Communication breakdown: understandings of the other and caring for others

Abstract

Robert Litman describes four remarkable cases where individuals reveal this repressed knowledge through dream analysis after the suicide of the “other.” In each case, there comes a moment of recognition of the significance of the dream such that the subject realizes culpability. And in each case, this culpability had to do with a communication breakdown that is revealed through psychoanalysis. I want to deconstruct the transference / counter–transference relationship as a symbiotic reciprocity. I do not venture forth unchanged as I transcend who I was through language with others. Language is alteration of subjectivity. I offer a criticism of certain understandings of alterity involved in psychotherapy by examining the general situation of the encounter with others through the peculiar language–event of psychotherapy. I must recognize that the threat of the alterity of the patient is also the promise of my ability to offer help. If we take seriously the transcendence of the language–event of therapy, we see that the process of altering another involves changes for all involved. Keywords: Reversibility, transference, Maurice Merleau–Ponty, Robert Litman, Alterity, Phenomenology, Transcendence, Psychotherapy.