Donna Orange Research Articles

Imagining a future for psychotherapy in Aotearoa

This paper discusses Donna Orange’s idea that Levinas’s philosophical position of radical ethics, when combined with the psychoanalytic concept of intersubjectivity, could unravel blindness to the climate crisis. Genocidal colonisation by Europeans across the world is a disavowed history that has been ruinous not only for the colonised, but also for the internal worlds of the colonisers. We remain in the grip of a destructive competitive mindset, driven by the forces of shame, shame anxiety, and envy. Psychotherapists could play a part in a better future by articulating the emotional defences at play in ecocide and strengthening our own workforce and those who are fighting against the climate crisis, with group work.

Donna Orange: Sistemas intersubjetivos, Filosofía y Ética

In this paper we examine Donna Orange's contribution to ethics within the psychoanalytic clinic, from the perspective of the theory of intersubjective systems and the critique of the Cartesian isolated mind. Above all, she says we must place a radically asymmetrical relationship, of infinite responsibility to the other person. The ethical approach proposed by Orange derives from the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, regarding the curvature of the intersubjective space and the total asymmetry before the face of the other, which we cannot take as an object of knowledge, and, later, that of the Danish philosopher, Knud Ejler Løgstrup, also a huge defender of that asymmetry: a person is a debtor because he or she exists and has received his life as a gift. We criticize this absolutism of moral obligation that is based on “debt”, concept very close to “guilt”, and not from “joy”. We criticize this proposed absolutism of the moral obligation that is based on "debt", close to "fault", and not from joy, and which poses what we consider a moral egocentrism. Ultimately, who is the subject of the moral mandate?

Hospitable psychotherapy

Hospitable psychotherapy

Refusals of Responsibility: A Response to Donna Orange and Robert Bernasconi

This article responds to Donna Orange’s and Robert Bernasconi’s suggestion that I present a developmental view of ethical subject formation in “Emmanuel Levinas and the 'specter of masochism.’” Arguing that the particular kind of development that underpins Levinas’s account is one of traumatic interruption, I ask what role the ego’s traumatic “prehistory” might play not just in constituting ethical subjectivity but also in closing it down: why is it that ethical hospitality, enabled by what Levinas calls “substitution,” so often finds lived expression in hostile refusals of responsibility? I propose that, to answer these questions, we need to consider Levinas’s “anarchic traumatism” not just from a philosophical but also from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Reaping the Whirlwind: Reply to Garth Stevens, Gillian Eagle, Margarita Kahn, and Donna Orange

Drawing on the work of Žižek (1992) on the neighbor, this paper grapples with Orange’s ethical challenges in this regard. Continuing a focus on the complexity of extending a hand to the Other, the paper then address Kahn’s ideas concerning how one pole of a binary defines itself through the Other, and I speak to the issue of victims and rescuers. The resistance of the erstwhile oppressed to being defined by the Other is taken up in Eagle’s paper. Eagle discusses the perils of reflection and interpretation when at the receiving end of the jouissance of embodied and enacted hatred. In this reply I elaborate these thoughts, and then move to discuss Stevens’s paper, which offers thoughts on how to respond constructively to this jouissance so as not to make a bad situation worse.

“We’re all mad”: Simon Critchley interview

This article is an edited transcript of an interview with Simon Critchley conducted by David Goodman and Donna Orange at the New School in New York City on 24th February 2017. The focus of the interview was on the intersections between psychoanalysis and politics in Critchley’s work. Specific attention was given to Critchley’s scholarship regarding Emmanuel Levinas, the persistence of the autonomy orthodoxy, and his understanding of sublimation and a superego II, along with careful consideration of how humor, among other things, may be utilized with regard to ethical political action and motivation.

Response to Orange, Lachmann, Shane, and Ipp

In her discussion of my article, Hazel Ipp emphasizes how risky it can be to uncover and examine ghosts that haunt our theories and our admired theorists. While followers can feel wounded, their idealizations fragmented, there is the “potential to open space, to amplify reflective capacities … and extend our thinking …” In their discussions, both Estelle Shane and Hazel Ipp emphasize the ways in which their thinking has been expanded in reading my article. Conversely, I believe that Donna Orange and Frank Lachmann find my article wounding. According to Orange, I have discredited self psychology’s “beloved grandfather.” I maintain that once a theorist is considered a beloved grandfather, any form of critical understanding of him or his theory constitutes betrayal, apostasy—a problematic position for any school of thought, particularly one founded in an empathic listening mode. For Lachmann, I have inadvertently opened up his own traumatic Holocaust experience, one that he has sought to deny through maintaining that it is only a former concentration camp inmate who can “be described as a survivor of the trauma of the Holocaust.” I argue that such denial is precisely what haunts our field to its detriment.

