Desire for the new in us is the desire for the Emmanuel Levinas The Adult-Child Situation and the Plural Self The adult-child situation is paradigmatic of alterity, both psychologically and ethically. For the child, it is literally the first relation with the other. For the parent, it is also a first relationship: the first time one has been on the other side, across from one's childhood. Facing my child, still the child was, but now in my parents' place. was once a child with my own parent just like this. still that child, yet here is another child before me. Now I, whose identity was intersubjectively constituted in my first relationship, the first relationship-the agent of constitution-for another. It is obvious that this relationship, in its intricate geometry of projections and introjections, will shape the child before me. But is there a way in which will be shaped by it as an adult? Is it a way of coming into a different relationship with the child that was and still as constituted by another? It seems clear to us what the possibilities for the psychological development of the child are. What are the possibilities for the adult? How do adults grow psychologically through their relations with their own children? The child-adult relation poses complicated problems for our understanding of personal identity. We assume the profound influence on the identity of the child by the parent, but lack a way to approach how the child shapes adult subjectivity. This relative ignorance may be a result both of adult egocentrism and of an inequality-the child has no choice but to be shaped, whereas the adult can reject being shaped. But rejecting being shaped is being shaped negatively-in turning away from the transformative potential of this relation, she turns away from coming to terms with her own childhood through parenthood, and therefore from a crucial dimension of adult development. Many testify to the experience of a profound sense of interior relocation connected with having children. Levinas (1969) considered that the child-adult relationship disproves the common sense notion of the unity of personal identity. He said, In a situation such as paternity the return of the to the self, which is set forth in the monist concept of the identical subject, is found to be completely modified. The son is not only my work, like a poem or an object, nor is he my property. Neither the categories of power nor those of knowledge describe my relation with the child.. . . do not my child; my child. Paternity is a relation with a stranger Who while being Other is me, a relation of the self with a self which is yet not me. In this I am being is no longer Eleatic unity. In existing itself there is a multiplicity and a transcendence. In this transcendence the is not swept away, since the son is not me; and yet my son. The of the is its very transcendence. (p. 277) The realization of the fecundity of the I-the existential experience of the multiplicity of selfhood-is the first outcome of becoming a parent. Early in life one becomes an other to oneself, for the reflective self originates in a split, or doubling of consciousness. But in becoming a parent, this otherness-which-- is-also-myself is suddenly found out there in the world, in another human. Compared to other adults, the child is a radical other-a tiny person who cannot quite speak one's language, and who depends on me to survive. One does not have this other, nor is this other oneself, but one is this other. This is a powerful image of alterity, which has the effect of what Levinas (1987, p. 17) calls the of the egoist-I, and its in the face of the Other, the re-orientation despite-itself of the for-itself to the for-the-other. The rupture and reconditioning provide the context for the psychological development of the adult through her relationship with the child-a development based on the experience of alterity and dialogue. …