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Psychoanalytic Psychology
2014, Vol. 31, No. 4, 537546

2014 American Psychological Association

0736-9735/14/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038061

WHAT IS A NEW OBJECT?

Thinking the Ontological Difference With
Hans Loewald and Luce Irigaray
Brian Kloppenberg, MFA
National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, New York, New York
and Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, New York, New York

This article offers a reading of Loewalds (2000) concept of the new object in
the light of the philosophies of Martin Heidegger (1969, 1996) and Luce
Irigaray (1985, 1993, 2002). The article demonstrates how the ontological mode
of analysis developed by these philosophers can help clarify and even suggest
revisions to Loewalds fundamental project: rethinking the concept of reality
implicit in classical psychoanalytic theory. The article argues that although
Loewald and Irigaray share a basic affinity as thinkers of difference, the
latters emphasis on the trauma of sexual difference provides a helpful correction to Loewalds seemingly minimal appreciation of the perception of gender
in debilitating or facilitating development. In so doing, the article extends Alan
Basss (2000) attempts to theorize a specifically sexualized form of anxiety
inherent to the internalization of difference as it is described by Loewald.
Keywords: therapeutic action, ontology, sexual difference
In the preface to his Papers on Psychoanalysis, Hans Loewald (2000) affirms the profound
influence of both Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger on his own thinking. Although
Loewald has come to be more widely appreciated by a variety of psychoanalysts for his
creative responses to Freudian theory, it strikes me that there has been, for the most part,
a general conceptual lag in coming to terms with the ontological significance of his work.
My aim in this essay is to take up a concept that has become closely associated with
Loewald, the new object, in order to breath some life into an aspect of his thinking that
has suffered from some painful reifications. More specifically, I plan to offer an interpretation of Loewalds idea of the new object as one that calls out for an ontological
analysis. In other words, I mean a particular kind of analysisinspired by Heidegger
that thinks carefully through the difference between Being and beings.
In order to further develop this more ontological Loewald, I will then endeavor to
bring him into dialogue with another thinker located at the crossroads of philosophy and

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Brian Kloppenberg, MFA, 1133
Broadway, Suite 1127, New York City, NY 10010. E-mail: bakloppenberg@aol.com

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KLOPPENBERG

psychoanalysisthe French theorist Luce Irigaray. Why this coupling? Irigaray, also
profoundly influenced by Freud and Heidegger, has more explicitly dedicated herself to an
ontological questioning of difference, in particular, the question of sexual difference. The
sustained, urgent, and complex nature of her questioning, thought about alongside
Loewalds own concerns, will, I hope, challenge the reductionism that has emerged in
response to both of their contributions. Finally, I will attempt to read Irigarays investigation into the fiery distress of individuation as an interpretation of Loewalds strangely
placid stance on this essential difficulty of both Heideggerian ontology and Freudian
psychoanalysis.
My own investigation into fundamental ontology must begin with some preparatory
remarks on Heideggers (1996) thinking of the ontological difference, primarily as he
develops these ideas in his magnum opus, Being and Time. Heidegger writes,
But what remains concealed in an exceptional sense, or what falls back and is covered up
again, or shows itself only in a distorted way, is not this or that being but rather, as we have
shown in our foregoing observations, the being of beings. It can be covered up to such a
degree that it is forgotten and the question about it and its meaning altogether omitted. (p. 31)

