Symposium on Sameness and Difference in the Consulting Room: Introduction: (I am) Everyday People

In a footnote to his essay “The Uncanny,” Freud (1919) described the experience of sitting in a railway car and seeing “an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and traveling cap” (a figure Freud believed to be not at all like himself), who, he came to realize, was merely his own reflection in the mirror. Freud was taken aback by suddenly and unexpectedly meeting this “other,” in effect, his own image. In his essay, Freud developed the idea of the “double” (or “other”), where “the one possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other…. So that [the] self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own—in other words, by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self” (p. 234). Freud posited that there is something at once familiar and unfamiliar about the other that is unnerving and disrupts the self's continuity of experience.

Similarly, the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1990) wrote:

[I]t is the other person, who disrupts our complacency, our sameness, and our self-sufficiency, and in the attention he/she commands establishes the self that we are in reality…. So the primary sense of subjectivity is not a private universe, a sealed interiority, but an unparalleled attention, a response to what is outside, the most outside of which is the other human being [p. xxi].

Both writers seem to imply we cannot ignore the impact of the other on the self. For if we do, we risk a disruption in our very self's construction.

Contemporary analysts (Searles, 1975; Hoffman, 1983; Aron, 1991; Renik, 1995) have discussed the effect of the patient (other) on the analyst's (self-) experience. But what of instances where there are clear differences in “otherness,” such as differences of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, country of origin, to name a few? In a society where “it is clear that race and ethnicity exist as a potent force in the social milieu in which