of the Self predominates, the inevitable psychological consequence is a state of conflict’ (Jung 1959, para. 125). This conflict relates to the presence of two incompatible truths in consciousness at the same time and the consequent inevitable temptation to break the tension and veer toward one of the two. But, according to Jung, to refer to the Self is to allude to the experience of maintaining a course between the opposites: to acknowledge their pull, but without falling one way or the other. Seen in this way the opposites retain their character as opposites, but are held in the same dynamic tension. The discomfort of such a tension is captured well in the paradoxical alchemical image of the hermaphrodite, with which Jung concludes ‘The psychology of the transference’ (Jung 1946/1969). Such an image is, as Micklem suggests, ‘grotesque and monstrous’ and certainly doesn’t suggest harmonious wholeness, and the erasure of opposites which tends to accompany such a goal of completion. On the contrary, these are tensions which ‘destroy us but also make us’ (Micklem 1990, pp. 10–11). Body and Other We might usefully compare this paradoxical approach to Self with MerleauPonty’s chiasmic ‘flesh’, whereby he attempts to talk about the intricate and interlaced relationship between lived-body and world. Merleau-Ponty uses a richly textured variety of metaphors to suggest this elusive structure: it is ‘a gaping wound’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 307), ‘a zero of pressure between two solids’ (Merleau-Ponty et al. 1968, p. 148), a ‘hinge’, ‘pivot’ or ‘articulation’ (ibid., p. 224), but most often it is the chiasmus, which derives from the Greek khiazein meaning to mark with the letter χ . In grammar, a chiasmus is ‘a figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other’. In Christianity, χ is of course the sign of the cross. We may perhaps understand the chiasm’s relevance to this question of the opposites by bearing in mind that, as Amin puts it, ‘the chiasm is perhaps best described not as a particular encounter between two otherwise fixed terms, but rather as the productive action or process released by this encounter. . . an implicated interrogation rather than a ready-made theory’ (Amin 2003, p. 180). Significantly, for Merleau-Ponty and for Jung, deeper reflection reveals the opposites as somehow implicating each other. For Merleau-Ponty, at the intersection of the chiasmic cross, opposites fold into each other completely reversed or ‘turned inside out’ (Merleau-Ponty et al. 1968, p. 263), but this enfoldment is not a fusion: the differences do not collapse, but instead the implications of opposites ensure that neither pole dominates the other. Such an enfoldment reminds us of the alchemical complexio oppositorum (literally a folding together of opposites), one of Jung’s favoured terms for Self. With regard to our topic of Self (same) and Other this implies that Jung’s Self concept is, at its most evocative, an attempt to suggest an arena wherein a dynamic encounter occurs between ego and other. This arena may be seen Entertaining the stranger 101 as a fissure or wound whereby the very holding apart of those forces felt to be most in conflict provides the capacity to reveal their most intimate intertwining and mutual implication, such that the terms ‘I’ and ‘other’ themselves become destabilized. The result is that I experience my-self most fully through and in the other, and vice-versa, and this experience provides the conditions for Jung’s stated aim for individuation: In this way there arises a consciousness which is no longer imprisoned in the petty, oversensitive, personal world of the ego, but participates freely in the wider world of objective interests. This widened consciousness is no longer that touchy, egotistical bundle of personal wishes, fears, hopes, and ambitions which always has to be compensated or corrected by unconscious counter-tendencies; instead, it is a function of relationship to the world of objects, bringing the individual into absolute, binding, and indissoluble communion with the world at large. (Jung 1916/1935, para. 275) It is significant that Merleau-Ponty’s insights with regard to the chiasm derive from an understanding of human existence as profoundly embodied. While such an understanding is not often fore-grounded in the work of Jung or his successors, it is perfectly consistent with the spirit of Jung’s writings on psyche, and indeed arguably provides a necessary grounding for his work on synchronicity and the unus mundus (Saban 2010). However, though Jung explicitly states, ‘psyche is as much a living body as body is living psyche: it is just the same’ (Jung & Jarrett 1989 p.396), often he seems to find it difficult to hold on to this intuition, falling back into a Cartesian mind/body division (Brooke 1991a, pp. 72–73). Pathos and the Other A helpful contribution here