For Heidegger, metaphysical thinking forgets the question about the meaning of Being
in its exclusive emphasis on knowing various things, entities, or beings. He seeks to revive
the primacy of this question through a particular kind of ontological mode of investigation,
one that must take up the difference between Being and beings. The forgetting of the
question of the meaning of Being belongs to the way in which Being is constantly falling
back from beings into concealment. For Heidegger, Being can never be known in the way
that we know things, entities, or beings. At the same time, a meditation upon the nature
of Being is made possible by the very way in which it is carried along onticallythat is
to say, in the everydayness of life. However, this meditation is only possible if the
fundamental difference between Being and beings is thought. Heidegger (1996) calls this
difference the ontological difference.
What is this difference, between Being and beings? How does Being fall back and get
covered up? How is Being revealed if it cannot be known as such? In the realm of
Heideggers fundamental ontology, any investigation of Being must take place in terms of
the essentially human nature of existence, what he calls Da-sein (1996). Furthermore,
any attempt to know Da-sein in terms of its objective presence will take us far from the
ontological significance of Da-sein, even as it takes us nearer to its ontical characteristics.
Likewise, any attempt to know Da-sein in terms of a theory of subjectivity will take us far
from its ontological significance as it draws us nearer to the ontical character of the
subject. Just as Da-sein in its Being flees from the onticalin its objective and subjective
modesit gives us something to think ontologically as a certain kind of possibility. This
possibility is both in yet not entirely of the everyday world of things, entities, and
beings.
Heidegger takes up an analysis of Angst as a phenomenon whose very threatening
indefiniteness cannot be accounted for in everyday terms. Unlike the more definite, ontical
experience of fear of a particular person or thing, Angst is both everywhere and nowhere
at the same time without any clear cause. Indeed, in the emergence of Angst there is the
possibility of a clearing in which something fundamental about how it is to be mightin
a flashreveal itself. As everywhere and nowhere, and without any cause, Angst is, for
Heidegger (1996), about the world as such (p. 175). He writes, What Angst is anxious
for is being-in-the-world itself (p. 175). In other words, Angst discloses one way in which

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WHAT IS A NEW OBJECT?

539

Da-sein exists fundamentally in the worldas thrown. To conflate Da-sein with a

human subject who is separate from a world of objects is to fall away from the ontological
dimension of Being and its existential spatiality.
If Angst intimates a radically unfamiliar sense of space, it also intimates a radically
unfamiliar sense of time that is fundamentally different from how it is usually conceivedas a series of discrete now moments. In Angst there can be what Heidegger
(1996) calls the way Da-sein stretches along between birth and death (p. 342). Elsewhere he refers to this stretching-along as existential temporality. Existential temporality is not about the present moment, or the past, or the future. For Heidegger, existential
temporality is an otherwise time that cannot be found in the everyday sense of time. There
is more to time than our everyday, ontic sense of it, and a glimpse of this more will
often lead to Angst.
The ontological investigation of Angst discloses Da-sein in its spatiality and temporality. This investigation also discloses how these phenomena inevitably become entangled with our everyday sense of self, others, things, and places. In this entanglement, there
is inevitably a falling away from the possibility for Da-sein to be in its own distinctive
disclosure (Heidegger, 1996, p. 178). And yet, this very falling away carries the
possibility of Da-seins own distinctiveness. Heidegger emphasizes how Angst
individualizes how Da-sein, as it falls away toward the ontic, the everyday, bears in its ownmost
being the character of not being closed (p. 125).
It is crucial in following Heideggers thought not to confuse the ontical way in which
an individual subject might experience anxiety with the fundamental ontology of Angst as
Being-there, Being-in, Being-open. For Heidegger, there is more to the world and more
to Being-in-the-world than what is immediately present, either in objective of subjective
terms. To meditate on his ontology is to consider that within each one of us there is
morea more that is not within or without, not now or then or yet-to-be, yet also is not
nothing. To consider this possibility is to think the ontological difference.
How might this way of thinking the ontological difference, one that held great
significance for Loewald throughout his life as an analyst, find its way into his own
thinking about psychoanalysis? More specifically, what might this way of thinking have
to do with his formulations about the new object? Loewald (2000) explores what he means
by this term in his now-classic 1960 article, On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis. Early on in the article, Loewald endeavors to take a fresh look at the analytic
situation (p. 223), and, in the process, he takes up the analysands new object relationship
to the analyst from the perspective of a positive transference. This relationship has the
potentiality to remain alive throughout the analysis, even with the ongoing emergence
of various resistances. He then goes on to write,
I say new discovery of objects, and not discovery of new objects, because the essence of such
new object-relationships is the opportunity they offer for rediscovery of the early paths of the
development of object-relations, leading to a new way of relating to objects as well as of being
and relating to oneself. (p. 225)

A psychoanalytic developmental perspective represents one imminently reasonable

understanding of this passage about the new object, and indeed there are others from
Loewalds essay that can be read to support this point of view. For example, Loewald
(2000) writes, Analysis is thus understood as an intervention designed to set ego
development in motion, be it from a point of relative arrest, or to promote what we

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KLOPPENBERG

conceive of as a healthier direction and/or comprehensiveness of such development

(p. 224). Coupled with a nuanced understanding of Freuds nonlinear conceptualization of
psychic development and its complex relationship to psychoanalytic process, one that is
clearly evident in Loewalds thinking, both of these passages read as confirmation of the
classical model.
At the same time, such an interpretation skips over a subtle maneuver that Loewald
makes right at the beginning of the first passage that I quoted, when he distinguishes the
phrase new discovery of objects from another phrase, discovery of new objects. The
latter phrase implies the existence, for the analysand, of new objects that are objectively
present and clearly different from various objects that are familiar often painfully soin
their repetitive character, their oldness. From this perspective, one could argue that, over
the course of a successful analysis, the patient eventually wakes up to this difference that
was already there and leaves the old objects behind. This waking up would include the
analysands realization that the analyst was never as bad or as good as various transference
distortions made her or him out to be. Indeed, these kinds of changes show up in analyses
all the time. However, this begs the question, what does Loewald mean by new discovery
of objects and why does he prefer this phrase to the imminently reasonable discovery
of new objects?
I believe that Loewald is attempting to bring to light, in his phrase new discovery of
objects, a process that cannot be reduced to what is either objectively present (or, for that
matter, subjectively present) for the analysand or analyst at any given time. Rather, this
process, whereby a new discovery of objects becomes possible, exists otherwiseas a
kind of relation both between and within self and objects that impacts on both simultaneously. Yet if there is the possibility of the new discovery of objects, which goes along
withindeed, has everything to do withthe possibility of the new discovery of self, then
is not Loewald asking us to rethink what we mean by the terms objects and self? For
Loewald, anything that one might claim to know about objects or self either objectively
or subjectivelyis somehow insufficient in terms of the possibility of a new event of
discovering. The possibility of this event means there is always something moreindeed
something differentwithin or between an object and a self.
Thus, the new discovery of objects and self has both temporal and spatial ramifications. This event of discovery cannot be framed in terms of what is knowable now,
because it is inherently directed toward the new discovery of objects and self that is
waiting at some point in the future. Additionally, there is no way of knowing for sure right
now how that discovery in the future will impact on everything that has been known about
the past. Further, the new discovery of objects and self reconfigures relations both within
objects and self as well as various relations between objects and self. For Loewald, time
and space are not, or are not only, measurable phenomena that should be conceived in
calculable terms. Instead, with the phrase new discovery of objects, he is attempting to
open psychoanalytic thinking to a more dynamic sense of time and space as media in
which objects and self can never be taken for granted either by the analysand or the
analyst.
Without explicitly saying so, Loewald is appropriating Heideggerian thinking about
the ontological difference as he elaborates his own theory of therapeutic action. To frame
psychoanalytic process in terms of the discovery of new objects is to think about objects
and self in purely ontical terms, where a static split between objects and subjects is taken
for granted as givens. This leads to endless debates about the superiority of an objective
conception of psychoanalysis versus a subjective conception of psychoanalysis. For
Heidegger, the everyday, vulgar conceptions of space and time can only approach

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WHAT IS A NEW OBJECT?

541

different objects and selves, both old and new, from the utilitarian standpoint of empirical
calculation. To meditate on the ontological difference is to open the possibility of a kind
of thinking about temporality and spatiality in which the new discovery as event can take
place as the disclosure or clearing of the ontic. This kind of taking place cannot be
located ahead of time or even after the fact; it cannot be measured by a clock or a ruler,
nor can it be captured by any system of notation. And yet Heideggers (1996) fundamental
ontology allows us to think about existential temporality and spatiality as they potentiate
the discovery of [time and] space within the world (p. 336). It is within the possibility
of existential time-space/space-time that Loewalds new discovery of objects discloses
itself as Being as different than beings.
Despite Loewalds preference for new discovery of objects over discovery of new
objects, countless appropriations of the new object as the central Loewaldian contribution
to psychoanalysis have reified the complexity of his thinking. One particularly simplistic
response takes the notion of the new object as a kind of narcissistic confirmation on the part
of the analyst of his or her superiority vis-a`-vis the analysands transference figures. In other
words, the analyst can claim, in the most vulgar of ways, that she or he is the new object
for the analysand, as evinced by the analysts objectively greater capacity for attuned,
open-minded empathy. Although there is some limited truth to this idea in the day-to-day
activity of psychoanalysis, suffice it to say that the potential for countertransference distortions
arising from such an appropriation of Loewald is staggering. At the same time, it is interpretable in terms of the ontological difference. Heidegger insists that forgetting is intrinsic to
Being, which means that the kind of effort required to think the ontological difference is
without end. I interpret the reductionist responses to Loewalds new discovery of objects as
an evasive turning-away from the potentially frightening strangeness of ontological thinking
that Loewald so quietly brings to bear in his contributions to psychoanalytic thought. Is it
possible that Loewald was aware of the profoundly radical nature of his project? And that
because of this, he found a style whose elegance would beguile just as it unsettled through the
articulation of more dynamic modes of thought?
For Loewald, to think dynamically about self and objects is also to meditate upon the very
nature of reality in which discovery is possible. In his first two published articles, Ego and
Reality from 1951 (Loewald, 2000) and The Problem of Defense and the Neurotic Interpretation of Reality from 1952 (Loewald, 2000), Loewald develops a theory of reality that is,
again, informed by Heideggers ontological difference without ever explicitly taking it up. For
Heidegger, there is a complex relationship between the ontological and the ontic, to say the
least. For Loewald, there is a complex relationship between two visions of reality one that
he calls dynamic, primary reality, and another that he refers to as defensively static. Loewald
thinks primary reality as an always-possible relation between ego and world, and one that is
open to the future as the potential for active transformation. Loewald locates ongoing
processes of integration via differentiation in primary reality. This interpretation of reality
oscillates with another one in which the static, concrete nature of antagonistic, oppositional
formulations about self, others, and world covers over the strangeness of what is nonstatic,
nonantagonistic, or nonoppositional. From this perspective, when an analyst sees herself or
himself as the new object for the patient, then a relatively static vision of the psychoanalytic
process has substituted for a more dynamic interpretation of primary reality as it makes
possible a revived analytic process. In other words, the discovery of new objects substitutes for
new discovery of objects.
Loewalds ontological meditations on new discovery of objects and primary reality
revolve around more dynamic ways of thinking differentiating and integrating relations
between self, others, and world, as well as differentiating and integrating relations within

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KLOPPENBERG

self and other. For Loewald, to think about ongoing differentiation-integration is to return,
time and again, to the relation between ego and reality. Even when Loewald moves in the
direction of analyzing various aspects of sexual difference, he comes back to his central
focus on the dynamic possibilities of a nonantagonistic openness between ego and primary
reality. Indeed, he writes, Is not the great riddle of sexuality, of sexual differentiation, at
the same time the great riddle of individuation . . .? (Loewald, 2000, p. 338). What if this
question were turned around? It might then read, Is not the great riddle of integrative
differentiation of the ego in relation to primary realty, at the same time the great riddle of
sexual difference? Such a question brings me to the writings of Irigaray. Indeed, the
turning of this question opens to a different kind of ontological thinking, albeit one that
I believe can be related to Loewalds. I am talking now about Irigarays thinking of sexual
difference. For Irigaray (1993), as she writes in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993),
explicitly echoing Heidegger:
Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.
According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual
difference is probably the issue of our time which could be our salvation if we thought it
through. (p. 5)

