conversation with
Donna orange

"Thirty-some years in psychoanalytic practice and have taught me to tune in to what Freud called the unconscious, to voices silenced within ourselves and others by non-responsiveness by fear of knowing ourselves, by the violence of many kinds. It has taught me to notice the ways I am silencing patients or supervisee even while trying to help them, complicated their anguished attempts to escape from confusion and unknowing" (Orange, 2020).

For years psychoanalyst and philosopher Donna Orange encourages the psychoanalytic community to see the other's face and hear the stranger's voice. In her last book, Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics (2020), she focuses on hearing what therapists need to hear and what remains unheard? Orange prefers "hearing" over "listening because, as she writes,  "Listening is my activity, hearing is my receptivity, my vulnerability, my willingness to be affected by the other." For Orange, to hear silenced voices always involves an ethical capacity that demands something from us. Orange thinks psychoanalysts actually have a unique contribution to make not only to their suffering patients but also to a communal and political change. This is the topic of her book Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2019).

Another thread that runs through Orange's writing is a deep commitment to intersubjectivity. Orange calls analysts to replace hermeneutics of suspicion with a hermeneutics of trust and reject concepts such as projective identification or transference rooted in one-person psychology (one of her papers co-authored with Stolorow and Atwood is titled: Projective Identification Begone!, 1998).

Aner Govrin and Sharon Ziv-Beiman will discuss with Donna Orange questions, such as how silences cooperate in violence and oppression. What do psychotherapists prefer to silence, how we improve our listening to the other, and can we work with unconscious phantasies without hermeneutics of suspicion?