From existentialism to post- existentialism: the ethics of the relational

The work of Emmanuel Levinas has been particularly important to me. Here, some implications of Levinas are considered in critiquing the growing development of relational approaches to psychotherapy. Levinas’s idea that we are subject to putting the other first is one of the most important influences on me in thinking about a postmodern existentialism. In this chapter I contrast him with Buber, who, while still considered to be of great value, in contrast starts with the ‘I’ in ‘I-Thou’ and therefore more dangerously potentially encourages starting and returning to the ‘I’.