Levinas and the Other in Psychotherapy and Counselling

Levinas offers us a fundamental shift in our thinking about therapeutic practices. His writings call on us to have an ethical responsibility in the very way we practice therapy. This is with all the complexities of negotiating from nearness and distance, involvement and boundaries, and how we view ourselves in attempting to do this. Levinas inspires us towards ontological, epistemological and methodological shifts. The attempt to put the Other first can significantly change our notion of being. It can help us be taken away from the dangers of a therapy based on ego psychology, which seems to permeate so much of our therapies whether classified as humanistic, psychoanalytic, behavioural or existential. All except the Introduction and two of the chapters were originally published in the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling.