In Body and Soul, Ellis Amdur gives us a profound understanding that therapy is first of all a dialogue where the therapist “attends to another.” Amdur’s 98 page book shows us the importance of existential and phenomenological psychology as it teaches us the meaning of haecceity and what it means to be a Person. 

 The book is composed of five parts. These are 1. The Pool of Narcissus; 2. The Wound of Eros; 3. The Body in Dialogue;4. Dancing with Death and 5. The Braid of Soul and Self. 

The first part of his text uses the insights of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Buber to show us that “relationship of any kind requires an Other, not a Same.” It is this unique difference of all that is that requires a singular attunement to every Other that we encounter. As Amdur writes, ” The gulf that Levinas describes between one being and another is appallingly radical — one can never truly encompass the mystery embodied in another that is revealed in their identity.” It is this irreducible kernel of the Other that “knocks us off center” and takes us beyond any instrumentalized and pre-package utilitarian response to suffering. Amdur shows that within there is something “absolutely not I” that can never be reconciled and reduced.

 The proper word for this irreducible difference is love. Amdur writes, “it is through intimacy that one realizes the absolute, infinitely precious independence and freedom that another human being embodies.” Such as view takes us beyond the Narcissism where we ONLY see ourselves, where we reduce the complexity of our consciousness to one single image. Amdur writes, ” We certainly find our own face in the world, but if we look downward and inward- or really, in any direction whatsoever- we also find innumerable Others, with whom we are in unceasing dialogue, each and every one.” For there to be meaning, we must recognize depth and complexity rather than surface and uniformity.  Amdur expresses the best insights of Continental Philosophy with its Judaic roots when he writes, “There is always more Soul than we can ever know.” This is not a nihilistic proposition. Rather it shows that knowledge is never enough to understanding the complexity of Persons in their unique, irreducible, unrepeatable and relational singularity. We betray when we “turn the Other into some Thing to be overcome.” 

Part Two, The Wounds of Eros, shows how we, like Jacob have to wrestle with what is both divine and human within us. Life wounds us, sometimes beyond repair, but it does give us gifts. Amdur writes, ” Existence is neither a swirl of erotic bliss, nor is it unending suffering. We incarnate beings remain down in the dirt, intertwined, unpinned and unpinning.” It is our encounter with the other that “dis-locates us, from the known into mystery.” 

This putting out of place can reveal the platea for us, that is, the open space, the broad space or avenue that widens our response and our sense of responsibility. Again, we are dis-located to find a renewed space in love. Amdur writes, ” Therapy is questioning and response; the questioning not to probe and examine, but to return us to that erotic connection that enfolds and incarnates us.” In it is in this space, created by love, that we can perhaps answer the question, “Who am I” to arrive at the meaning of what ‘Here I am” means. Amdur reveals that “the therapeutic role is bizarre- one offers oneself to another for their struggle while withholding oneself for the same reason. It is role that cannot be lived impeccably.” 

Part Three and Part Four, The Body in Dialogue and Dancing with Death describe two individuals that stood out in Amdur’s therapeutic work. He writes, “with one, the road we walked was primarily that of isolation, depression and the language of the body, and for the second, hatred, death and fear.” In these case studies, Amdur shows “the emergence of Soul through the establishment of true dialogue.” The two case studies were utterly moving in their description of pain, yet we are given traces of beauty and kindness that readers of Amdur’s book can discover for themselves.  

The final part of the book, The Braid of Soul and Self,  summarizes what Amdur has learned through the process of therapy: “this asymmetric dialogue, this wrestling of Israel and Angel, Soul and Self.” Amdur shows us that even though we can arrive to be present in our own lives and in the lives of others, there is something that will always remain “radically open and “fundamentally untouchable despite its proximity.”

Amdur gives us one of the best accounts of haecceity that I have read and shows us that there can be a resurrection within life itself. This resurrection is a transfiguration that cannot be reduced to pre-existing parameters.  Amdur writes, “What is created between us in any relationship is something new in the world, something never seen or experienced before, because the other is always infinite, always partly over the horizon line, and thus you and I are an eternal spring, new life at every breath.” Reading Amdur I am brought back to the core of Judaic thought and to what Christianity has unfortunately forgotten. 

Marko Zlomislic, Ph.D. Conestoga College, Kitchener, Ontario. 

Categories: Psychotherapy

Keywords: psychotherapy