ABSTRACT
Levinas’s notion of the “face-to-face” is a crucial contribution to a consideration of what occurs in the analytical relationship. The crucial challenge of Levinas’s work is that of thinking, questioning, differently from any positivistic desire to establish, for example, “truths” or “facts” of depressive states for which we can then formulate “cures”. He shows how in their occurrence, insomnia, fatigue, and indolence are “events”, positions taken in relation to psychoanalystic existence. Levinas sets out on a different path which is to theorize self-identity by exploring it not in terms of a problem of knowledge but as an ethical issue of engaging with how we respond to the otherness of the other person or persons. Levinas’s phenomenological descriptions of the event which produces fatigue and indolence provoke us to begin at the beginning, to slow down and to attend to the experience of recoiling before existence itself.
