"Over thirty-six years in psychoanalytic practice have taught me to tune into what Freud called the "unconscious." I believe he was referring to the voices that are silenced within us, a silencing that is the result of a fear of knowing ourselves, and the activation of various forms of violence. I have learned to notice the ways in which I silence patients or mentees even while I am trying to help them, thereby making it more difficult for them to escape their tormented attempts to escape confusion and unknowing" (Orange, 2020).

For three decades, psychoanalyst and philosopher Donna Orange has encouraged the psychoanalytic community to see the face of the other and hear the voice of the stranger. In her latest book, Psychoanalysis, History and Radical Ethics (2020), she focuses on hearing—what therapists need to hear, and what remains out of earshot? Orange prefers “hearing” to “listening” because, as she writes, “listening is my activity, hearing is my receptivity, my vulnerability, my willingness to be influenced by the other.” For Orange, hearing silenced voices always involves an ethical capacity, which demands action from us. Orange believes that psychoanalysts have the capacity to promote change not only among suffering patients, but also in the political and social realms. This is the theme of her book Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2019).

Another theme throughout her writing is her deep commitment to intersubjectivity. Orange calls on analysts to replace a "hermeneutics of suspicion" with a "hermeneutics of trust" and she rejects concepts such as "projective identification" and "transference" that belong to the psychology of one person (one of her articles, jointly with Stolloro and Atwood, is called: Projective Identification Begone! , 1998).

Aner Guvrin and Sharon Ziv-Beiman will talk with Donna Orange about silence as an ally of oppression, what therapists prefer to silence, how we can improve listening to others, and is it possible to work with unconscious fantasies without a hermeneutics of suspicion?

Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D., is a California-based psychoanalyst and philosopher. She teaches at the New York University Postdoctoral Program and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Research on Subjectivity, New York. Her books include Thinking for Clinicians (2010), The Suffering Stranger (2011), Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians (2016), and Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2017).