A client speaking to his Rogerian therapist says: “I am so depressed, I just don’t feel like is worth living.” The therapist replies: “I hear you saying that you are in pain and that you are not sure how you will ever feel better.” The client replies by saying: “I really feel I would be better off dead.” To which therapist comments: “You really are at your wits ends about what to do.” The client stands and moves to the window of the office and opening it up, the therapist says observes, “You are showing me how much pain you are in, how desperate you are.” The client then jumps out the window – the therapist says, “Splat.”

The therapeutic approach of Carl Rogers (1995a; 1995b) is one of empathy, listening, acceptance, and minimal intervention. For Rogers, person-centered therapy is based around two related concepts: reflective listening and unconditional acceptance. In this manner, the therapist is able to listen and reflect the client’s narrative in a space where the whole of their experience (affective, content, etc.) is unconditionally accepted by the therapist. This allows the client to become increasingly comfortable with aspects of themselves that may be threatening, shameful, scary, anxiety-causing, etc., which facilitates growth and eventual change. Rogers stated this process as follows:

“I can state the overall hypothesis in one sentence as follows. If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur” (Rogers, 1995a p 33, my emphasis).

Accordingly, two aspects of person-centered therapy are immediately clear. First is that the therapeutic moment is relational, involving an interaction with an “other” and second that this interaction is markedly different than most other types of relationships. While it is generally understood that the therapist’s unconditional acceptance of the client is what makes this relationship different than others, I would like to briefly argue that this is only a part of the story. Instead, I will make the case that it is the reflective listening of the therapist that provides the groundwork for a type of relationship that is therapeutic and helps the client to achieve a greater subjective sense of understanding.

I would like to begin by simply noting that the above quote is preceded by the word “if”. To me, this signifies that the type of relationship that Rogers is talking should not be taken for granted but should instead be seen as a goal that the therapist is working towards. Indeed, in addition to unconditionally accepting the client, Rogers also stressed the importance of having a genuine and real relationship with the client. Accordingly, it seems clear that he was aware that the idea of having a real, unconditionally accepting relationship is paradoxical. The “if” then puts the onus on the therapist to work to create a relationship with the client, where they become a companion who is both idealized (accepting) and real (genuine) to the client. It is worth noting that this is an extension of the typical therapeutic alliance, in that there is not only an alliance but it is of a certain type – idealized and real.

This paradoxical relationship is established through the use of reflective listening, whereby the therapist tries to sensitize him or herself to the phenomenological moment-to-moment experiencing of their client. Importantly, despite the mirroring connotations, reflective listening is not so much a matter of reflecting back a mirror image of the client as it is about altering it in subtle ways. In this manner, the therapist joins the client not only in the construction of their narrative but also helps to deepen and broaden out certain aspects of it, which the client may or may not have been aware of. Accordingly, the “real” quality of the therapist is revealed in their ability to be an “other” to the client who is able to express a full range of human thoughts and emotions in an integrated and comprehensive fashion

One way of seeing this process is through the metaphor of the therapist acting as a scaffold for the client’s subjective experiencing. Through reflective listening the therapist not only embraces the client’s subjectivity but in a manner deepens it by giving voice to other aspects of the client’s experience, which for whatever reason are not being stated. Clearly, the therapist is never able to mirror phenomenologically the experiences of the client but he works to co-construct with the client a richer subjective world. In this manner, the therapist scaffolds – or provides a structure, which both supports and extends the client’s experiencing. That this experience occurs in a space where they feel they will be accepted unconditionally helps to enable them to become more comfortable with their narrative.

What both limits and enables this process is the therapist’s inactivity within other spheres of the client’s experience (as illustrated by the joke above). By existing primarily as a scaffold for the client the therapist is able to maintain the illusion of being both unconditionally accepting and real. Through limiting their activity to reflective listening the therapist lessens their own subjective experiencing giving the illusion of an idealized other. In turn, the client becomes able to more fully develop the reflective qualities of subjective experiencing, which the therapist reflectively supports (via scaffolding). In this manner the client brings increasingly richer subjective experiences to the forefront that receive the support and validation of the therapist.

What differentiates the properties of reflexive listening from those of the therapeutic alliance is the manner in which they are used. For Rogers the increased reflective capacity of the subjective self became the main motivation for change. Accordingly, he was able to limit the activity of the therapist towards working on his or her own unconditional acceptance (no small task!). Other therapies, while stressing the importance of the alliance, augment it through increased interaction with the client. This speaks to the romantic and in my opinion endearing and permanent aspects of Rogers’ view of human growth as able to overcome the distance individual subjectivity.

References:

Rogers, C. R. (1995a). Client Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory. Philadelphia, PA: Trans-Atlantic Publications.