Creating a Space for Responsibility: Reply to Commentary of Donna Orange

In response to Donna Orange’s discussion in which she addresses the relationship between informed consent and one’s ethical response to the Other, I attempt to articulate that informed consent is born at the moment of an analyst’s responding to her patient’s demand prior to the awareness of his professional role. Informed consent proclaims the birth of a human relationship in which both participants take responsibility for each other’s suffering. I conclude that it is part of the fundamental ethics of our professional work to create a space for mutual responsibility, for the future therapeutic relationship, in the present relationship, and that the analyst’s efforts in this regard can be a way of making the impossibility of informed consent possible in an intersubjective field.

Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians: the Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis. by Donna Orange: What about Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society. By Paul Verhaeghe, Translated by Jane Hedley-Prole

Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians: the Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis. by Donna Orange: What about Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society. By Paul Verhaeghe, Translated by Jane Hedley-Prole

Insecure Attachment and Narcissistic Vulnerability: Implications for Honneth's Recognition-Theoretic Reconstruction of Psychoanalysis

This paper endeavours to move Axel Honneth's recognition-theoretic reconstruction of psychoanalysis beyond its existing focus on the perspective of Winnicott. To this end, it places Honneth into conversation with several non-Winnicottian approaches to the phenomena of insecure attachment and narcissistic vulnerability: the attachment theory of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, the self psychological perspective of Heinz Kohut, and a more recent intersubjectivist psychoanalytic paradigm set forth by Robert Stolorow, George Atwood, Bernard Brandchaft, and Donna Orange. Similar to Honneth, these authors seek to lay bare the maladaptive genetic circumstances under which the psyche becomes alienated from its capacity for self-realization and its ability to engage in healthful intersubjective endeavours. However, with respect to our primary affective relationships, their accounts of pathogenesis depart from Honneth's, focusing not just on overt physical abuse and negligence, but also on other, seemingly more mundane, intersubjective ruptures. The paper maintains that were Honneth to pay closer attention to such subtler relational disturbances, he could better appreciate the nature and pathogenic implications of misrecognition experienced at the level of our primary affective attachments.

A commentary on Donna Orange’s “What kind of ethics? Loewald on responsibility and atonement”.

A commentary on Donna Orange’s “What kind of ethics? Loewald on responsibility and atonement”.

Finding a Language of Shared Power: Reply to Donna Orange and David Wallin

In this reply to discussions by Donna M. Orange and David Wallin, I address both of their major concerns about my nine-year analysis with “Linda” by introducing a new organizing principle: The experience of power in our relationship. I argue that given Linda’s felt lack of personal power or agency, and the controlling, negating ways her mother had exercised power throughout her childhood and adolescence, Linda was extremely vigilant regarding the ways I used my power, and predisposed to “resisting” attachment and dependency in order to protect herself from the potentially controlling and exploitive influence of the powerful other. Given these sensitivities, much of the work in the early years of the analysis involved my trying to find a “language” of non-controlling, shared power to navigate between the shoals of retraumatizing control and facilitating therapeutic influence.

Donna Orange: Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies

Donna Orange: Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies

The Art and Craft of Psychoanalytic Practice: A Discussion of Orange's “Speaking the Unspeakable: ‘The Implicit,’ Traumatic Living Memory, and the Dialogue of Metaphors”

Donna Orange's approach suggests a radical emotional embodying of the analytic relationship in which metaphor allows the unspeakable to become spoken through the articulation of the embodied experience of traumatic living memory. The art and craft of human relating or the mortising and tenoning of the human connection, are fertile ground for metaphor – the democratic linguistic form available to hand for all. The analysts' choices become more about the ethics of human relating, timing, tact, and the care of a particular patient than about technical rules. Fresh metaphors that evolve within the analytic work or come from the place where psychoanalysis meets other fields of thought have the potential to deepen our understanding and freshen our perspective. Metaphors that come to be commonplace in our theoretical worlds run the risk of becoming deadening metaphors that can constrict our creative responsiveness to each unique analytic moment.

