Prologue: Otherness

In recent years the noun “other” has worked its way through the culture and emerged as the verb “to other” – meaning to reduce someone to a mere external representation, lacking depth and interiority, and thus easing the way for us to discount or destroy that person. The phenomenon of othering goes so against the ethos of our psychoanalytic tribe (which claims to self the other, as opposed to other the self) and yet has become such a prominent experience in our world that many of us have put the problem of the other on a par with that of the self, a problem that lights up core values in our field and core vulnerabilities in the individual. The writers in this issue have confronted the problem from two positions, one positive, one negative. We can describe the two positions by the questions they bring up. On the positive side, what does it mean to try to know or love an other as one would know or love oneself? What does that do for the other? What does that do for the self? On the negative side, what does it mean to other a person or a group? What does that do to the other? What does that do to the self?

John Riker opens the issue with a bird’s eye view of the self/other problem from the perspective of Hegel, who sees the human animal as split between being a subject and an object. As subjects, we are “sheer openness” and feel ourselves to be infinite. As objects, we are finite mortals, formed by social and physical forces, not so much free as defined, prejudiced, limited in vision. For Hegel, the self-consciousness necessary for a human being to become a subject depends on recognition by others, leading to a futile life and death struggle through history in which one will emerge as a “master” and another as a “slave,” but in which neither is free, as neither can be fully recognized by the other. Hegel’s answer: the management of desire by a rational mind devoted to a universal ideal of mutual recognition. In an important critique, Riker argues that Hegel (and Freud f