Rogers, C. R. (1995b). On Becoming a Person. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

From Simon Goldhill’s review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:

There are at least three types of reception study in classics. The first takes a work of the ancient world — the Aeneid, say or the Antigone — and sees how it has been adapted by later artists. It derives its logic and its focus through a linear genealogy — a sequence of works descended from an original text, interrelating with each other. The second type takes a post-Classical author and sees how this particular artist works with a classical paradigm — Dante’s antiquity, Wagner’s Greeks. It derives its logic and focus in the vision of a single artist, reading antiquity. The third type takes a more general cultural model and explores how classical antiquity has provided models and inspiration in a time in history or in a genre or an artistic movement: the Victorians and ancient Greece; modernism and the classical body. In this case, there is potentially a more diffuse focus and potentially a wider set of cultural questions. The specific problem for contemporary reception studies is how these three models fit together. When looking at the reception of the Antigone (say), how much can the broader vision of any one artist find a place in the analysis? When looking at an individual artist, how much can cultural context or the reception history of a particular text play a part?

Ted Hughes and the Classics is very much a work of type two. It looks at how one artist reads antiquity — adopts, adapts, translates, manipulates the texts of the classical past in his poetry. It has a tight focus, for sure, and one cost of such a focus is that there is very little sense of the wider reception of classics in the twentieth century. Thus we get Ted Hughes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses but very little of how this might fit into a tradition of the reception of Ovid’s epic; Hughes on democracy, but very little on the class and education issues Hughes invokes. You get what it says on the tin: this is “Ted Hughes and the Classics”.

This volume is the seventh or eighth in the Classical Presences series edited by Lorna Hardwick and James Porter. It has already published some exceptional volumes, both in terms of the sheer quality of research and in terms of the interest of the topics. The series has made a name for itself in supporting both monographs and collections of essays on the cutting edge of reception theory — feminism and myth, French political thought and the classics, African version of Greek drama (and so forth). In such a context, this volume, edited by Roger Rees, is rather more conservative in scope and ambition. It looks at Hughes’ works in roughly chronological order, roughly by genre, and discusses his allusions to classical texts, his translations, and his general classicizing techniques.

The authors and titles of the individual chapters:

• Keith Sagar, ‘Ted Hughes and the classics’
• Stuart Gilespie, ‘Hughes’ first translation: ‘The Storm from Homer, OdysseyV’
• Lorna Hardwick, ‘Can (modern) poets do classical drama?’
• John Talbot, ‘Eliot’s Seneca, Ted Hughes’ Oedipus‘
• Janna Stigen Drangsholt, ‘Living Myths’.
• Vanda Zajko, ‘”Mutilated towards alignment?”: Prometheus on his Crag and the “Cambridge School” of anthropology’
• Neil Roberts, Hughes’s myth: the classics in Gaudete and Cave Birds‘
• Roger Rees, ‘Between monarchy and democracy: neo-classicism and the laureate poetry of Ted Hughes’
• Garrett Jacobsen, ‘”A holiday in a rest home”: Ted Hughes and the vates in Tales from Ovid‘
• Anne-Marie Tatham, ‘Passion in extremis in Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid‘
• Jennifer Ingleheart, ‘The transformations of the Actaeon myth: Ovid, Metamorphoses 3 and Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid‘
• Genevieve Lively, ‘Birthday Letters from Pontus: Ted Hughes and the white noise of classical elegy’
• Michael Silk, ‘Ted Hughes: Allusion and Poetic language’
• Hallie Marshall, ‘The Hughes Version: Commercial Considerations and Dramatic Imagination’
• Sarah Annes Brown, ‘Classics reanimated: Ted Hughes and reflexive translation’
• David Gervais, ‘Beyond tragedy: Ted Hughes, Racine and Euripides’

295 pp. | 6 x 9
Available November 2009

FORTHCOMING

from Zone Books:

The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. Before humanitarian organizations, human rights, and the establishment of international law in the early modern period, the Roman statesmen already made this point perfectly clear. As Cicero famously remarked, there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce. But there is also an enemy with whom treaties are in vain and war remains incessant. This is the pirate, whom the ancient jurists considered to be “the enemy of all.”

Departing from Cicero’s account of foes, The Enemy of All reconstructs the shifting place of the pirate in legal and political thought from the ancient to the medieval, modern, and contemporary periods. Antiquity already encountered the sea thief in politics as in the law. Classical letters from Homer to the end of the Roman Empire contain ample accounts of pirates of various sorts. The Roman jurists assigned to the pirate as a legal person an exceptional position in civil and international law. Their theory was to be the point of departure for the Christian jurists of the Middle Ages, who defined the pirate as “the enemy of the human species.” Later, the thinkers and statesmen of modernity went one step further. Elaborating a new international code of law and ethics, the writers of the Enlightenment represented the pirate as the ultimate “enemy of humanity.” Today, as Heller-Roazen argues, the pirate furnishes the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe. This is a legal and political person of exception, neither criminal nor enemy, who inhabits an extraterritorial region. Against such a foe, states may wage extraordinary battles, policing politics and justifying military measures in the name of welfare and security.

