查看文章

In the light of the paradigm that currently dominates the debates on developmental psychology, social cognition, and phenomenology of empathy, the quoted passage from Winnicott is utterly puzzling. Namely, in all of the aforementioned fields, the other–the ‘object’–is assumed to be differentiated from the self from the outset. In developmental psychology, the ever-growing empirical evidence has strongly fostered the view that even neonates are capable of experiencing their caregiver as something other-than-themselves. Partly building on developmental findings, the interdisciplinary research on social cognition sets out to explain how we manage to bridge the gap between ourselves and others. In the phenomenology of empathy, again, the idea of a fundamental self/other differentiation is manifest in the form of the assumption that other people are forthwith encountered as subjects with an experiential life of their own. In brief, the current debate widely embraces the idea that fellow humans are forthwith targeted as others.

In the psychoanalytic tradition, this picture is turned upside down, as it were. Whereas the dominant research paradigm assumes the task of explaining how we bridge an alleged self/other divide, the psychoanalytic tradition sets out to explain how we manage to distinguish between ourselves and others in the first place. Accordingly, while the dominant paradigm introduces others qua ‘objective subjects’, psychoanalytic research has focussed on others qua ‘subjective objects’. To be sure, it would be hard to find a scholar who would claim that there are no cases in which the ‘otherness’ of others is either actively denied or …