Plenary Speaker: GEORGE KUNZ

Saturday 13th August, 9.15 - 10.15am

Psychology for the Other: Emmanuel Levinas' distinctive contribution
A phenomenological reflection on the unique face-to-face encounter between self and Other in therapy, research, and education. Inspired by the meta-ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas concerning the enigmatic experience of the self inexorably commanded to be responsible for Others, but unable to understand, fill needs, or feel their feelings. The Other is simultaneously infinitely close, and infinitely far away. The therapist, the researcher, and educator are obligated to those they cannot adequately meet.

The self, on the one hand, tending toward egocentricity, finds itself caught in the paradox of the weakness of its own power: when the therapist, researcher, and educator exercise self-interested power, they sabotage their possibility to help, know, and care for the Other. On the other hand, each is able to transcend their own self-interest and discover the paradox of the power of their weakness: when they weaken self-power and attend to Others, they are invested with ethical power to serve clients, understand subjects, and teach students, and, in turn, discover their own most real identity.

Simplicity, humility, and patience are the lived out expressions of ethical responsibility in relationships with clients, subjects, or students. To philosophically found these expressions, five fundamental distinctions of Levinas will be reviewed: 1) totality and infinity. 2) need and desire, 3) willful activity and radical passivity, 4) self freedom and invested freedom, 5) social equality and ethical inequality, and, 6) the said and saying.

I will make the extravagant claim that ethical responsibility expressed in simplicity, humility, and patience allows a) therapy to be therapeutic, b) research to be open to the subjects' meaning, and c) education to be teaching and learning.

Biography
George Kunz, Seattle University since 1971
Ph.D. from Duquesne Univ. 1975; studied under Amedeo Giorgi.
Undergraduate courses: probably 100 sections of Introduction to Psychology; Phenomenological Psychology; Qualitative Research Methods.
Graduate courses: Phenomenology of the Face; Ethics and Phenomenology.
Founded Seattle University graduate program in Existential-Phenomenological Therapeutic Psychology with Steen Halling, in 1981.
Presentations on Levinas and Psychology at several IHSR conferences.

Publication: (1998) The Paradox of Power and Weakness: Levinas and an alternative paradigm for psychology. State University of New York.
Convener of annual international seminar, "Psychology for the Other," on Levinas in psychology. http://www.seattleu.edu/artsci/psychology/conference/