Drawing on the diverse materials of several disciplines, from law and history to political theory and literature, The Enemy of All brings to light a single paradigm that defines the act of piracy. This “piratical paradigm” consists in the conjunction of four traits: a region beyond territorial jurisdiction; agents who may not be identified with an established state; the collapse of the distinction between criminal and political categories; and the transformation of the concept of war. Whenever we hear of regions beyond “the line of the law,” in which acts of “indiscriminate aggression” have been committed “against humanity,” we must begin to recognize that these are acts of piracy. Long said to be a person of the distant past, the enemy of all is closer to us today than we may think. Indeed, he may never have been closer.

• Fark Yaralari = Scars of Differance
• Multitude of Blogs
• Museum of Accidents
• Discourse Notebook
• AAAARD.ORG

However, as counterpoint to Janneke Adema’s echoing of John Perry Barlow’s well-known declaration that “information wants to be free“, it should be reminded that information does not just want to be free. As Goldsmith and Wu put it in Who Controls the Internet?:

“The Internet has been celebrated for allowing open, universal communication. ‘Information wants to be free,’ John Perry Barlow famously declared. But information does not, in fact, want to be free. It wants to be labeled, organized, and filtered so it can be discovered, cross-referenced, and consumed.” (Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006: 51)

With so many texts now available online, in searchable pdf format, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could be searched, cross-referenced, tagged, etc. before downloading? The kind of possibilities – conceptual, and research-wise – this would open up for scholarship is mind-boggling if taken to its conclusion.

Amid growing international concern over the India-Israel arms trade, the Israeli firm Rafael unveiled the below marketing video — described by Stephen Trimble of The Dew Line as a “catastrophic collision of Bollywood and the arms industry” -- at the Aero India 2009 defense convention in Bangalore. In the months since its posting, the video has become the errant poster-child — even earning a reprimand from The Jerusalem Post — for the new age of covert international arms trading.

Noah Shachtmann of Wired’s DangerRoom has deemed it “the most atrocious defense video of all time, just days into the Iron Eagles — our celebration of the awesomely bad videos of the military-industrial complex”.

Every element of the promotional film is just plain wrong. The sari-clad, “Indian” dancers look all too ashkenaz and zaftig. The unshaven, hawk-nosed, leather-clad leading man appears to be a refugee from You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. Then of course, there’s the implication that the Indian military is somehow like a helpless woman who “need(s) to feel safe and sheltered.”

But for my rupees, the worst thing about the video is the damn theme song they’ve concocted for the thing. To pimp its weapons, Rafael produced a sitar-heavy twist on Rick Astley’s love letter to Satan, “Together Forever,” complete with a new chorus: “Dinga dinga, dinga dinga, dinga dinga, dinga dinga dee.” The rest of us now have to suffer for that bad, bad choice.

The video may be as offensive to our tastes as to our morals, but it’s also, perhaps, a sign of things to come. As a kind of post-modern pastiche of traditions and fads, light-hearted pop songs and mechanistic war, the video seems to embody perfectly the brazen disregard — where anything goes, and nothing is sacred — that we would expect from an arms dealer. Even more remarkable is the fact that these videos are themselves the product of a formula of sorts, where diverse archetypical cultural affects are combined, to easy effect. Saurabh Joshi of StratPost, the South Asian Defense news site, inquired further into Rafael’s marketing practices:

StratPost spoke to Assy Josephy the Director of Exhibitions for Rafael about how this video came about. “In Israel we have Jewish people from India, so we know about Bollywood and the song and dance numbers. Israelis are generally aware of Indian culture. This video is to help build familiarity between India and Israel and Rafael,” he says.

But this is not the first time Rafael has exhibited something of the sort. Josephy says Rafael has displayed such videos in many countries with various themes customized to the culture of the locations. “In Brazil we did a video of football. Football is very big there. In Paris the video had a theme that included Napoleon and the Renaissance. In Poland our video had themes of Chopin and Copernicus. In England it was about Shakespeare,” says Josephy.

Though we can only hope to one day get our hands on the Shakespeare defense video — an odd phrase to be sure — the greater point to be taken here is that even arms dealing can be “Epcotized”. The Rafael video is, no doubt, a classic case of a capital enterprise creating an image of cultural understanding that disguises its opposite, a generic, reproducible schema that can be ‘customized’ to capture any given culture. Only in this case, the product is a missile, not international cuisine, and the means for marketing — “culture” in quotes — is also the target.

