The Conversation

Where the first episode of our two-part series on "otherness" looked to infancy and to our essential nature to understand the other and othering, this second part considers societal sources of our tendency to subjugate those different from us.  We don't simply project what is shameful in ourselves into the foreign, such that it gets incorporated in the culture and exploited by leaders. Our reactions to otherness seep down into us via the culture in the first place. In this view, the structure of the mind repeats the politics of the world as much as vice versa. To tell the story, we have drawn from original interviews with psychoanalysts Jessica Benjamin, Cynthia Chalker, George Makari, Donna Orange, Eyal Rozmarin, John Riker, Robert Stolorow and Koichi Togashi, as well as from interviews with the philosopher Shaun Gallagher and cultural critic L.M Sacasas.Topics Covered in this episode: The Still Face experiment, the Moral Third, Fanon’s phenomenology, the origin of the term Xenophobia, Israel-Palestine, States of Exception, Levinas and the Face, Alienated Recognition, Walter Lippmann and the birth of the stereotype, and much more!  

What do we mean when we speak of "the other" and of "othering?" This first part of our two-part series on "otherness" looks at the question of the "other" and at the problem of "othering" through the multiple lenses of psychoanalysis, philosophy and child development. To tell the story, we have drawn from original interviews with psychoanalysts Jessica Benjamin, Cynthia Chalker, George Makari, Donna Orange, John Riker and Robert Stolorow, as well as from interviews with the philosopher Shaun Gallagher, and the child psychologist and psychobiologist Colwyn Trevarthen.The second part of this two-part episode will be available shortly and will  focus on how structures of power shape and constrain our concept of the other. This upcoming episode will feature original material from all the thinkers featured in the current episode  as well as additional material culled form interviews with Eyal Rozmarin, Koichi Togashi and L.M. Sacasas.

Leaders exist in a dynamic relationship with their followers. That's our starting point. Based on an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry edited by Michael Maccoby, Ph.D. and Mauricio Cortina, M.D., our conversation traces this dynamic across worlds and time, from our nomadic prehistory to Hitler's rise in Weimer Germany to the BLM movement in the United States.