Psychology’s Small Stories and the Call of the Other: An Interview with David Goodman

David Goodman is the Director of the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics and the Dean of the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, where he also teaches in the Department of Formative Education.

A past president of the APA’s Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Division 24), Goodman is known for his interdisciplinary work at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, theology, and ethics. He is the founder of the Psychology and the Other conference series and serves as editor of two book series: Psychology and the Other and Essays in the Psychological Humanities.

In this conversation, Goodman draws on the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to reimagine therapy not as a space for self-optimization but as an encounter with responsibility—a call to become more available, interruptible, and open to the world beyond ourselves. He reflects on psychology’s history of centering the individual at the expense of the relational, critiques the structural limitations imposed by managed care systems, and shares clinical insights from his own practice.

He explores how therapy can become a site of ethical awakening rather than adjustment, and how the dominant metaphors of psychology (often drawn from consumer culture and medicine) may obscure the relational depth of human life.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Ayurdhi Dhar: Psychology has always been concerned with the ‘self’, but you have written extensively about the ‘other’. Could you tell us why this interest in the ‘other’?

David Goodman: I want to reverse the question and ask, “Why such a preoccupation with the self, and why have we built an entire discipline that explores humanity with the exclusion of the other”?

As Judith Butler said, “we’re undone by each other,” and if we’re not, we’re missing something. I really think the field of psychology is missing something. There is no self without the other.

We have extricated a version of the self that doesn’t have to be formulated in relationship to otherness or the other. We’ve a deformed field if we study this unit of self without putting it in the context of otherness.

Encountering Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher who prioritized thinking about the other, was transformative for me. More personally, I think we all struggle with being a little preoccupied with ourselves. That’s something of a perennial human temptation.

In Hebrew scriptures, Cain responded to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Why do we even ask that? Of course, we’re each other’s keepers, but we’re all tempted to think that we have an excuse for not being responsible for each other. It is a personal struggle. I have every day to not be narcissistic and to be more truly available to those around me.

 

Ayurdhi Dhar: You write that Psychology has been reluctant to let go of this ‘self’. It is seen as a singular unit, contained inside a person: the ego-logical self. This concept is at the center of our discipline, whether it’s theories around how the self develops or what a healthy self looks like. Often, mental disorders are thought of as something going wrong with the self.

But as you just said, the only way to be a person is through others. Could you, using an example, explain what you mean by that? Also, could you tell us about Psychology’s history of ignoring the ‘other’?

David Goodman: A dear friend of mine, Eric Severson, points to a beautiful and powerful image: all of us have a significant scar on our body that represents how we are brought to light, nourished in life, and brought into the world by another human being, and that is our belly buttons. We are all grown inside of another being, connected to, attached to, nourished, fed by, brought to life into being by another, and we have this scar that reminds us of that.

Yet, especially in Euro-American contexts, we’ve this illusory picture of ourselves as somehow trying to get away from our belly buttons, from the way that we are truly bound to one another. We are completely interdependent beings, and yet we think so much with language that is about ourselves, myself, me, my thoughts, my fulfillment.

When you really unpack what the field of Psychology is, in terms of what our aim is, it’s for each of us to be fulfilled. How did that come to be? Why is my fulfillment the end of my life?

We’re trying to get away from our boundedness. It’s this neo-liberal mythology that each of us lays claim to our lives. I think that not only does it miss the truth of life, which is that we’re interconnected, but it’s also incredibly dangerous and potentially violent in this world.

In colonialism, a country is preoccupied with its own ability to create its destiny in the world. Then it takes over and lays claim to what it wants. We have developed a colonial version of the self within Euro-American contexts, where each of us thinks we are entitled to lay claim to the world we want for ourselves. I believe that leads ultimately to a rather selfish, deeply lonely existence that deprives us of the very resources of life. We undermine the possibility of joy and flourishing. The field of Psychology is complicit in that.

Psychology was born in the middle of the 19^th century in Europe when the world underwent enormous transformations. There were so many vacuums, the loss of tradition, of cohesive cultural life and religion, and the presence of new social ventures like public education.

This required people to be sorted rapidly; what should classrooms look like, who should be an officer and a soldier, and how do we keep people productive? All these things made Psychology a problem solver in how we intervene culturally and societally.

Before it could even get its feet under itself, psychology was forced to be something of a parentified child. It had to grow up way too fast. The negative effects are that it has become rigid, instead of being sophisticated and complex in its formulations. This preoccupation with the individual is one of the vestiges of that.