Three recent films/series use the plight of fantastical beings (vampires, mutants, aliens) trying to gain acceptance into society as metaphors for the real life struggles of embattled, minority groups. Is the metaphor successful, or does it also work against its apparent progressivism by indulging in the very stereotypes it claims to resist? But first, a brief summary:

* True Blood uses the fictional acceptance of vampires into society as a metaphor for how the United States regards the gay community and the gay rights struggle. (A stream of amusing markers draws clear parallels between the two: in the opening credits a lit up sign displays the message “God Hates Fangs”; vampires are said to “come out of the coffin”; and it’s mentioned in passing that Vermont was the first state to legalize marriage between humans and vampires.) Michelle Goldberg nonetheless finds True Blood conservative through and through: though the vampire-homosexual analogy is “cheeky and clever”, “it has troubling implications, because the vampires, political rhetoric aside, aren’t really interested in joining human society. Unlike the misunderstood X-Men heroes, most of the vampires we meet are arrogant, perverse, and cruel—everything the far right believes gays to be.” So is True Blood a sophisticated, sympathetic tale of the plight of an excluded, embattled group, or does it simply make use of that plight to imbue its story, at strategic moments, with a serious, charged, and culturally relevant aura?

* X-Men also borrows heavily from the culture wars landscape to cast the mutants as a misunderstood, vilified group that’s gradually gaining acceptance. And just like in True Blood, a more militant faction, here lead by Magneto, threatens to sabotage the advances made by the mainstreaming, well-behaved majority. But the more heavily the mutant struggle for acceptance draws on gay rights themes, the more problematic its relation to it becomes. Mutants are, after all, by definition more dangerous and threatening to humans proper. They have a power in excess of the norm, which at once differentiates their clearly demarked kind from that of the ‘normal’ and pitches it against them. Though this lack of self-control is just as often likened to adolescence and sexual development, the fact that it’s unique in posing a real danger to their world limits the comparison and ultimately distinguishes it from safe, nonthreatening sexuality ‘proper’.

* District 9, still out in the theaters, presents a similar problem. The aliens stand in for all sorts of subaltern or excluded groups, and through that substitution the film is able to elaborate a powerful, progressive critique of certain states’ treatment of different groups; but at the same time, a delicate dance is required to keep the metaphor from circling back and affirming the common, derogatory representation of particular ethnic groups as nonhumans, subhumans, animals, etc.

Each of these films (or series) also makes consistent use of ‘fake’ news footage that invokes past and ongoing civil rights struggles, and borrows heavily from the politically-charged atmosphere most associated with culture wars social issues. In all three we are sporadically treated to clips of warring pundits, for instance, one conservative, the other ‘tolerant’; or heated split-screen debates between vampire and church, or mutant and human, spokespeople. The specter of a high-stakes national debate, sensitive to the slightest misstep, is everywhere present, hanging precipitously over the heroes’ heads – mutant, vampire, and alien.

The progressive, or empathetic, representation of subaltern groups as fantastically, often physiologically different is of course not a recent phenomenon; nor is the prominent inclusion of a media or public relations sphere in the development of narrative events and the creation of a ‘national’ atmosphere (as in King Kong, for instance). But what is perhaps historically novel in this gaining trend is the media’s dramatic promotion in importance: it is a premise of all three – District 9, especially – that the media world holds a powerful, if not determinate, position over the fate of the groups in question. In the latter film, news footage of alien riots, with shaky, live, street footage and commentary from ’specialists’, approximates the familiar instant-retrospective gaze of a culture comfortable with having an underclass and the violence required to maintain it. Whether we see in this footage the LA riots or the razing of Cape Town’s District Six under the Group Areas Act of 1966, the image of history we are given is purposefully generic and prepared.

Freud said of the dream that it’s not just what reality the dream is representing that matters, but why that reality had to take the dream-form it did. We know that the vampires represent homosexuals, but what is it of our time that encourages the representation of homosexuals as vampires? Or of Zimbabwean, Mozambican, and Malawian migrants as aliens? The ease with which matters of race, in particular, have been reimagined, historically, as matters of species needs no introduction; nor for that matter does the habitual representation of ’sexual deviants’ as predatory beings.

True Blood in particular runs up against this problem repeatedly: namely, how to draw upon the thematically-rich struggle of gay rights, as a readymade template for any mythical excluded identity, while at the same time stopping short of affirming, through the thriller/horror genre, the very prejudices it otherwise claims to regard as oppressive. Because the vampires really are dangerous, and do actually prey on humans, the comparison with homosexuality must be handled delicately, if not avoided altogether at the appropriate moments. When Godric blasphemes that humans are justified in fearing vampires, his wisdom assumes an almost extra-diegetic, directorial position. Does this blasphemy, then, amount to a tacit endorsement of the conservative view that finds the alleged promiscuity of the gay community to be the true roadblock to their social acceptance – hence the prominent vampire ‘mainstreaming’ theme of the show – or is it the opposite, an instance of the vampire rights theme diverting from its occasional analogy, gay rights?

