The Suffering Stranger

Book excerpt: Winner of the 2012 Gradiva Award! Utilizing the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas, The Suffering Stranger invigorates the conversation between psychoanalysis and philosophy, demonstrating how each is informed by the other and how both are strengthened in unison. Orange turns her critical (and clinical) eye toward five major psychoanalytic thinkers – Sándor Ferenczi, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, and Bernard Brandchaft – investigating the hermeneutic approach of each and engaging these innovative thinkers precisely as interpreters, as those who have seen the face and heard the voice of the other in an ethical manner. In doing so, she provides the practicing clinician with insight into the methodology of interpretation that underpins the day-to-day activity of analysis, and broadens the scope of possibility for philosophical extensions of psychoanalytic theory.