Psychology’s language is mostly around locating suffering, identity, and human potential as attributes within people. As Philip Cushman wrote, where you locate suffering is significant because the treatments will reflect that. If people are disordered, then our treatments are oriented toward the individual person. If the disorder exists in larger political structures, then it’s a different conversation.

Psychology has continued to locate things into the atomized individual and doesn’t have languages that facilitate curiosity at the interpersonal, political, and social levels.

 

Ayurdhi Dhar: Let’s get into your writings on Levinas. You say that in one’s life and therapy, one is called to be responsible for this ‘other’. When we encounter someone’s pain, their suffering, we have an ethical obligation that comes from deep within. This is a very different idea of responsibility. It’s the ability to respond rather than something negative, cumbersome, or suffocating. This responsibility comes from deep within, before we even think about it or evaluate anything. It’s not just society telling you to do the right thing.

This call, this response to the ‘other’, to their suffering, it almost seems instantaneous, automatic, almost primordial. Could you talk about what Levinas meant by this type of responsibility?

David Goodman: Absolutely. Levinas’s version of responsibility is not part of a moral order we’re meant to abide by. Levinas lost the majority of his family to the Nazi collaborators in Lithuania, and he watched the utmost sophistication of German society and the modern world be able to reduce human bodies to bars of soap; take the other and reduce them.

He believes we have forgotten that we are responsible for the other prior to anything else. To be human, we need to choose to be responsible. We are already responsible just by living and breathing in the world.

Here are a couple of examples. The shirt that I’m wearing, that you’re wearing right now, another human being stitched it. Another human being brought this together under certain ethical or unethical working conditions, and I’m linked to that person.

I pay taxes. Every single bullet and bomb that the US military creates, I paid for. I could easily say I don’t believe in these things, but I am actually contributing to it with my taxes. I am already responsible in the world, and the fact that I wear clothes, eat food, and am a part of this life means that I’m affecting other people. I am completely implicated in this interconnected world we live in.

Levinas wants us to move past this dissociation that we think we’re somehow not responsible for one another. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Levinas says that the question is the beginning of evil. Because the answer is “Yes, I am responsible”.

When we walk around in this world, we encounter deeply vulnerable human beings, people whose face literally is saying for Levinas, “Please don’t kill me”. We’re not killing each other per se, though we do, just reducing, exploiting, not seeing one another, is a part of what it is to kill and to diminish another being. Levinas draws attention to how we forget that we are implicated every single moment in each other’s lives.

 

Ayurdhi Dhar: Let’s talk about the consequences for our society of not even hearing the voice of the ‘other’. You write that Levinas says that we live in a culture that itself is narcissistic. Let alone being able to see the suffering of the other, we can’t even hear their call anymore. It’s easy to think this doesn’t apply to us, but anyone who has experienced involuntary hospitalization or coercion knows what we mean. They were surrounded by those who turned a deaf ear and were blind to their pain.

Think of the popular concepts in Psychology, like the blind romanticization of boundaries. Boundaries are not bad, but we have fetishized them so that anytime anybody is even the least bit not perfect, we say you should cut them off.

How can we call into question this type of a ‘self’ in therapy with a patient? One of the criticisms against therapy is that it’s a narcissistic endeavor, that it’s about me, me, me: “look at my hurt and my pain and my protection. ”What does it look like to practice a therapy that is not about this kind of self?

David Goodman: You’re right to describe the valorization and romanticization of boundaries. It is a wonderful and adaptive capacity for humans to be able to develop boundaries. But when we romanticize it, when that becomes the means to our own fulfillment, then I think you’re 100% right. There’s a lot of damage in that.

Matt Clemente and I wrote an article on ethical distancing. We tend to find ways of dissociating the face of the other, not actually experiencing and feeling the other’s call. There’s a temptation not to feel guilt when you walk by a homeless individual, or rather to think, “I’m a taxpayer, and thankfully, there are shelters; my personal responsibility doesn’t exist”. That’s just one example of ethical distancing.

Levinas talks quite a bit about the importance of building societies and organizations at scale so that we can actually be responsive to human need. We build judicial systems, agricultural systems, and school systems, all of which are meant to take human responsibility for one another and scale them so that we can be responsive at a much higher level with more capacity.