In this light, to be sure, the show’s invocation of the plight of the gay community can seem disingenuous, a plundering for story parts.

All of this is driven home by the recent episodes with Godric (Allan Hyde), Eric’s (Alexander Skarsgård) ‘maker’. Where it was assumed that Godric had been captured by the Fellowship of the Sun, the extremist conservative Christian church, he had in fact turned himself over in an attempt to create peace and understanding because, as he says at one point, ‘let’s be honest – vampires have not exactly acted peacefully to humans’ (paraphrase). This admission raises the issue of the vampires’ true dangerousness to a thematic level: it’s the first time the vampires’ culpability is acknowledged and treated explicitly by the show. Until Godric made this perspective his own, and introduced it to the storyline, it existed solely as a contradiction or ideological problem in the makeup of the True Blood universe, rather than a problem the characters themselves are dealing with, diegetically. Accordingly, the clip above, in two parts, shows Nan Flanagan (Jessica Tuck), the vampires’ lead PR agent, chewing out Godric for creating a national PR disaster for the vampire cause. It’s the first time we see the characters interact with the national campaign, and it’s the first time that we get a real sense for ‘the politics of vampirism’ and the concessions that must be made, if only to prevent a battle that cannot be won. It’s also the moment when the blame shifts, however gently, from the humans to the vampires. As a result, it would seem, the homosexuality-vampirism comparison is here put on hold, as if the writers did not want this shifting of blame to be ‘misread’ as an analogy for the gay community’s culpability, but even so the implication is somewhat unavoidable if unintentional.

In this respect, we may see some of the philosophical and political commentary on the show move into its inner workings. So maybe the Godric theme will crystallize into a more nuanced social commentary, or it could simply feed into the ‘mainstreaming’ theme, where the ‘vamps’ need to come to terms with their scary, violent nature and learn to domesticate themselves. I’m betting on the latter – Bill, after all, is supposed to be the model vampire of sorts – but either way the writing seems to have grown more sophisticated over the last season and its politics should be expected to do the same in the season ahead.

Though the main fixtures of a classic, Hollywood film are conspicuously absent – narrative, sequential time, protagonist – it would be a mistake to describe Terence Davies’ film as experimental. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) does not, after all, revel in its play with filmic form: it does not push the limits of film language for the sake of pushing the limits of film language, or at least that’s not the impression we’re led to get. In place of brazen self-consciousness, we find moderation and modesty, a fealty of form to subject. So if the meditative, ponderous movement of the film does not offer itself up as experimental – its radical temporality is not achieved through a virtuosity of editing (as it is in, say, the battle scenes of The Desert Fox [1951]), nor through well-timed plot tricks designed to relentlessly complicate who knew what when (as in Memento [2000], for instance), – it is because its language is justified by the subject of the film itself, which, in this case, is memory broadly speaking.

The children’s memories of the father structure the film and provide it a logic [above], and it is the father’s recollected brutality and callous love that keeps the memories in abundant supply. Torn, then, between nostalgia and trauma, the film belongs to an an incessant displacement: as soon as a memory is summoned, it must be turned away for another, lest its horror overwhelm. No scene conveys this tortured figuration more succinctly than that of the air raid. Angry out of worry that they’re late in reaching the bunker, the father slaps the eldest of the bunch, then tells her to sing. For Davies, what allows, or makes endurable, the convolution of love and violence is art, or song, so rendered.

Song both binds the film together on a formal level, forcing into succession asynchronous times, and offers the children means for a pleasant, psychological distraction from the conditions of their lives. It would be tactless, however, to call this distraction an escape, if only for the reason that the songs themselves, in their subject matter and oftentimes-melancholic delivery, repeat or return to the trauma they otherwise appear to disavow. Their love of song is perhaps then less a means of escape than of mythology. Interrupted by a song, whole scenes come to a stop, and a welcome lethe descends upon the characters: one must sing about the war to forget it just as they remember their father to forget his brutality.

Though it is true that the disavowal of the father is never complete – in the last scene, the son is shown weeping on his wedding day (although this time, importantly, no memory accompanies the recollection) – the figuration of love and violence he enacts retreats into new, less conspicuous forms: as a cruel oedipal fate, he reappears in the daughter’s husband [below], only with this repetition she finds herself unable to finish singing. We are left, then, with the impression that the whole story will begin again, through a new generation, but that song may not be able to soothe the mind the way it used to.

