My Other’s Keeper: Radical Ethics and Visions of Community

My Other’s Keeper: Radical Ethics and Visions of Community

Donna Orange (Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NYU)
Tuesday, March 7, 2017 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Thinking about community, badly needed, is in short supply in current public discourse.  We will step back here to consider what meanings community might bring now, how it can be used to include and exclude others, depending on intersubjective context. We will ask how presumption of common humanity relates to conceptions of community, and above all, what then, a radical ethics, as found in the theorists who emerged from other “dark times,” may require of us now.

Donna Orange is educated in both philosophy and clinical psychology. She also teaches at ISIPSé (Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychology of the Self and Relational Psychoanalysis), Milano and Roma. In New York, she teaches and supervises at IPSS, the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. She runs study groups in philosophy, in the history of psychoanalysis, and in contemporary relational psychoanalysis. She is author of Emotional Understanding: Studies in Psychoanalytic Psychology; Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies, and The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011). With George Atwood and Robert Stolorow she has written Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice and Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis. With Roger Frie, she co-edited Beyond Postmodernism: Extending the Reach of Clinical Theory. Her philosophical studies include pragmatism, ethics, phenomenology, and many topics in the history of philosophy. In psychoanalysis, she wonders about the ways in which traumatic experience and fixed ideas, including especially her own, interact to inhibit dialogue and hospitality.

Click here to listen to a recording of Donna Orange’s talk for the 2016-17 IHC series: Community Matters.

Sponsored by the IHC series Community Matters and the English Department’s Literature and the Mind Program.