On Recognizing the Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Other: A Discussion of “Recognition as: Intersubjective Vulnerability in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue,” by Donna Orange

The author asks Donna Orange to practice her form of recognition in regard to other recognition theories; to “enter the bottle” of the “other's” theory—basically, Jessica Benjamin's version of intersubjectivity and mutual recognition seen through a clinical case illustrating recognition and intersubjectivity as a mutual phenomenon. The author suggests the material shows no “Hegelian imperative” for the analyst to demand a reciprocal recognition for what is given to the patient, nor an expectation of a “Buddhist-style Nirvana” of perfect “subject–to-subject” relating achieved through a “magical mutual process.” Instead, it illustrates Winnicott's “destruction and survival” as a human dynamic by which meanings are challenged and made more real. The dynamic of destruction/creation is more complex and paradoxical than the secure holding with which Orange appears to equate Winnicott's views of recognition. The larger question is whether the disparate paradigms of Orange and Benjamin can each genuinely recognize the fundamental existential truths encoded in the other.

Recognition Revisited: Commentaries on Donna Orange's (2008), “Recognition as: Intersubjective Vulnerability”

Recognition Revisited: Commentaries on Donna Orange's (2008), “Recognition as: Intersubjective Vulnerability”

Commentary on Donna Orange's, “Recognition as: Intersubjective Vulnerability in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue”

This article critiques Orange's review of the phenomenon of recognition in contemporary psychoanalytic literature. In particular I note that she engages in something of a misreading of recognition as it is described and explained in Relational psychoanalysis. By focusing on “mutual recognition” without considering its dialectic, “mutual negation” Orange misconstrues as in kind of coercive requirement by the analyst for her subjectivity be recognized. Missing from Orange's understanding of mutual recognition is that it is a corrective to mutual negation, the latter of which involves each parties experience of being misrecognized by the other, and, that in some cases devolves into states of “mutual inductive identification.” Under this circumstance, each feels themselves becoming more and more constrained by the respective roles in which each experience themselves cast. The misfortune of Oranges misreading is that it undermines areas in which both Relational psychoanalysis and Intersubjective Systems Theory can be seen as both overlapping and augmenting each other and can lend to the novel clinical model building in which I for one engage in both positing the role of Improvisation in treatment as well as an intersubjective/relational approach to couples therapy.

Can We Recognize Each Other? Response to Donna Orange

The author responds to Orange's critique of her theory of recognition, which asserts that relational intersubjective theory replaces analytic empathy with an imperative that the patient recognize the analyst's subjectivity. She agrees with Orange that the therapeutic stance is based on empathizing with the patient but argues that it should allow the patient to gradually experience the analyst as a separate subject. Recognition is not imposed but rather a relieved appreciation that this separate person does not need to be omnipotently managed by a caretaker child desperately trying to suppress or regulate his own needs. This idea of recognition follows Winnicott's notion that the analyst external subjectivity arises by disconfirming the patient's fantasy of “destroying” a weak or retaliatory object. Orange's position implies that only one partner at a time can be subject, hence implicitly reproduces the very subject-object structure that theories of intersubjectivity were meant to solve.

Reply to Donna Orange and Carol Munschauer

Reply to Donna Orange and Carol Munschauer

Does or Should the Past Go Away?: Commentary on Paper by Donna M. Orange

In Donna Orange's interesting paper, psychoanalysis is put into dialogue with philosophy as a royal road for questioning certain essentialist habits of thought as Orange asks us to consider the continued viability of certain overly freighted theoretical descriptors given recent shifts in theoretical assumptions. Instead of being viewed as neutral, timeless, culturally disembodied descriptors, our psychoanalytic lexicon is itself sociohistorically grounded in a particular tradition or assumptive context. Thus, given recent shifts in the assumptions on which psychoanalysis is grounded, the continued use of terms from a previous world view or context, without explicit reflection, is, according to Orange, at the least, problematic. The present commentary seeks to raise questions about the reasonableness of Orange's claims—including the use of reason itself as a way into this problem-space. In short, it is argued that the semantic structure of many words in a natural language lexicon derives from the fact of our embodiment—such that the controversial terms are claimed to rest on a background of prereflective, bodily based experiences that exist as echoes saturating the use of such terms. To strip our theoretical discourse of the use of the terms in question would seriously jeopardize losing the layers of sedimented meanings based on unconscious associations that echo through their continued use.