ABSTRACT
All meetings of human beings imply a meeting with what we experience as strange, the stranger or what we may call the otherness of the other.
In this chapter I will discuss the developmental basis for our relation to otherness and how this becomes a problem in different pathological states of mind. Symbolising the other and our relations to the other requires an ability to endure ambivalence and to create psychic space that allows for the not already defined and/or known. In psychosis and in the traumatised mind the other tends to become one- or two-dimensional and frightening not allowing the “new” in otherness to take shape. In these states of mind foreclosure and denial of otherness dominates. In other conditions we see restrictions and narrowness in relation to otherness. A psychoanalytic process will potentially imply an increasing openness to otherness.
It will be argued that psychoanalysis as a treatment and a model for reflection may open the space for the ability to appreciate and endure the meeting with otherness, the strange and the “new” both on an individual and a group level.