Cheddar Mortadelle Cosmos, 2005, by Philippe Mayaux

My last post on the Biblical and philosophical concept of “kenosis” ended with a reference to Emmanuel Levinas, whose essay, “Judaism and Kenosis,” though unread at the time seemed to promise an altogether different approach that that found in contemporary and poststructuralist philosophies, which remain in large part derived from the Christian tradition. From Luther to Hegel to Derrida and Cixous, kenosis refers to the achievement of empathy, immersion, and other forms of ‘embodiment’ and ‘externalization’. For Levinas and the tradition he captures, kenosis suggests the opposite, an impasse between existences.

Levinas’ essay, for its part, radically departs from this, Christian tradition and sketches out, in my opinion, the more enlightening, the more philosophically authentic position. Where the Christian model stresses a seamless movement between, or transcendence of, ontological orders, the Judaic perspective stresses unbridgeable, unresolvable differences; which, I think, describes our world more closely than does the secular philosophical legacy of incarnation, identification. A fundamental schism in philosophy is thus revealed in the posing of this question, which is itself already a Christian one. Indeed, as one would expect, Levinas quickly reminds us that, “There is probably no need, here, to remind ourselves that the idea of divine incarnation is foreign to Jewish spirituality.” (Levinas Kenosis 114)

That being said, Levinas goes on to point out, in schematic terms, comparable sensibilities in the Judaic tradition and isolates key Talmudic passages where God descends and inhabits human misery, and precisely through that descent is found to be all the more exalted.

But the fact that kenosis, of the humility of a God who is willing to come down to the level of the servile conditions of the human (of which St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians [2:6–8] speaks), or an ontological modality quite close to the one this Greek word evokes in the Christian mind – the fact that kenosis also has its full meaning in the religious sensibility of Judaism is demonstrated in the first instance by biblical texts themselves. Terms evoking Divine Majesty and loftiness are often followed or preceded by those describing a God bending down to look at human misery or inhabiting that misery. The structure of the text underlines that ambivalence or that enigma of humility in the biblical God. Thus, in verse 3 of Psalm 147, ‘He who healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds’ is the same one who, in the following verse, ‘counteth the number of the stars, [page] and giveth them all their names.’ Psalm 113 sings of ‘the elevation above all nations and the glory above the heavens’ of ‘our God that is enthroned on high’; but He ‘looketh down low upon heaven and upon the earth.’ The psalm ends with God’s care for the barren woman, whose despair is deeper than that of the poor person whom God ’causes to rise up out of the dunghill.’ As if to say that exaltation were at its height in these very acts of humbling! The importance of these verses for Judaism is emphasized by the fact that they have become part of Judaic liturgy.

But what is significant for Jewish ‘theology’ as such is the express Talmudic attestation of that importance: there is an inseparable bond between God’s descent and his elevation. (Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaism and Kenosis,” in In the Time of the Nations. Translated by Michael B. Smith. London: The Athlone Press, 1994: 114–115)

That much is shared with the Christian tradition. In each, God’s love for humanity involves inhabiting, or adopting, human feelings and thus in some way the human form. But beyond these generalities, there is little in common between the two.

Levinas’ reading of Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi’s parable “The Moon that makes itself Little”, from his treatise Hulin, expresses this distinction succinctly. “This parable,” he writes, ”approaches the theme without hiding the ontological or logical ‘upsets’ latent in the kenosis.” (Levinas Kenosis 116) Whereas Christian kenosis not only hides the logical upsets, but revels in them, ben Pazi’s parable isolates the upset, lingers on it, and ultimately fails to find satisfaction or resolution.

As a metaphor for God’s authorial power, and so for the structure of the universe itself (with God at the top and lesser entities below), the parable describes, through a dialogue between God and the Moon, a “dissatisfied silence” that cuts across all of creation, potentially undermining the ineffable order into which God has shuffled his subjects.

“The parable, cast in the form of a dialogue between Eternal God and the Moon, is supposedly motivated by a contradiction brought out in Genesis 1:16, which announces the creation of ‘two great lights,’ but right afterward refers to ‘the greater light’ and ‘the lesser light,’ as if, between the first and second half of the same verse, one of the great lights had diminished. The contradiction is set in relation to Numbers 28:15, which specifies the sacrifices to be performed for the new moon.” (Levinas Kenosis 116)

The problem concerns the status of the lesser light relative the greater one. By what law or reasoning, the Moon wants to know, are distinctions formed, and powers and orders assigned? It is as if, for reasons entirely external to the subjects affected, decisions are made concerning their fate, their status, and their hierarchical value. Justice itself seems to vanish in the moment an order of justice is created.

Immediately after the creation of the two great lights, one of them, the Moon, said to the Creator: ‘Sovereign of the world, can two kings wear the same crown?’ And God answered: ‘Go, therefore, and make yourself smaller!’

