ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the apply Levinas’ work to the fields of psychotherapy and psychology. The social and ideological tendencies which move psychology towards ever more ‘commodified and professionalised’ forms, in Richard House’s term, or to ever more mechanical ‘economic and ideological dogmatism’, as Clegg and Slife write, have been passionately and articulately critiqued for decades. Recognize and are offended because this was not the end that was intended. Psychology: logos of the psyche, a would-be science of behaviours, emotions, mental states and their disorders, intended to describe and explain, and so to inform our psychotherapies, to allow us better to understand and to treat psychic distress. In ‘Epistemology and the hither side’, Clegg and Slife quote Levinas on the inadequacy of thematic knowledge for comprehending the other: ‘the face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure’.
