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What I so enjoyed about reading Donna Orange's (2011b) new book, The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice, which is part of her larger project that includes her earlier 2010 book, Thinking For Clinicians, is that she makes so accessible her philosophical ideas, ethics, and clinical values of compassion and emotional availability. I, as a reader with little formal philosophical background, felt cogently engaged with the author throughout the book, writing in the margins, raising questions, and thinking in new ways about how I situate myself along the dimensions that Donna Orange (2011b) delineates. Given Orange's breadth and depth of scholarship in both philosophy and psychoanalysis, she is well-suited to bring together these two
discourses that enliven each other and expand philosophical applications within contemporary psychoanalysis.
Donna Orange (2011b) offers us her wealth of scholarship not only in her accessible, fluent narrative, but also in the background footnotes to make distinctions or to point to other resources for further reading and exploration. In so doing, her ongoing narrative evokes a sense of personal immediacy and clinical relevance that I found engaging, as well as, at times, challenging of my own convictions and assumptions.
In the first two chapters, Orange (2011b) introduces us to a brief history of hermeneutics, then offers commentary on the words and attitudes of a few of her philosophical mentors, especially phenomenologists Hans Georg Gadamer and Emmanuel Levinas, along with five psychoanalysts, who, each in their own way, embrace a hermeneutics of trust in contrast with a hermeneutics of suspicion. An example of a hermeneutics of suspicion, Orange indicates, is the Freudian notion that a patient's statement may be construed to unconsciously disguise, conceal, or to mean the opposite of what the person consciously intended to say—that a person's truth is both revealing and concealing. When a clinical focus or