comes from Bernard Waldenfels, a thinker who has taken on the challenge of the Other, as posed by Levinas, but in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s late work. For Waldenfels embodiment and otherness come together: ‘From the very beginning’, as Waldenfels says, ‘there seems to be something strange about [the body]’. (Waldenfels 2007, p. 68). He points out that, while there is a tendency for us to conceptualize the encounter of self and other in terms of consciousness and its intentionality (‘I see the other’, ‘I approach the other’), such accounts do not do justice to the experience. Consciousness, knowledge and will are in fact late arrivals in the event of our encounter with otherness. For example, perception does not start with an intentional act of observation. Invariably our attention is aroused and provoked by what strikes us. It is the frightening or tempting situation which, by attracting or repelling us, incites us to action. Even thinking cannot be said to be truly intentional: ideas occur to us, and thus set in train our thoughts. The essential psychic movement here is one of pathos: ‘the way we are touched, affected, stimulated, surprised and to some extent violated’ (ibid., p. 74). I may like to believe that ‘I’ am the subject and author of my actions, but 102 Mark Saban a truer description would be that there are events that are undergone by me: things happen to me. From this perspective I am less the subject of my life than the patient. And this is where embodiment is revealed as crucial, for my body is precisely the realm of what is to do with me without being done by me. This embodied approach thus opens up a vantage point which contrasts with that of ego-agency. From this perspective, the Self, rather than being reified as an inflated, all-inclusive, whole version of the ego, may instead be characterized as a space of openness within which that Otherness that arouses, provokes, touches, invites, wounds and, in brief, affects may manifest, thus making possible the productive chiasmic encounter mentioned above. As we know from Jung’s word association tests, when Other, in the shape of the complex, breaks into the Same of the ego-syntonic consciousness, it does so through ‘feeling-toned’ affect and this penetration occurs simultaneously throughout the lived-body/psyche with no priority given either body or psyche (see Brooke 1991b). As Freud commented, ‘We can catch the unconscious only in pathological material’ (Andreas-Salomé 1965, p. 64). Hillman too has noted the primary nature of this activity: ‘pathologizing is not a field but a fundament, a strand in all our being, woven into every complex. It is a belonging of each thought and feeling and a face of each person of the psyche’ (Hillman 1975, p. 58). Like Waldenfels, Hillman insists on the original, underlying meaning of pathos: ‘a being moved and the capacity to be moved’ (ibid., p. 97), thus making the important point that we should distinguish pathos from suffering4 , though, constitutionally deaf as we are to the calls of the Other in both outer and inner worlds, it is, in practice, often only by constellating suffering that our symptoms finally break through the unity of ego consciousness and we begin to attend (and be attended). So a revisioned, re-embodied psyche is a psyche always already open to being touched and affected by world, whether that world manifests through the call of the Other person, animal, tree standing before us, or through the pathologies, 4 The word ‘suffer’ itself has become a victim of a general tendency in Western thought to pathologise affectivity. it derives from the Latin sufferre, to bear, to support, and so its original meaning, like that of pathos, was closer to a neutral experience of undergoing. It would seem to be the ‘passive’ nature of such experiences which has led to a shift of meaning towards what has become a predominantly negative valuation. One might speculate that, at least in part, it is this ‘passivity’ which has led to its rejection, and consequent drift into the arena of pathology. The ego’s bias towards the familiar, the known, the same, and consequent rejection of what is likely to be the occasion for disturbance (the other) has no doubt also contributed to this process. Other related sources for the widespread negative valuation ascribed to pathos in the tradition include the Stoics’ belief that, because virtue is to be equated with self-sufficiency and self-control, the pathe (responses to outside events which are outside of our control) must be destructive to virtue and happiness and Aquinas’ claim that because the pathe involve change, they must belong, at least partly, to the body, source of corruption, as the soul is unchangeable and incorruptible. Pathos thus takes its place, with the body and the feminine, as part of the discarded Other which haunts the western tradition. Entertaining