&_copy; David Lichtenstein, Ph.D., February 2002
The attacks of last September opened a space for the other which has yet to be repaired. In addition to mourning the tragic loss of life, the challenge of that otherness demands extraordinary psychic work.
Many of us, watching the attack from the streets of New York, worked hard to grasp its meaning even as it was taking place. That people were intentionally responsible only became clear when the second plane hit. Before that it was a common impression that we were witnessing a tragic accident. So radical a sense of otherness, of an incomprehensible difference, would be attached to conscious intent, that many first rejected that possibility. "No one in his right mind could possibly do a thing like that!" Akin to the not-I, a sense of not-We emerges, that is, not we civilized, rational human beings. We (human beings) don't do things like this. It is other than human, inhuman, to act this way. Of course it was an intentional attack by rational people, although even now this seems too strange to be true. Religious trances and notions of evil cultic devotion are proposed as explanations for incomprehensible actions. The work of otherness confronts us still. Psychoanalysts, if they can help at all, can encourage and foster a certain working through of this otherness. A coming to terms with human acts that are tragic and criminal but nevertheless, still human. My writing here is meant to be a contribution to that effort.
The other (das Andere) can be found as a psychoanalytic concept in Freud, but was not much developed there (cf. Laplanche, 1999). It appears in Lacan (1998) and in the work of other French psychoanalysts (Laplanche, 1999). On the most basic level, the concept refers to the alien character of the unconscious from the point of view of the conscious self, the unconscious as other. However, it also has been used to convey the sense that someone or something is acting from that alien place, i.e. that there is an other there in that other scene that is the unconscious . The other as a who not just a what. This conceptualization generates intriguing questions about the relationship between the other as an unconscious entity and the other (der Andere) in the interpersonal sense, i.e. other people. The dynamic interplay between the two senses of the other, that the unconscious other affects and is affected by our experience of others, should not lead us to conflate the two. To do so is to lose an appreciation of the force of the unconscious in our mental lives. However, the two senses of the word are too close to keep neatly apart. The other is an entity of the mind and draws upon its unconscious structure. It is not an entity of the social world except insofar as social relations are filtered by the light of unconscious mental processes.
One way to describe the goal of psychoanalysis is that it enhances our ability to get along with the other, as that which speaks from the place of the unconscious. The attacks on September 11 put this ability to a rigorous test. Reflecting on the meaning of this view, on what is meant by the other in this context and the subjective difficulties engendered by it, offers an opportunity to work through our recent experience as the targets of these attacks.
In point of fact, getting along with the other can never be taken for granted in human life. It is only the ongoing work of culture that enables it to take place at all-human nature doesn't guarantee it- and it is the unique place of psychoanalysis within the array of cultural practices to be knowingly directed toward this end. According to this view, psychoanalysis is a theory and practice primarily concerned with the subject's relation to the other.
The italicized form other may be used to distinguish it from the more mundane sense of the other, as when we speak of the other party in a conversation. The ordinary other is like us, a more or less familiar speaker or actor, another person like our self. The other in the formal sense used above, however, is always characterized by radical difference. When used to refer to an unconscious wish, for instance, it is other insofar as it is not recognized as one's own. It is strange, unfamiliar, wholly unlike one's recognized wishes. Once that constitutive difference is bridged, it is no longer unconscious and no longer other. The other in this formal sense is that which is radically other, that is constituted by some apparently unbridgeable difference. Any other person may be experienced as other at a point where there is perceived to be a fundamental or constitutive difference. It is thus a social event, common enough, that rests upon a psychic fulcrum.
Sexuality is important in psychoanalysis because it presents the subject with a primary and inescapable constitutive difference. It is the confrontation with this difference and the repression of infantile bisexuality that grounds unconscious sexuality. The other sex becomes other and the subject is more or less dumfounded by this rupture until bridges are constructed and the difference, although never vanishing, ceases to be unbearable. The otherness of the other sex remains in effect but through a certain working through including that done in psychoanalysis, that otherness may be less absolute and hence less threatening. An element of this work is seeing in oneself elements that were taken to be wholly other, an identification with the other sex where previously there had been only radical disjunction.
Likewise the radical difference inherent in the separation between self and other is initially constitutive in its very form, infant and mother, and, we surmise, more or less unbearable for the infant until the various bridges of thought and language and the mechanisms of identification develop to cross the gap. The I and the not-I are formed and the latter is associated with the other scene that is the unconscious. The fundamental gap between self and other remains, beneath the bridges as it were, with the potential to reopen. In living as social beings we are always confronted by the potential otherness of the other. It is one of the things we negotiate, like sexual difference, more or less well. Here is the parallel between getting along with the not-I as the other person and the not-I as the other, the unconscious.
It is relevant here to consider how, for the infant, the not-I is the receptacle for all that is bad. The origin of the other as not only radically different but inherently threatening is in this split between the I and the not-I and the assignment of destructive potential to the latter.
The shift from other to other, as a gap opening in interpersonal relations, occurs often enough in ordinary life. For example when someone close happens to say something that one finds utterly inconceivable. There may be a break, a rift in the familiar status of mutual understanding and the otherness of the other is suddenly experienced . The gap may be bridged over with further dialogue or perhaps left open as we tolerate a certain level of otherness in all relationships. Such common rifts are characteristic of intersubjectivity. No one goes through life as a seamless experience of fellow feeling and untroubled union. The best that we can achieve is that such rifts not be too disruptive, cause too much anxiety, defensive or symptomatic reactions.
