Body and Soul

Therapy is a dialogueThe first two chapters of this small book are an inquiry into the nature of psychotherapy, an asymmetric dialogue, where one person, the therapist, literally attends to another. Weaving together overlapping perspectives from Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Buber, Amdur asserts that the greatest gifts of therapy arise from a fundamental estrangement from each other. The realization of this unbridgeable distance, however close we may be, is a profound shock that gives birth to a genuine relationship, comprised of two beings, two bodies, not merging into one. It is the maintenance of separation that allows, in every dialogue, the birth of something new and unique in the world. The chapters that follow bring these rarified notions to earth, through accounts of two therapeutic relationships: one, with an achingly melancholic man, so wounded that improvement was meaningless to him; the second, with a man struggling with anguish, his