Otherness

November 16th, 2024 at 2:30PM

Future Event

The notion of Otherness—for all its familiarity and slipperiness—has become so relevant in our era of rapid political polarization that a fresh and interdisciplinary examination of its roots seems in order. This roundtable will bring together philosophers, psychoanalysts, social theorists and historians to trace its origins and significance at multiple levels. 

What is Otherness? When did the concept first appear in Western discourse? Where does it arise in ordinary development? When did “Othering” become a verb?

For phenomenologists—and infancy researchers–the awareness of other minds is thought to be a normative, even constitutive aspect of our very capacity for what Husserl termed, “transcendental subjectivity.” Infants become aware that objects and persons in the world are really there because of an implicit sense that they are available—or could be–to other experiencing subjects in a shared social world. And yet the capacity to maintain the sense of the other as a like-minded subject becomes a never-ending struggle—both in early infancy, and, as Hegel intimated, in the broad historical sense: We seem to live with the perennial possibility of either unwittingly erasing the Other as subject—or being erased by the Other in turn. Can attending to the developmental and historical roots of Otherness—and Othering–help us understand—and even transcend the sort of Master-Slave dilemma that has so defined our current political moment—where, in the psychoanalyst/social theorist Jessica Benjamin’s terms, “only one can live”? 

Participants:

Jessica Benjamin

Co-founder, Stephen Mitchell Relational Studies Center
Psychoanalyst

View Papers / Presentations »

Jessica Benjamin is best known as the author of The Bonds of Love (1988), which brought a feminist intersubjective perspective into the psychoanalytic field, and of “Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness” (2004), the basis for her recent book Beyond Doer and done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third (2018). This… read more »

Janice Edwards

Professor, School of Social Work, Howard University

Dr. Janice Edwards is a clinical social worker. She received her MSW degree from Howard University School of Social Work and her PhD from the National Catholic School of Social Work, Catholic University. Dr. Edwards has served as a Professor in the School of Social Work at Howard University from the academic years 2011-12 to… read more »

Daniel Goldin

Editor, Psychoanalytic Inquiry
Training & Supervising Analyst, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis

View Papers / Presentations »

Daniel Goldin serves as editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He is a training and supervising analyst on the faculty of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and has written numerous articles for Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalysis: Self and context and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. His book Storying in Psychoanalysis and in the Everyday World will be published by Routledge this year. Daniel Goldin and… read more »

George Makari

Director, The DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry
Professor of Psychiatry, Weill-Cornell Medical College

Historian, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist George Makari is the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts, and Professor of Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College, where for over two decades he has led efforts to integrate humanistic scholarship into mind/brain medicine and science. His latest book, Of Fear and Strangers:  A… read more »

Daniel Posner

Assistant Clinical Professor, Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Daniel Posner is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he teaches and supervises psychiatry residents in psychodynamic therapy.  His writing explores a range of topics through the multiple lenses of psychoanalysis, enactive phenomenology, epistemic justice and infancy research. He has published work in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Psychoanalysis, Self… read more »

Eyal Rozmarin

Psychoanalyst & writer

Eyal Rozmarin, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and writer. His research takes place at the intersection of psychoanalysis and social theory and explores the relations between the subjective and collective aspects of human life. He has written about how psycho-social constellations such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ideology, nationality and history form our sense of self, our identifications… read more »

Jasper St. Bernard

Visiting Assistant Professor, History, Rhodes College

Jasper St. Bernard is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Rhodes College. His academic work currently focuses on African American philosophy, focusing primarily on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His recently completed dissertation explored the anti-lynching work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. While Jasper’s work focuses on the social/political thought of black people during the… read more »

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