But the problem is that a generation or two later, sometimes even less, it forgets the original, more profound responsibility to the other in front of me. It starts getting animated by bureaucratic needs and power structures that distract it and create an ethical distance. I, as an individual, need to rely on these big systems to be responsive to society, but ultimately, the systems cease to be responsive. They become machines. Machines can’t see people. We must build systems that constantly have to interrogate and remind themselves of the deeper responsibility that they were first set out to achieve.

About therapy: Therapy is language. We’re handing people language to make sense of themselves that has ethical distancing built into it.

If I’m teaching someone how to think about their anxiety, beliefs, and thoughts without being open to what’s their experience and what it means, then I typically hand them a language that doesn’t have them asking hard and big questions about who they are, how they’re living, what life is, who’s in their life, who they’re responsible for, and so forth.

Most therapy involves people coming in feeling like they’re living small stories. Their life has become restricted, constricted. They’re coming and saying, “I’m in pain because I can’t break free of this small thing that I’m living in, and I want increased range of motion. I want to be able to be more alive…”

We get trapped in ourselves, and therapy is meant to help us not live that same trapped-ness. But unfortunately, psychologists exchange one small story for another small story, a version of selfhood that is still about the self and is relatively small in its nature.

I think about therapy as a space to free oneself from the small story people are living to be more available in the world, to not be so preoccupied with the pain. Pain is preoccupying. When someone’s in pain, it’s hard to think about anything else. When we try to reduce pain, it’s not so that one is without pain. It’s so that one can flourish, be available in the world, and live more fully.

For Levinas, freedom is born from responsibility. Freedom is born from being available, attuned, and alive to our interconnectedness and the needs around us.

Therapy is meant to help us become more available in the world. It’s intended to allow us to become more interruptible.

Eric Severson talks about how best to be interrupted. We are very good at not being interrupted, living our small rhythms, and not allowing things to interrupt us. God forbid the other needs something from us.

Being available, being interruptible. This is really weird, but I’m a big believer in being able to be embarrassed. Abraham Joshua Heschel talks about this. What it means to flourish is, in part, being able to be embarrassed, not ashamed but embarrassed.

To be able to be embarrassed is to be able to be like, “Oh my gosh, I was seeing the world through my small lens and I misunderstood. Wow. I didn’t even take that person’s perspective into account. I didn’t even know that part of my own history. I didn’t even know that I’m a part of a country that did this”.

Heschel describes embarrassment as a virtue that we need to form. It has within it humor.

I think it’s a virtue that’s a gateway drug to other virtues of being able to be humble, open, and excited to take on the world as the world is, instead of our simplified versions of it. In short, therapy is a wonderful vehicle for learning to become more available, free, and interruptible, and to develop the virtue of embarrassment.

 

Ayurdhi Dhar: That’s beautiful: to take yourself less seriously. Let me try to bring this beautiful thing that you said to the ground. What would that look like in a therapy room? Let’s say you get a person having X issues. What would it look like to help a person be more available in the world, to get them out of their little story?

David Goodman: Relational psychoanalysis emphasizes on a two-person psychology – this idea that I as a therapist am not the one providing interpretations and just unpacking the other person’s world, but rather the relationship itself is a sacred space where things will enact that require both of us to be deeply curious about what’s taking place.

This then draws forward my responsibility as a therapist and the patient’s responsibility for owning and understanding what they are bringing into the space. So, I don’t have a ready-set CBT language for identifying what’s happening; instead, it’s a dynamic living relationship.

What happens between people is a very important thing for us to be able to think about together, and that builds muscle groups around embarrassment, interruptibility, and availability.

There was a wonderful patient of mine who struggled with rage. If she walked into a supermarket and someone didn’t open the door for her, she would scream at them. She’d be so upset at what she viewed as everyone around her not being good people. She would rage about this all the time. I would try to be curious with her and get into the depths of what is happening- some of the history of what has created this way of seeing, feeling, and being in the world.

But one day, we had a very interesting session wherein she started really losing her mind around my socks. She says, “I finally have to say this, like I just don’t even… why do you wear socks that don’t match? This is ridiculous.”

She went on about how I didn’t even care enough to have matching socks. For her, it was me disrespecting her. I wasn’t there for her as a professional, and it angered her. It was in keeping with this theme we had been working on, but here, finally, it’s in our room, and it’s about us.

I said, “All right, thank you for being willing to be curious and stay in your anger on this at me. Can I share with you why I wear mismatching socks?” She was surprised there was an actual reason. She thought it was just sort of sloppy unprofessionalism.