the stranger 103 complexes, dreams etc whereby Otherness reaches us intra-psychically. In either case, our primary mode of being in the world is pathos. Moreover, as Hillman astutely points out, ‘The wound and the eye are one and the same’ (ibid., p. 107), in other words our deeper perception, our perception of depth, emerges from exactly the site of our affect, exactly where we are touched. Without the in-break of the other, in the shape of a complex disturbed or an old trauma reawakened, and without the potential for consciousness which such events offer us, we slumber on, safe in the ego-syntonic comfort zone, incapable of touching or being touched by other within or without. Jung’s insistence that the relationship of analyst with patient is one of mutual affect is surely underpinned by an awareness of this pathic nature of psyche: For two personalities to meet is like two different chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed. In any effective psychological treatment the doctor is bound to influence the patient; but this influence can only take place if the patient has a reciprocal influence on the doctor. You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence. (Jung 1929, para. 163) Such an encounter occurs, as we have seen, in an intermediary realm, in which the other, the stranger is literally enter-tained. This entretien occurs within a crucial lacuna: ‘between what happens to me and how I respond there is a hiatus interrupting the flow of words and actions’ (Waldenfels 2007, p. 49). This hiatus is not merely a shift of the pendulum, as conversation swings from one to another, it is that gap, fissure or wound mentioned above, from which, and perhaps only from which, emerges a creative response. This response emerges from elsewhere, and is never grounded in an established sense or existing rules. It ‘infuses a new meaning into what nevertheless called for and anticipated it’ and the transmutation brought about by such a response is ‘not simply a metamorphosis in the fairy tale sense of a miracle or magic, violence or aggression. It is not an absolute creation in absolute solitude. It is also a response to what the world, the past, and previous works demanded of him, namely, accomplishment and fraternity’ (Merleau-Ponty 1973, p. 68). If we have hitherto suggested Self as that chiasmic placeless place where I and world touch without touching, then here in the encounter of ‘I-analyst’ and ‘other-patient’ the Self may perhaps be also presenced as that creative tension from which that word or gesture originates which, catching and expressing the vibration which emanates from this meeting, here and now, is silently understood by both ‘participants’ to be transformative. So here the splitness of the Self as an ‘inner’ fissure paradoxically becomes a recognition of ‘outer’ meeting. Such a creative event is not performed or achieved by either of the individuals involved qua individuals, but nor should we think that what has occurred stems from some centralized, unified event. Difficult though it is, we must try to hang on to what we might describe as the gappiness of this phenomenon. This is the challenge and the difficulty of discussing what we call the transference. 104 Mark Saban Here our puny psychoanalytic language of projection and counter-projection, projective identification etc is shown up as hopelessly shallow. Little wonder Jung borrowed the rich images and words of alchemy to do justice to these multifaceted and ambiguous events. The alchemical approach also serves to de-personalize the encounter, thus evading the dichotomy of subjective/objective. The quality of that simultaneously separate and yet engaged meeting which occurs within the analytic vessel cannot be grasped within the crude distinction of subjectivity or objectivity. The alterity which haunts it is only revealed in the grammatical form of the ‘it’, as we find it in phrases like, ‘it happens’ or ‘it is raining’. This ‘it’ brings us back to Freud’s das Es, the id, the it. As Waldenfels says, Something becomes visible, audible, sensible, in such a way that it comes to our mind, strikes us, attracts or repels us and withdraws from our knowing and willing without being ascribed to a subject. (Waldenfels 2007, p. 45) This is surely very close to Jung’s unconscious psyche, an ‘it’ from which the creative response rises up without being produced or owned by ego, (or indeed tu) but rather serving to challenge and relativize ego. Such a response to the Other might be characterized as a phenomenon of our own wild Otherness and perhaps this is how we might begin to think of the unconscious psyche, as a version of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘wild world’ (Merleau-Ponty et al. 1968, p. 177) which ‘behind or beneath the cleavages of our acquired culture’ is inhabited by a ‘wild Being’ (ibid., p. 121). But it is crucial that we do not