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David M. Goodman Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2012, 290pp., $30.00, ISBN 978-0820704494
Where, in the current terrain of psychoanalytic practice, is there room for the ethics demanded of the self by the other? In The Demanded Self: Levinasian Ethics and Identity in Psychology, David M. Goodman surveys the critical and practical landscape of psychoanalysis, notes the absence of ethics, and turns to the phenomenology articulated by twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas for a corrective. Levinas, Goodman argues, provides the grounding for a psychology that would not only make room for ethics, but that would fully embrace the ethical imperative by placing the other – as opposed to the self – at its centre. This is not entirely new ground. Among others, C. Fred Alford, George Kunz, Paul Marcus, and Richard N. Williams have taken on wide-ranging reassessments of psychoanalysis in light of Levinas’s oeuvre. Though informed by such work, Goodman extends the grasp of a Levinasian psychoanalysis by suggesting that psychology must be reoriented from the constructs of selfhood that have long defined it. Following Levinas’s phenomenological account of the unbridgeable asymmetry of the other in relation to the self, such a reorientation would lead, Goodman argues, to a psychology inherently more alive to ethics.
In the introduction to The Demanded Self, Goodman frames Levinas’s philosophy in contrast to the Western, post-Enlightenment tradition, and in relation to the psychological models generated from that tradition. The alignment of psychologies around scientific epistemologies has been essential, he argues, in according “legitimacy and prestige” (p. 8) to the field and its practical application. But though psychology’s embrace of science has helped legitimize its practice, Goodman suggests that the universality vaunted by scientific epistemology obscures alterity. Otherness that does not conform to a universally agreed-upon truth must not be truth; such c