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Imagine this: you are a candidate at an analytic institute, and you have been recruited to spend a few hours with a visiting analytic scholar of some repute who will be spending a few days teaching at your institute. And you find yourself lingering on a road that overlooks a sea cove with waves splashing against the rocks. And blue sky. And interesting greenery on the hillside. And you begin to enjoy a conversation together. And you find that you don’t need to cater to the scholar’s need to be esteemed, to be treated with great deference. Instead, the conversation is casual, playful, intimate, and this person seems to be as genuinely interested in you, as you are in her. And you are not intimidated! That analyst would be Donna Orange, of course.
When Donna was in Australia, I suggested that two friends of mine, a married couple who knew Donna’s writings well, could drive Donna and her dear husband, Don, to some coastal sights. Sally described the conversation they had with Donna: “she was mundane, ordinary and lovely—and I mean that in the most impressive way. We had a laugh, ate together, enjoyed looking at the Jacaranda trees on the north shore and just spent a lovely time with them both.”
I know such an experience is familiar to many. Obviously, her supervisees and patients know how deeply Donna’s attentiveness and connection could be felt. And many others who knew her well, or even those who had only one or two conversations, feel a special connection to our memories of a “being-with,” that lives as a treasure in one of the pockets in our hearts.
As a philosopher, psychoanalyst and teacher, she is credited with shepherding us into what has been labelled, the “ethical turn” in psychoanalysis. She taught us the humane power of a hermeneutical process. She certainly lived and interacted in ways that lived the credo she articulated. To call it an “ethical” turn honors her scholarly rootedness in philosophy, as well as her earlier years as a religious (a Catholic nun, t