I said, “I take myself way too seriously oftentimes. One thing I do each morning to not take myself so seriously is to wear mismatched socks because I know that I’m going to have my legs crossed all day long and see my own feet. Whenever I look at those socks, I stop taking myself seriously”.

She starts bawling. She cannot believe there’s this reason behind this, that she had completely misattributed the entire thing. Something broke for her in that moment, like “I am meant to be more open to what might be happening around me”.

She was embarrassed at that moment when she had misunderstood. We slowed it down, and we could bring it into our relationship. I saw more availability from her, less rigid immediacy in terms of thinking about other people’s intentions, and more interest in others, which is the bedrock of opening up more to the other in ways that defeat our selfish perspectives.

 

Ayurdhi Dhar: Thank you. That was a perfect example of everything you were talking about. However, you write that within this powerful therapeutic relationship, nowadays there is another party: insurance companies, HMOs. Now, here is a profit-seeking corporation, and they decide who gets what therapy and for how long. What’s the effect of this, and how does this undermine the work that you do in that relationship?

David Goodman: It’s so double-edged. I was talking earlier about the need to scale systems and to build resources that can facilitate responsiveness. HMOs made therapy accessible. It’s a game changer.

But when you scale and build new systems, those end up creating their own logic, and that logic often conspires against depth. It seeks simplicity and one-dimensional approaches. It must, by its nature, rely on metrics that are believed to be scientific and validated within the medical model. Psychology does not fit in the medical model!

I get worried when these HMOs, these managed care organizations, change the very logic and nature of the language we use and the way we understand interventions for human suffering. We’re training the next generation of clinicians to think with the DSM-5 and with insurance criteria to conceptualize human life. Should the medical language we have to use to submit claims reverse engineer what happens in therapy? Absolutely not. Something has to be rearranged, and I don’t know how we get there.

Many skilled therapists are doing their best work in private practice and without insurance because they’re not willing to play the game. But then we have a caste system in terms of who receives high-quality care and who does not.

 

Ayurdhi Dhar: You said that therapy is a language. It teaches us how to think about our experience. There are multiple metaphors that psychological theories might use, such as the person as a steam engine or a computer, or mental illness is like diabetes—these influence how the client experiences her own suffering.

Now, people with fewer means with HMO insurance can only go for certain types of short-term therapy, often called empirically supported treatments, which is a dubious claim. This means that a rich person who can pay out of pocket has access to all these languages that they can use to understand their experience, and some might fit better than others; they have a choice. But if you are not rich, then your experience is wrestled into a certain language. It might be CBT language. It might be helpful or it might not fit, but you don’t have a choice. What are the consequences for real people when they’re forced to fit their life into a therapeutic language that doesn’t suit them?

David Goodman: In the article you’re referring to, McDonaldization of psychotherapy, I draw the parallel between therapy and food deserts in the United States. You go to affluent neighborhoods, where there are various places to get fresh produce. You go to an underserved, under-resourced area and find corner markets with almost entirely processed foods. It is far more expensive to buy broccoli than it would be to buy 10 noodles, which have horrific health consequences. They provide calories but are ultimately destructive and contribute to many diseases.

In terms of psychotherapy and access, we say, “We have community clinics and treatment options for individuals within these communities”. But really, the treatment options are very short-term cognitive behavioral interventions that are a type of calorie, a way of responding to human suffering that is very specific, and no other options are made available.

The language we use for someone’s suffering, their identity, and their potential is sacred. It’s the means through which they come to know themselves and interpret their own experience. What we do in terms of giving people language is so important.

I distrust that paradigm and just saying, “Oh, more people have access to therapy now than ever”. Well, what types of therapies? McDonaldization of care is the belief that one size fits all will be acceptable to certain communities. We expect them to take it, whereas we would never expect other portions of the population to tolerate just being given the language and having no choice. That to me is an egregious application of a caste system while pretending that we’re actually providing care.

People talk about Psychology as though it has a unified and integrated picture of itself. In actuality, Psychology is a profoundly disintegrated field. It does not have a consensus. It does not share theoretical frameworks that most people would abide by. It’s actually one of the things I love about it, and I’m not scared of it.

We should be pluralistic. We should have enormous creative space for different understandings of human life and be allowed to play with one another kaleidoscopically, so we can have various lenses to make sense of who we are. This desire for us to have an integrated discipline is in my eyes a misguided notion. That’s not serving us to be attuned and attentive to the person sitting in front of us.

 

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