Was the moon unable, out of pride or vanity, to share the greatness she had received with the Sun? And was not the order she was given, ‘to make herself smaller,’ the just punishment for such pretentiousness? Or was the Moon, troubled by a precocious philosophical concern, affirming the necessity of a hierarchical order in being? Did she already intuit the ‘negativity’ between equals and discern that greatness cannot be shared – that the sharing of greatness is war? Rather than commanding a punishment unjustly imposed, perhaps what the voice of God proposed was the greatness of smallness – of humility, of the abnegation of night. The nobility of the best ones: smallness equal to greatness, and compatible with it. (Levinas Kenosis 116–117)

“Perhaps” is the key word here. Theories are offered; excuses are made; possible reasonings flushed out, but each, in its turn, is proved insufficient. The greatness of smallness, though an attractive idea in its own right, is ultimately a plain contradiction. That one only “plays the part” of the small, and one the part of the big, with each being equal by virtue of their equally but playing a part, is no consolation. The apparent difference cannot be whisked away through so much reasoning. God, it seems, cannot explain himself, and the Moon is not buying it:

‘I just expressed a sensible idea: is that any reason to make me smaller?’ says the Moon in answer to the Master of the World. Hierarchy is necessary, but I already see that it is necessarily unjust. The ontology of the creature is contradictory. It is dangerous to utter truths! As for the greatness of smallness, I do not at the outset see it as being as great as greatness. Is not the ‘glorious lowering’ a scandal to reason? The Moon’s argument is then taken into account. ‘Thou shalt reign day and night,’ says the Lord, ‘while the reign of the Sun will be limited to the day.’ A discreetness in light – is this already a decline? There are lights without brilliance whose lustre the Sun cannot dim: there are insights of the intuitive mind that systematic reasoning, in its glorious clarity, cannot refute. The wisdom of the night remains visible during the day.

‘What would be the advantage of shedding light in full daylight?’ says the Moon. The role of second brilliance cannot heal the wounded ego. And the civilization of triumphant science will one day invalidate all instinctive knowledge and all truths without proof. This is an antimony on the essence of the intellect, between God and the Moon! (Levinas Kenosis 117)

Concessions are made. Space and time are divvyed up to conceal this inaugural injustice. The organization of the universe itself starts to seem like one big compromise, as if the real creation, not the nominal one, took place through negotiations with, of all things, the created. The dialogue continues with a “discussion of the lunar calendar, of days and nights, versus the solar calendar, of years and history. The Sun and Moon are not just lights, but movement, time – history. To the solar calendar of the nations is added Israel’s lunar calendar: universal history, and individual history.” (Levinas Kenosis 117)

The argument, remarkably enough, is never settled. The greatness of humility can never be the greatness of greatness.

“Perhaps it is true that neither the light of thought nor the glory of history can tolerate the alleged greatness of humility. Perhaps its majesty has meaning only in the holiness of the person, where, as exaltation of renunciation in the justice of the just, it is the humanity of man and the image of God! Hence the Creator’s last attempt to console the Moon, offended by her title of ‘lesser light.’ ‘The names of the just evoke your title: Jacob, called littled in Amos 7:2, Samule the Little (a holy rabbi of the Talmudic period), King David, called Little David in I Samuel 17:14.’

Like any tedious argument or negotiation, this one can only peter out, without closure or sure resolution. There’s no final entreaty, no last evening-out. A fundamental inequity is seen to pervade, and possibly constitute, the very structure of the world.  There will be no appeasing the Moon, and the Moon sees no point in pressing it further.

‘The Moon has since then remained without any arguments. But Eternal God sees that she is not satisfied.’ A dissatisfaction without arguments, a dissatisfied silence! This is perhaps the residual ambiguity that surrounds the greatness of the saintly and humble who risk being taken for failures! The residue of the stubborn contention of a nature persevering in its being, imperturbably affirming itself. To this there is no response, but for this, precisely, Holiness takes on the responsibility. Here is the humility of God assuming responsibility for this ambiguity. The greatness of humility is also in the humiliation of greatness. It is the sublime kenosis of a God who accepts the questioning of his holiness in a world incapable of restricting itself to the light of his Revelation.‘ (Levinas Kenosis 118)

The parable of the Moon is not, of course, just about the Moon and Creation. Taken more generally, it’s about the humble, good life that, confined to its own unrecognized corner of the world, risks being mistaken for a failure. In being lesser, or in being recognized as lesser, while in some other sense being greater, the saintly, the humble are doomed to inherit, according to Levinas, a “residual ambiguity” with which they must struggle endlessly.

