The Conversation Daniel Goldin and Daniel Posner

The first part of this episode looked to infancy and to our essential nature to understand the problem of the Other.This second part considers societal sources of our tendency to subjugate and exile those different from us. In this view, the structure of the mind repeats the politics of the world as much as vice versa. To tell the story, we have drawn from original interviews with psychoanalysts Jessica Benjamin, Cynthia Chalker, George Makari, Donna Orange, Eyal Rozmarin, John Riker, Robert Stolorow and Koichi Togashi, as well as from interviews with the philosopher Shaun Gallagher and cultural critic L.M Sacasas.

What do we mean when we speak of "the other" and of "othering?" This first part of our two-part series on otherness looks at the question of the other and at the problem of othering through the multiple lenses of psychoanalysis, philosophy and child development. To tell the story, we have drawn from original interviews with psychoanalysts Jessica Benjamin, Cynthia Chalker, George Makari, Donna Orange, John Riker and Robert Stolorow, as well as from interviews with the philosopher Shaun Gallagher, and the child psychologist and psychobiologist Colwyn Trevarthen.

Leaders exist in a dynamic relationship with their followers. That's our starting point. Based on an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry edited by Michael Maccoby, Ph.D. and Mauricio Cortina, M.D., our conversation traces this dynamic across worlds and time, from our nomadic prehistory to Hitler's rise in Weimer Germany to the BLM movement in the United States.