Preface to the Special Issue on Psychology and the Other

Abstract

Scholars in the Western philosophical traditions have defined themselves as seekers and knowers of truth. The Jewish Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1998) describes this as the “love of wisdom” that underlies Greek and Western philosophical lineages. In modern thought, this seeking and knowing has radicalized to the degree that privilege is given to “knowledge” as a primary means to the true and the good. Toulmin (1990) understood this to be a historic shift to a “quest for certainty.” Psychology, beginning with Freud, has largely followed a similar path. From a psychological perspective, the human person is understandable, graspable, measurable, conceivable, and predictable, able to be mapped onto specific, identifiable data points. We are empirically validated selves who relate to empirically validated others. This has often meant that researchers, scholars, and clinicians in the field of psychology have gravitated toward universal systems of ‘truth’ (Cushman 1995) that can identify correlates of mental anguish in the interior, intrapsychic, or biological processes of an individual. These models of distress create anemic depictions of human relations and contribute to a stifling of larger moral, political, and social truths that can extend into and are given expression through individual and intersubjective experiences (Cushman 1995; Fromm 1955; Laing 1969). In recent years, there has emerged an increasing number of scholars who call into question the imperialisms of the self and who have identified what Thomas Carl Wall (1999) described as “an extreme humility and an unprecedented ethics” that has ruined “the grand epoch of the Subject and its maniacal striving after itself” (p. 40; see also Brueggemann 1999). The knowing and centralized self—a creation of the modern era—is being called into question (Taylor 2007) within an articulate literature that revolves around the notion of the “Other.” The Other—taking many shapes and forms throughout contemporary scholarship—has emerged in critical theory, philosophy, psychology, theology, religious studies, and anthropology. It is a topic ripe for interdisciplinary conversation—a conversation to which this special issue is devoted. Pastoral Psychol (2013) 62:399–402 DOI 10.1007/s11089-012-0475-7