On a grand scale, such was the case on Sept. 11. Once convinced that someone, worse still several people acting together, would do a thing very much like that, indeed had done this very thing the observer was at that moment struggling to understand, there was a gap, a rupture, so profound in the sense of the other, that all efforts to bridge the gap seemed doomed to failure. Such futility often accompanies the confrontation with someone who is psychotic: nothing can be done he/she is insane. When an act seems inherently inconceivable all efforts to conceive meaning may be abandoned.
Instead the gap may be papered over with absolute proclamations of one sort or another that take the place of any real work toward meaning. The use of the word "evil" served this function in the initial days after the attack. "Terror" has come to be the lasting signifier serving not as an occasion for a progressively more articulated discourse regarding the social, historical, and political meaning of our current crisis, but as a substitute for that articulation, a condensation that can serve, symptom-like, to convey meaning only if it is allowed to open further discourse not if it is taken as the end point, the truth in itself.
One consequence of this symptomatic condensation of thought and language is a constriction in the political realm. The psychic and the social interact here in ways that psychoanalysts need to make clear. The word "terror" ( or its variants in "terrorism", "terrorist") taken as a self-evident truth leads to such absurd formulations as the War on Terror. What can that mean? Terror is a human affect that is often considered a reasonable response to conditions of war. Thus to fight a war on terror is so absurd on the face of it that one must wonder what is going on when such phrases appear. Of course one know that what is actually meant is not a war on terror per se but a war on those who incite terror. The ellipsis is familiar in its form: the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty. In each case there are terms left out that allow for a convenient abbreviation, but also a risk of distortion. The war on drugs was perhaps the best example: no one was ever sure quite what it meant even now when it has been declared a failure. What we need in the place of such phrases as the War on Terror is an enduring effort to find historical meaning in the actions of those we are opposing as well as in our own actions.
Like the work of psychoanalysis to find meaning in nightmares, in repetitive self-destructive symptoms, in seemingly useless inhibitions, work must be done to recognize human actions in the otherness of violence. Human actions that, therefore, have meaning, even if they must be condemned, punished, and stopped from recurring.
It is the task of psychoanalysts to support a certain articulation of meaning. An articulation that lessens the threatening character of the other. Through this articulation difference is no longer constituted as radical and unbridgeable but rather as the difference that exists among links in a chain. The elements are distinguishable but not by virtue of a fundamentally different status. The unconscious wish or the unthinkable actions of another are rendered are rendered conscious and thinkable. Their difference exists but not as radically other.
Thought and speech may stand as substitutes for actions but there are times when acting is in fact the best course. Acting to stop criminals, to punish murderers, to protect innocents, is such a time. However, when that action is accompanied by the sort of work of articulation that allows the sort of linking just described it is fundamentally different than when it occurs under the cover of meaningless slogans and obfuscatory simplifications that preserve and indeed perpetuate a sense of radical otherness. Punitive actions in the context of radical otherness have no claim of proportion. They risk becoming unlimited, a risk too often realized in history.
Mindless revenge and jingoistic calls to absolute war offer no traction, no footholds, for the slippery work of meaning. Without that work, those who seek to redress their pain or loss, simply pass it on with the dim awareness that such a game of hot potato must inevitably lead to more suffering for all the players. To situate police and/or military action within a context where the punishable offenses are recognized as categorically human actions, no matter how they may violate moral and legal rules, allows the punitive action to remain ethical even if it must involve violence.
Those who planned and carried out the attacks of September 11 and those who provided them and continue to provide them with support are misguided criminals. Their moral and political errors can be described and refuted. Their continued action must be prevented; however, viewing them as pure evil, or as madmen, or as inhuman closes off the important recognition that they are, in fact, all too tragically human. To see their tragic human proportion allows us to better stop them from acting in the future, to punish them where appropriate and in a manner that is appropriate and protects us from an enduring specter of the other.
Just as it may be the analysts role in therapy to inquire into a particular fear, to encourage the analysand to explore the actual dimensions of the threat and consider whether it is reasonable to allow that fear to play such a powerful and controlling role in life. So it is the psychoanalysts function in the social discourse to encourage the demystification of social fears. That killers exist is profoundly distressing. That they are human, not monsters; that they are cruel, misguided, and dangerous but not pure evil in the metaphysical sense is not only the source of some comfort, it is the basis of a subjective rebalancing, a restoration of equilibrium, removing the specter of the other from our understanding of the other.
Much has been written about the affective responses to the attacks of last September and of the role of psychotherapists as guides and counselors in the process of understanding and abreacting these emotions. What I have presented above is not meant to reduce the importance of that work of fostering the expression of fears, anger, and grief. However, the abreaction of emotion alone is not sufficient. There must be a framework of meaning for that expression. That framework, I propose, is the gradual movement from the appearance of the other as wholly alien to recognizably, tragically human.
References:
Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. New York: Norton.
Laplanche, J. (1999). Essays on Otherness, New York: Routledge
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