Death Acceptance through Otherness

Abstract

When the subject of death appears in the therapeutic context, dealing with it can be a complex task. Levinas proposed that there is no anxiety towards one’s own death but rather that fear for death is fear for the Other’s death, meaning that because of death’s incomprehensibility, it can only be experienced when it happens to others. According to him, both death and the Other represent a way out of solitude for the subject. Death is thus intrinsically related to human encounter. The present work deals with the way the philosophy of ethics, by drawing our attention to our responsibility in the face of the Other, helps us understand and address the question of death in relational therapy. [4]. As we will see further, Levinas’s stance on alterity and death invites us to rethink the therapeutic relationship and processes in terms of human encounter and responsibility, in terms of Otherness. We previously wrote about the importance of adequate and adaptive to and fro movements along the axis of Sameness and Otherness in therapy [5]. In the case we described, we showed the importance of Sameness in the therapeutic relationship. Indeed, the adoption of Sameness by the therapist enabled him to step outside and act from his position of Otherness [5]. To exemplify the importance of Otherness when dealing with the subject of death, we discuss the following case through Levinas’s philosophy of ethics.