To Be Continued . . . Donna Orange and Gestalt Therapy

My world darkened when Donna Orange was killed. Her death was a personal loss to me. She was my colleague, friend, and teacher. I studied philosophy in her study group for almost twenty years. These comments will not be about Donna and me, how she became a teacher, a friend, and an exemplar of someone who walked the walk of that which she talked—that is, of a “radical ethics” that is at the root of our relatedness, and of a self that is predicated on a particular posture toward the other. Donna has influenced many Gestalt therapists. They will speak for themselves. It is virtually impossible to identify her influence on me as a Gestalt therapist, but I can identify her as installed in my own approach and occupying a region that belongs to no one else but her. I limit myself here to my sense of Donna and Gestalt therapy. I do the scope of her work no justice.While Donna led the phenomenology study group moving through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, James, Waldenfels, and Gadamer, it was with Emmanuel Lévinas that we spent our most time. She did not hesitate to guide us through some of his minor works and, most importantly, through Lévinas’ (1969, 1981) magna opera, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Donna was writing a Lévinas dictionary at the time of her death. We, inspired by her gentle curiosity, dug deeply not just as phenomenologists but as psychotherapists committed to the field-oriented relational approaches of our modalities. Donna was a good fit for Gestalt therapists who considered psychotherapy to be philosophy put into practice and believed that the rigors of philosophy could inform theory/practice. Her book Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies (Orange 2009) makes this point emphatically. After all, Donna held doctorates in philosophy and psychology. She taught philosophy for years and, most recently, was adjunct faculty at Duquesne University, a leading center for phenomenology. Her teaching style was informed by her commitment to the pragmatism of C. S. Pierce’s maxim to hold ideas lightly and to the hermeneutics of Gadamer, where conversation, uncertainty, and fallibility hold sway.Donna was important to psychoanalysis’ relational turn and further to an intersubjective self-perspective. Her work paralleled Gestalt therapy’s so-called relational turn. Over the decades I spent with her, I could track her deeper and deeper exploration of the limits of prevailing conceptions of relationality into her discovery of complex intersubjective dimensions that led to an “ethical turn.” Lévinas’s notions of infinite responsibility, an ethics of non-indifference, and the emergence of the ethical self were core to her understanding.To some of us Gestalt therapists, the horizons of our relational approach needed to be pushed further than what had been accomplished by the integration of I/Thou and dialogue into our practice. Dialogue occurs at the meeting of an I and a Thou. Yet, what constitutes a “meeting” within our field-emergent perspective? The mutuality of this meeting is challenged. When we consider this meeting in terms of an “ethical field” with intrinsic or primordial relationality that is prior to any sense we have of an I and a Thou, the mutuality of dialogue is called into question. When any Thou is understood in terms of an I, as a my Thou, its uniqueness is submerged into what Lévinas refers to as a totalizing relationship. We need a more radical approach that lines up with our actual experiences of our patients as “other” and one that accounts for our responsibility to the other. There is a next step beyond the I/Thou meeting, or rather, pace Lévinas, an “otherwise” than an I and a Thou. And here is a dimension inspired by Donna’s radical ethics. This is the world where ethics and relatedness are two aspects of one primary whole. This dimension does not replace the I/Thou dialogue but modifies it in ways that ground it in a field-emergent self.Donna led us through this exploration not only by helping us understand Lévinas—who provides the core of this new sensitivity to the other—but also by understanding Gadamerian dialogue and Bernhard Waldenfels’s concepts of the alien and of responsivity. Our relation to one another is not mutual. The relationship of an I to another reflects a curvature of intersubjective space. If mutuality implies a level field, a radical ethics discovers an asymmetrical intersubjective world in which I, as subject, am subjected to you-as-other. I respond to the call of the other. I cannot hear that call. That is, I cannot be indifferent to it. I, as a therapist, adopt an open, welcoming presence in which I am available to the emerging weight of the other’s suffering in this field. To Donna, our work is a response to the other as “suffering stranger” (Orange 2011). My response is field-emergent. I and the other are inseparable functions of one whole field. We are of one whole field, yet one in which my readiness to hear the call of my patient shapes the asymmetry of the therapy relationship.No, we are not passive receptacles, cyphers, or dispensers of feel-good empathy. Rather, we are participants in a clinical dance where polarities of active and passive, aggressive and responsive, are irrelevant, or worse, impediments to the emerging figure. These are not rejections of Buberian dialogue but supplements to it. Nor are these dilutions of our characteristic creative aggressions as Gestalt therapists actively engaged in the cocreated psychotherapy process. Donna was clear: responsibility is not masochism or self-negation. Her death cut short her development of these ideas; it ended the life of a gifted teacher and of a thinker who never stopped discovering and unfolding layers upon layers of understanding.In Thinking for Clinicians (2009), Donna refers to her teachers as part of a supporting chorus ever singing in the background. Her book specifies Kierkegaard, Freud, Buber, Lévinas, Pierce, and Gadamer as members in her background chorus. I have my own chorus with the voices of my own teachers. As I write this short tribute, I can hear Donna Orange singing: a soloist with a compelling voice. Hers is a voice that cannot fall silent.