Commentary

It is an honor to be asked to respond to Warren Poland's fine paper, “Witnessing and Otherness.” I have thought quite a bit about the second half of his subject, less about what he calls witnessing, which I had assumed to be an essential aspect of empathic listening. But I think he is right: witnessing is sufficiently painful for the analyst, and important for the patient, to deserve recognition on its own. Let me begin with “otherness.”

It is an ordinary, undeniable fact that although you can have pain at the same spot along your sciatic nerve as I have along mine, you cannot have my pain. In fact, you and I can have the “same” pain only by having different pains. Subject our two bodies to stimulation of just the same nerve fibers, and you and I will still be suffering our separate pains. It is another such fact that you cannot know my mind in quite the way you can sometimes know your own. Nor can you read my mind in the way you read the pages of a book, for one thing because minds are not visible in just the way that books are. And it is yet another that you cannot see the world from exactly my perspective, that is, the perspective defined not only by my exact position in space and time, but also by my memories, my associations, and so on. I call these facts and others in the same family “the facts of separateness.”

We often preface our words of advice by saying “If I were you…”; but of course, no matter how entwined our paths, I never will be, can be, you. Even coming as close as one can to being another is so demanding that we seldom do it; it requires both acknowledging the ways in which you and I are similar—and therefore vulnerable to many of the same sorts of pain—and honoring the differences between us. The acknowledgment of similarities is difficult because it means recognizing that with a turn of fortune I too could be overwhelmed with shame, or beside myself with terror, as you are; that only by luck and for the moment am I in a position less painful tha