A Stranger in a Strange Land
The Question of how to be with an ‘other’
The task undertaken in psychotherapy as a client, can be described in Heiddegerian terms as the ‘disclosing of one’s authentic being to oneself’, in other words, attempting to confront oneself honestly.
Here, the intersubjective, what takes place in the encounter between two people, comes to the fore. In order to disclose myself to myself, I cannot simply look inward, nor can I cut myself off from the others, or lose myself in the mass of humanity (Das Mann), but I must appreciate and recognise being ‘in relation’ as fundamental to my own existence.
To quote Heidegger once again, “Knowing oneself is grounded in primordially understanding being-with” (1996, p.116)
Clearly this applies and is a challenge to both client and therapist. As client I am involved in at least two processes: firstly, I enter into the strange world of psychotherapy, a realm with its own distinctive parameters, rules, meanings, and symbolism. Secondly, I enter in a distinct and peculiar sort of relationship with a stranger, an ‘other’, who is doomed to largely remain unknown to me.
This is my context for what is meant to be my own greater self-discovery. Implicit in the remit of gaining greater self-awareness is the suggestion that to a greater or lesser degree I am a stranger to myself. Here the metaphor of the foreigner is useful. As a foreigner, there is a certain logic in not feeling at home, when I am not at home. What is generally felt to be more painful, more frightening, is to not feel at home, when I am ostensibly at home. Then what? Where do I turn to then? It is no surprise that ‘disclosing my authentic self to myself, is a much avoided process. That process of coming to know myself better, more fully, is fraught with possibilities of feeling estranged from myself. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar becomes known. I have entered into the strange, sometimes scary land of all the dimensions of myself – and I undertake this unravelling within the context of a relationship. Again, its only within the context of a relationship that I can come to know myself and yet, paradoxically, being in a relationship is a complex and challenging enterprise.
In fact, much of what takes place within psychotherapy is precisely the struggle to be-with-another, a struggle both for therapist and client. Therapist and client enter into a particular sort of relationship, one that would not necessarily be described as fully reciprocal. Each comes to it, with different expectations of each other and themselves.
For example, my task as therapist might be to attempt to enter into the world of my client; to acknowledge my client as ‘other’, while recognising we are both one of the others, part of humanity.
If this is my goal, then I have to take a stance that permits me to enter into a relationship that allows for sameness and difference. I have to go beyond my ‘self’ in order to attempt to engage with my client in their process of discovering themselves more fully. This means truly acknowledging that my client is ‘other’ than me, OTHER NOT SAME (not another me). In fact as Buber tells us, this is actually the only way we can really be in relation.
But this is no mean feat, and I believe is often an issue throughout the therapeutic relationship. In order to ‘seemingly’ be with my client, how often do I deny their difference from me? To what extent does acknowledging my client’s distinctiveness rock my sense of me?
The truth is that while the therapeutic endeavour is portrayed as the journey of the client, that client’s journey impinges on the therapists. If I, as therapist, am truly to engage with the uniqueness of my client, including their difference from me, truly to allow my own understanding of existence to be challenged and scrutinized, then it is me, as much as my client, who enters in to an uncertain, unsettling, at times, terrifying journey.
Spinelli describes this as ‘unknowing’ (1997), daring to unravel what I think I know. Involved is the recognition that being in relation means being touched and perhaps being changed by the encounter. As Levinas describes:
“the work thought radically is indeed a movement from the Same towards the Other, which never returns to the Same. To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we would like to oppose the story of Abraham leaving his homeland forever, for a still unknown land and even forbidding his son to be brought back to its point of departure.” (Levinas,
1974, p.191)
So I end where I began with a stranger in a strange land; but while at times frightening, perhaps on reflection, not so strange. Perhaps the lifelong task that has been set us as human beings is how to engage with the ‘other’ while at the same time always discovering and rediscovering ourselves. At the heart of the challenge appears to be the fear of the unknown, in ourselves and the ‘other’. How that fear becomes translated into curiosity and interest, how the unfamiliar can be welcomed rather than masked or shunned, is the question that remains: how to go out from my self to an ‘other’.
Harriet Goldenberg
References
Buber, M., 1965, Between Man and Man, New York: MacMillan Publishing Co.
Heidegger, M., 1996, Being and Time: trans.by J Macquarrie and E Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers
Levinas, E., 1974, En decourvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (3rd ed), Paris: Vrin, as in Critchley, 1992,p.109.
the workshop around this thematic will return on at 4 Manchester Square, on the 22nd of March 2025.
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