Sigmund Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be an ethical enterprise and was disappointed that his theory did not, in his own words, make "the analysts themselves better, nobler or stronger of character." According to Paul Marcus in Being for the Other (Marquette University Press), Freudian analysis and its offshoots have fallen short for not putting ethics "at the center of its theorizing and practice."
To plug the moral gap in contending psychoanalytic narratives, Marcus offers the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95), the French-Jewish philosopher already regarded by other scholars as one of the last century's most important ethical thinkers. No less a postmodern titan as Jacques Derida wrote that Levinas "changed the course of philosophic reflection in our time," yet he remains obscure in the English-speaking world. Marcus, supervising and training analyst for the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, offers Being for the Other in an effort to call attention to Levinas' body of work and its application to psychotherapy. Specifically, Marcus proposes that Levinas can form the basis of a "better psychoanalysis," not supplanting Freudianism but re-anchoring it to the best of Freud's humanistic concerns.
In essence, Levinas restated the Golden Rule as the basis for an ethical life, stressing that the logic of unethical lives led to his imprisonment in Nazi Europe and the murder of his parents and brother in the Holocaust, a catastrophe premised by a pair of savage world wars. Levinas wasn't alone in wondering how highly developed nations, which "were supposed to epitomize the highest development of Western tradition and culture," twice transformed Europe into a slaughterhouse. From this, Levinas embarked on a critique of the drift of the Western philosophic tradition, in which psychoanalysis is rooted.
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As Levinas trenchantly argued, one of the problems of psychoanalysis and the ground it came from is a tendency toward narcissism, or at least a self-preoccupation that eclipses the ethic of responsibility toward others and the world around us. Awakening to the value of the Other, and balancing this with self-understanding, is integral to well being. It's "Do unto others" conceptualized in terms of psychological integrity as well as moral responsibility.
Along with advancing Levinas' arguments, Marcus' study will encourage attentive readers to seek out Levinas' prolific writings, steeped in Heidegger's phenomenology and Talmudic erudition, dense with poetic metaphor and committed to disrupting conventional modes of thought.