see this realm as either mine or thine, because, as Tengelyi suggests, commenting on Merleau-Ponty, ‘far from belonging to any “primordial sphere of ownness” it is rather characterized by a ‘primordial anonymity’ and is to be considered as an entirely disowned or dispossessed ‘intermonde’, an ‘intermundane space’, a noman’s land’ (Tengelyi 2004, p. 103). Can we perhaps revision Jung’s collective unconscious along these lines? Conclusions This paper began with Jung’s awareness of an inner split: ‘I always knew I was two persons’. It will have become apparent that I regard such a split not as a problem to be overcome, but as a condition utterly characteristic of (post-)modern psychological life, and as a fissure which always already gapes in the midst of my-self. Indeed, the difficult though creative tension engendered by consciousness of such a split lies at the (always already broken) heart of Jung’s Self. That this condition is no abstract, theoretical idea is brought home to us in the everyday experience of psyche as lived-body: we find the split where the body both touches and is touched, sees and is seen: When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of ‘touching’ and being ‘touched’. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 80) Entertaining the stranger 105 As Yount comments, ‘the reflexivity of this touching-touched exceeds the logic of dichotomy: the two are not entirely distinguished, since the roles can be reversed; but the two are not identical, since touching and touched can never fully coincide’ (Yount 1992, pp. 216–17). By this account our being in the world is always under the spell of a kind of alienness, whereby we are connected to ourselves, yet at the same time cut off from ourselves, and Self resides in the tension between the two. This tension between Other and Same is not then a pathology which can be cured, but one which is intrinsic to existence. But it is through our felt sense of our own alienness, the intrinsic otherness of the self, described so memorably by Rimbaud when he wrote, ‘Je est un autre’, that we can begin to become aware that we always, to an extent, stand outside ourselves. This point has political implications too. As Derrida remarks, it is a duty, an ethical and political duty, to take into account this impossibility of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other. . . Dissociation, separation, is the condition of my relation to the other. I can address the Other only to the extent that there is a separation, a dissociation, so that I cannot replace the other and vice versa. That is what some French-speaking philosophers such as Blanchot and Levinas call the ‘rapport sans rapport, ‘the relationless relation’. (Derrida & Caputo 1997, p. 14) This other is not just another ego or subject, and nor is he/she an object, but, miraculously, someone who is like me but who is at the same time incomparable. This strange fact is derived from what Waldenfels describes as ‘the doubling of myself in and by the Other’ (Waldenfels 2007, p. 82), a process by which my sense of my own alienness is reinforced by the duplicative alienness of the Other: I feel myself seen before I see the other as someone who sees things, and feel addressed before hearing the other utter certain words5 , and therefore, strangely, I perceive myself from elsewhere. Perhaps this should not seem so strange. After all I receive my name from others, not to mention my habits and characteristics. Even my language comes from others. So it is that, through the phenomenon of alterity, perceived both in self and in other, we are brought nearer to an awareness of the inextricably interwoven nature of our involvement with our fellow humans and our environment. And we are brought closer to our-selves when we acknowledge that we are indeed always already accompanied by a twin in otherness, and it is this phenomenon, 5 I have not begun to explore the question of language and the other in this paper. Bakhtin offers a potentially fruitful approach, which might be read in juxtaposition with Merleau-Ponty, when he suggests that ‘The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. . . It encounters an alien word not only in the object itself: every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates’ (Bakhtin 1980, p. 279). Mark Saban 106 I believe, which lies at the root of Jung’s comment: ‘I always knew I was two persons’. TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT Cet article a pour sujet la problématique de l’Autre en psychologie analytique. Malgré les importantes contributions de Papadopoulos et de Huskinson sur cette question, celle-ci n’a pas, selon moi, reçu l’attention qu’elle mérite. A la lumière des écrits de Levinas sur l’altérité, la tendance de Jung à caractériser le soi comme unitaire, autonome et indivis, peut apparaı̂tre comme une défense contre l’altérité, voire même comme une