Because of Donna Orange . . .

It all began with The Suffering Stranger, in the autumn of 2011. I had already studied Donna Orange’s pioneering, coauthored works on intersubjectivity (Orange, Atwood, and Stolorow 2001; Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange 2002), but the meeting of minds that proved pivotal to my teaching, my clinical practice, and my life began as I stepped onto the ethical edge of Donna’s singular voice with The Suffering Stranger, a chiasmic intertwining hermeneutic phenomenology and psychoanalysis (Orange 2001). “Ethical” was Donna’s middle name (along with humble, courageous, thoughtful, and indefatigable), and this book was part of the so-called ethical turn she shepherded into psychoanalysis. For Donna, ethics was not something moralizing or academic; ethics was life itself, especially the part of life we therapists spend companioning others on journeys to find themselves—and end up finding scattered parts of ourselves along the way. Reading her meant sharpening both my wits and my witnessing.As I read, page by page, it was as if someone were gathering my fragmented thoughts and feelings and knitting them into something much larger, deeper, and more demanding. Lévinas’s commandment “For the other” became more than the oft-repeated risk of masochism; it became the risk of human existence itself. The book was a revelation, stitching between Lévinas and Gadamer, two profound thinkers for the work of psychotherapy. As soon as I closed this book, I picked up Thinking for Clinicians, published a year earlier, and emailed Donna out of the blue, singing her praises and promising an additional 40 copies sold of both books, since I had listed them as the required texts for my January 2012 lectures at Toronto’s Centre for Training in Psychotherapy.Being Donna, she promptly emailed back, curious about what I was teaching. And so began a dozen years of thoughtful, thought-provoking communications—phone calls (before Zoom) to read Gadamer aloud together, small seminar gatherings on Lévinas, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Waldenfels, and others. Mostly phenomenology, but always with that ethical edge that was Donna. She trusted my French, badly accented; I trusted her German, accented even worse; we muddled through. And through her, I met a small group of exceptional American colleagues from the world of Gestalt therapy, dedicated to both the art of psychotherapy and the practice of hermeneutic phenomenology. It is rare in one’s elder years to meet such good new friends.I have read and reread each of Donna’s books published from 2010 to 2020 (Orange 2010, 2011, 2016, 2017, 2020). We discussed how her chosen title for her last book got buried in a subtitle. The book was published as Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics, but it was the subtitle that said it all: Learning to Hear. We debated our different senses of “to hear” and “to listen” and how important it is, in the work of psychotherapy, to be aural witnesses of both kinds. I also knew Donna had had complete hearing loss in one ear before we met, and even when she had a cochlear implant, she still could not properly hear her beloved Bach.My clinical practice, my work as faculty at a psychodynamic training institute where Donna’s presence, both physical and textural, has left an indelible mark, and my own lived world all have become more generous, more complex, and more challenging because of Donna’s ethical insistence on the witnessing dimensions of psychodynamic psychotherapy. I hear and I listen to so much more.David Eagleman (2009) suggests we die three times: when our body relinquishes life; when our body is committed to the earth or fire; and when our name is spoken for the very last time. Donna Orange and her singular thinking of others will be alive for generations of psychotherapists to come.