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This interesting and important book rests upon and offers readers a very accessible, in-depth encounter between the work of Jean Laplanche and
the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. At its heart is the assertion that the ethical stance of the psychoanalyst goes far beyond the pragmatic level of a set of professional obligations or commitments. Rather, psychoanalytic ethics is related to something that is enigmatic, fundamental to the human condition, and that is at the root of all human relatedness. It is a consequence of the challenges provoked and the developmental processes initiated by the inevitable and necessary asymmetry and primal seduction of the mother-infant relationship that is reactivated in the transference by the analytic situation.
As Scarfone describes in the book's excellent preface, the analyst is called upon to acknowledge that through the offer and performance of the analysis, what is reinstated is a situation of primal seduction in which the analyst “is required not to make any deliberate use whatsoever of the influence that such a seductive framework affords” (Scarfone, p. xvi). What Chetrit-Vatine then argues so effectively is that “listening to the other in the responsible way afforded by the Freudian method … eminently incarnate[s] Levinassian ethics” (Scarfone, p. xvii).
Levinas defined ethics as responsibility for the other and described it as the first philosophy. He believed that the encounter with the face of another human being initiates a “summons” to become aware of one's ethical responsibility for the other (p. 5). This formulation, rooted in the infant's helplessness and need, and inevitably evocative of memories of one's own infantile helplessness, is reminiscent of Freud's assertion that “the initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives.”1
Chetrit-Vatine links Levinas's ethical challenge in the primal mother-infant relationship to that of Laplanche's description of the primal situation that exists bet