The proximity of the other. Psychoanalysis and Levinas

This paper attempts to demonstrate the importance of the work of Levinas for an ethics of psychoanalysis that transcends ideological difference. Firstly, the role of language in psychoanalysis and the construction of subjectivity is stressed, secondly, the work of Bion and the containment of anxiety. However, beyond these 'positions', there remains the impossible proximity of the other as singularity, for whom, according to Levinas, I am responsible without limit. For Levinas, as for Freud, the subject is not one, but instead, open, gaping, exposed between being and nothingness, a diachrony, which language, the Law and philosophical systems in general, dissimulate and betray.…