Unsuccessful encounters with the other - A psycho-analytic approach to Emmanuel Levinas

The difficulties of the encounter of the I with the other are explained on the basis of a clinical-psycho-analytical case vignette dealing with a narcissistically colored interaction with a young woman going through a post-adolescent identity crisis. This women's self-destructive and relation-destructive history of the "new sufferings of the soul" seems to reflect a pattern of modern intersubjectivity. The contradictions of such a clinical encounter with the other are then sharpened and deepened on the basis of central concepts of the phenomenology of EMMANUEL LEVINAS, according to which the subject's path can be described as a path "from being to the existing": from an initially objectless being of the mere "there is" the subject develops via an intermediate stage of pre-objects ("abjects") to the existing as the world of object relations in which the human desire can develop intersubjectively. This path is made up of stages of "missing the encounter" (LACAN) in the dialectical sequence of which deficit always functions as dynamic motor of intersubjectivity. Only through a recognition of this deficit could a therapeutical ethics of caring, of being there for the other, be developed plausibly and in accordance with LEVINAS. Put in this ethics too, there is still to be felt the destructive underground of a traumatic threat to all intersubjectivity, designated by LEVINAS as "illeity", as insuspendable absence of the other ("trace").