Taking a philosophical turn, Levinas finally defines this inner struggle or dissatisfaction as the ”stubborn contention of a nature persevering in its being, imperturbably affirming itself”, and in this respect, the Moon is an unmistakable figuration of the self, the subject. At once aware of itself and its place in the greater order, the Moon questions both without the possibility of satisfaction. This profound impasse, it would seem, is what most distinguishes the Judaic from the Christian conception of kenosis.

In my case having worked extensively at one clinic in addition to other sites, preparing to start internship meant terminating not only with the patients I had seen over the year, but also with patients whom I had been seeing for the past three years. Having never terminated with patients who I had seen for even close to this long, and certainly never having terminated with so many patients all at once, I was unsure what to expect both from my patients and myself during the termination process. Given this, perhaps it is not surprising that much like I have found throughout my clinical training, my expectations and thoughts about what terminating would be like did not match my experiences. This seemingly common – at least to the training experience – phenomenon creates in my mind an interesting gap, created not by poor expectations, but rather by the inherent difficulties of training. In other words, despite the fact that I had been taught and even experienced when completing previous externships what termination would be like (i.e. see above) it remained difficult to know how it would be when it was this different.

The hardest part of termination for me has been trying to assess the effectiveness of therapy and to evaluate how I performed as a therapist. Going through the termination process I remember voicing doubt to fellow classmates and supervisors about how I helped my patients. While many had made progress towards goals they also often remained stuck in certain places. From my perspective it was difficult to ascertain that what I did during sessions helped them achieve their goals, as opposed to it just being a product of time and their own growth.

Reflecting upon my uncertainty and ambivalence I think it is in some ways part of the tension that is a part of therapy. Both the therapist and the client have an idea of what they are working on, or what the “problem is”, but how they approach it and work at it may not be so clear. Indeed, as a student I feel that this uncertainty may even be exacerbated as there is a propensity towards trying new techniques or representing the material in ways that reflect recent readings, discussions, ideas etc. That this process of working in different therapeutic frames is likely normal if not central to the training, does not necessarily alleviate the feelings that the patient would be better off with a more established therapist, or generally that they deserve better.

Despite this, during the process of terminating one of the most consistent and perhaps surprising observations was how deep my relationship was with my patients and vice versa. While going through notes I was amazed at how much had transpired in their lives and my own over the course of my sessions with them. Not only did I feel tuned into their lives but it also felt as if I had actively participated with them. In this sense reading through notes about their stories I found myself at times thinking in terms of “we”. For example, how “we” handled a certain issue or “we” achieved certain goals. The feeling of connectedness in some ways belies the uncertainty, almost by saying that this was “you” in the relationship and that your effect was real.

This is in some sense the actualization of the gap that I described earlier. The role of the therapeutic frame and theory is meant to structure the therapeutic space providing the tools to help the patient work and make changes. However, this space does not in effect account for the human-to-human interaction that comprises all of the therapeutic interactions. Indeed, as described above, while talking with my patients about our relationship what was striking was how much they valued the relationship. That to me the frame more often than not felt ambiguous seems to have had a minimal bearing on them. What mattered more to them was that I was there, and that they knew that I would be there to listen, to share, to acknowledge, to discuss and to explore. As my patients discussed with me the aspects of myself that they valued and found effective during therapy, it was amazing how little they had to do with approach or technique. Carl Rogers knew this of course and orientated humanistic psychology around it. Cynically, I feel that in some ways the parts of me that worked the hardest for example to conceptualize them or to make certain interpretations were the least acknowledged.

What terminating has helped me to begin thinking about is how to minimize this gap. One way that comes to mind is how theory can be orientated and utilized around the actual interactions in the office. I understand this personally as a deepening and extending of my thinking about interpersonal approaches to psychotherapy that work off the therapeutic relationship. What I have come to appreciate in terminating is the need for the therapist to present himself or herself in an authentic manner so that the aspects of themselves, whether they are warmth, honesty, directness etc can be felt and understood clearly by the patient.

In many ways this feels both very obvious to me and is also somewhat of a revelation. To me it means both working as myself but doing so in ways that are clearly conveyed to my patient. Theory then becomes a way of looking at the ensuing interactions between my patients and me, providing a perspective to both elaborate upon our shared experience and create new ones. In other words, in therapy a space is created to have experiences that are real but can be explained in ways that allows for the growth of the therapist and the patient.

As a final thought it is probably not a surprise that I felt this gap while terminating with my clients. Termination is not only a time of reflection, but it is very obviously the end of the therapy. This can lead to a sense of safety where both the therapist and the client knowing that their time is ending can act more like themselves in therapy. While throughout termination I was thinking about theories about what is happening for the patient and myself, it still nonetheless felt as if my interactions with my patients were more genuine and less a matter of us participating in social role playing. Experiencing these authentic interactions, while also hearing about what my patients were taking from therapy has not only helped make terminating with them a meaningful experience but also an educational one as well.