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If, as Freud and many of his followers argue, the ills bringing people into psychotherapy stem from imprisoning, inward-looking, narcissistic self-obsession, then surely the solution lies in looking outwards to others? According to one writer, however, ‘the majority of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are themselves very narcissistic, and they pass this viewpoint and psychopathology to their patients’ (Symington 2002, p. 3). Another writer complains: ‘The Freudian finds oedipal themes, the Kleinian the presence or absence of the depressive position, the Jungian various stages of individuation, and so on. Psychotherapy, wherever it looks, only finds itself: a form of violence to the Other’ (Heaton 1988, p. 6).
If this is the case then the philosophy of Levinas is highly relevant to psychotherapy. For whereas psychotherapy is arguably beset by its participants foregrounding themselves, Levinas foregrounds the other. But what Levinas writes is terribly difficult to understand. Thank goodness, therefore, for Alford's book. For he makes Levinas's writing comprehensible by comparing it, perhaps surprisingly, to the writing of Iris Murdoch and Theodor Adorno. Fearing entrapment within our inner world erasing the reality of others, says Alford, Murdoch emphasized attending to what is particular to them. In this, he says, Murdoch adopted Simone Weil's notion of attention ‘to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality’ (p. 79). Attention, in these terms, involves stepping back, not being so in thrall either to oneself or to the other that one cannot see clearly the imperfections in each. ‘The chief requirement of the good life’, says a character in Murdoch's novel, The Bell, ‘is just precisely to see reality. And that is something outside us’ (p. 83). Adorno apparently similarly