suppression de l’altérité. Cependant, une relecture derridéenne de cette approche donne à entendre que les ambiguı̈tés et paradoxes, à propos desquels Jung a souligné qu’ils étaient inhérents à ses intuitions du concept du soi, possèdent un potentiel d’évocation remarquablement subtil de l’être-soi (Selfhood) qui se manifeste au cœur même des tensions entre Même et Autre. En conclusion, cette expérience de l’être-soi (Selfhood) est amplifiée par les apports du philosophe allemand contemporain Waldenfels, avec une attention particulière portée au pathos dans la rencontre avec l’altérité. Dieser Text versucht, sich dem Problem des Anderen in der Analytischen Psychologie zu nähern. Trotz der wichtigen Beiträge von Papadopoulos und Huskinson hat diese Frage nicht die Aufmerksamkeit erlangt, die sie verdient. Im Lichte von Levinans Schriften über die Andersartigkeit lesen sich Jungs Tendenzen, das Selbst als einheitlich, autonom und ungeteilt zu charakterisieren, als Abwehr gegen oder sogar als Löschung der Andersartigkeit. Jedoch legt eine Derridasche Revision dieses Ansatzes nahe, daß die Ambiguitäten und Paradoxien von denen Jung behauptete, sie seien seinen Intuitionen über das Selbst-Konzept intrinsisch, das Potential haben, eine bemerkenswert feinsinnige Auffassung des Selbstseins zu evozieren die genau in der Spannung zwischen Gleich und Anders erzeugt wird. Abschließend wird dieses Experiment des Selbstseins im Lichte der Ekenntnisse des zeitgenössischen deutschen Philosophen Wagenfels amplifiziert, wobei der Rolle des Pathos in der Begegnung mit der Andersartigkeit besondere Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet wird. In questo lavoro si tenta di affrontare la problematica dell’altro nella psicologia analitica. Nonostante gli importanti contributi di Papadopoulos e di Huskinson questa questione non ha ricevuto l’attenzione che merita. Letta alla luce degli scritti di Levinas sull’alterità, la tendenza di Jung a caratterizzare il sé come unitario, autonomo e indiviso può essere visto come una difesa nei confronti dell’alterità o persino come una negazione della stessa. Tuttavia una revisione di questo approccio da parte di Derrida fa pensare che le ambiguità e i paradossi, che secondo Jung erano intrinseci alle sue intuizioni sul concetto del sé, ha la potenzialità di evocare una visione eccezionalmente sottile dell’Individualità che si manifesta proprio nelle tensioni che si generano tra lo Stesso e l’Altro. In conclusione, questa esperienza della Individualità si amplifica alla luce di alcune delle intuizioni del filosofo contemporaneo, il tedesco Waldenfels, con particolare attenzione al ruolo del pathos nell’incontro con l’altro. Entertaining the stranger 107 Зta statь – popytka obratitьs k problematike «drugogo» v analitiqesko psihologii. Nesmotr na vaжnye vklady Papadopulosa i Haskinsona, зtot vopros ewe ne poluqil dolжnogo vnimani. Proqitanna v svete pisani Levinasa ob inakovosti, tendenci nga oharakterizovatь samostь kak unitarnu , avtonomnu i nedelimu , moжet rassmatrivatьs kak zawita ot inakovosti ili daжe stiranie takovo. Odnako revizi takogo podhoda so storony Derridy predpolagaet, qto dvusmyslennosti i paradoksy, kotorye, kak nastaival ng, byli prisuwi ego intuitivnym prozrenim o koncepcii samosti, oblada t potencialom probuжdatь k жizni porazitelьno tonkoe videnie Samosti, provl wes vnutri sobstvenno naprжeni, poroжdaemyh otnoxenimi meжdu Takim жe i Inym. V zakl qenie moжno skazatь, qto tako opyt Samosti amplificirovan v svete nekotoryh otkroveni sovremennogo nemeckogo filosofa Valьdenfela, v qьih rabotah osoboe vnimanie obrawaets na rolь pafosa vo vstreqe s inakovostь . Este trabajo busca comprender lo problemático del otro en psicologı́a analı́tica. A pesar de las contribuciones importantes de Papadopoulos y Huskinson esta pregunta no ha recibido la atención que merece. Leı́da a la luz de los escritos de Levinas sobre la alteridad, la tendencia de Jung para caracterizar el Sı́ Mismo (Self) como unitario, autónomo e indiviso, puede ser visto como una defensa contra o aún como una negación de la alteridad. Sin embargo, una revisión Derrideana de este enfoque sugiere que las ambigüedades y las paradojas en las cuales Jung insistió fueron intuiciones intrı́nsecas acerca del concepto del Sı́ Mismo tienen el potencial de evocar una visión notablemente sutil de la Mismidad la cual se manifiesta dentro de las tensiones engendradas entre El Si Mismo y El Otro. En conclusión, esta experiencia de la Mismidad es amplificada a la luz de algunos de las profundizaciones del filósofo alemán contemporáneo Waldenfels, prestando especial atención al papel del pathos en el encuentro con la alteridad. References Amin, K. (2003). ‘The chiasm of rhythm: a Merleau-Pontian revision of Lacanian embodiment. In Merleau-Ponty: The Real and the Imaginary, eds. R. Barbaras, M. 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