Like Heidegger, who seeks to retrieve a fundamental ontological question about the
meaning of Being from the forgetfulness of Western metaphysics, Irigaray seeks to
retrieve her own fundamental question from the same tradition. However, her question is
about the meaning of sexual difference. Mindful of the ontological difference, Irigaray
aims for the new discovery of what it could mean to be a woman in the most fundamental
sense. (Although, it should be noted, given the polyvalence of Irigrays ouevre, there is
always more than one aim to be found.) Indeed, for Irigaray, the question of sexual
difference has everything to do with how egos, selves, subjects, objects, others, become
knowable as such. To think ontologically about sexual difference with Irigaray is to
seriously question what we think we know about what it is to be a woman (or a man), and
that there is always more to know about her (and him) than meets the eye. In fact, any
question about what can be known about a woman, or womensuch as, What does a
woman want? gives way in Irigarays ontological meditations to other kinds of questions altogether. Irigaray asks, otherwise, How can a woman be? Is it possible for a
woman to be in her own specificity?
What Irigaray finds, in nuanced readings of texts both philosophical and psychoanalytic, from the pre-Socratics to her contemporaries, is a systematic occlusion of thinking
sexual difference. Instead, what she reveals is a preponderance of fetishistic formulations
that repeatedly represent girls and women asin her now famous phrasethe sex which
is not one. In other words, the standard, universal subject is male, whereas the female sex
emerges as a degraded quasi-male, or, in other cases, an imaginary inversion of what it is
to be male. Irigaray thinks about the very meaning of subjectivity and objectivity in
Western discourse and what she finds, time and again, are profound conceptual limitations
marked by phallic narcissism and anality. The unitary, masculine subject is one by virtue
of his phallic dominance; all others (primarily but not exclusively women) become conflated
with passivity and castration. Moreover, for Irigaray, the coherence of the unitary, masculine
subject depends uponanxiouslythe necessary exclusion of the other into a state of
dereliction.
Although these fetishistic formulations typify the kind of static reality organization
that Loewald associates with a neurotic interpretation of reality, Irigaray goes further than

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WHAT IS A NEW OBJECT?

543

Loewald in her analysis of the impact of these static, fetishistic visions of female and
male. Loewald represents the possibilities of primary reality, the new discovery of objects,
as imminently available within the analytic frameworkif a more sophisticated conceptualization of therapeutic action can be found. Irigarays efforts to retrieve a kind of
feminine specificity beyond fetishistic formulations reveal something more dire than
anything to be found in Loewalds thinking. More often than not, intimations of sexual
difference can only be found as a kind of representational remainder that comes into view
only when the workings of an exclusionary, masculine economy of the same breaks down.
As a thinker at the crossroads of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Irigaray goes further
still. The masculine economy of the same, in its ongoing repudiation of sexual difference,
demonstrates remarkable adaptive potential in the face of various deconstructive efforts to
interpret and thereby possibly change the status quo by revealing its symptomatic
limitations. The mobilization of feminist and/or queer liberation via the fantastic,
phantasmic fragmentation . . . [of] the subject (Irigaray, 1985, p. 135) is, for Irigaray,
only another redeployment of the fetishistic economy of the same, another symptom of
what she calls, in Speculum of the Other Woman, the crisis of ontico-ontological
difference (Irigaray, 1985, p. 145; emphasis added). In other words, multiplicity as
metaphor or performance cannot substitute for an ontological thinking about a sexual
difference that has yet to arrive. Thus, Irigarays commitment to ontological thinking
engenders its own kind of Angst as a dynamic response to the omnipresent destruction of
sexual difference that has all-too-real effects on the lives of women, and children, and
men, across the earth. For Irigaray, something like Loewalds new discovery of objects
within primary reality must be thought in relation to the crushing, fetishistic sclerosis of
static reality organizations. She refuses to let us forget that the risks in this endeavor are
quite high, and that any meaningful transformation of the masculine economy of the same
will be painful for all involved. As Irigaray (1985) puts it herself, The space-time of the
risk that fetishes will be consumed, catch fire (p. 145).
If Irigaray is resolute in her diagnosis of the tremendous risks involved in any
fundamental kind of change, she is equally committed to exploring a variety of locations
in which change might take place. She devotes special attention to the radical possibilities
of the psychoanalytic setting in a series of shorter writings on clinical practice, several of
which are gathered in To Speak Is Never Neutral (Irigaray, 2002).The fiery nature of her
approach retains the basic Freudian framework while deeply investigating how the analyst
can most effectively listen and respond to the analysand. According to Irigaray, the analyst
must continuously question any given assumptions that she or he might have about sexual
difference, about subjects and objects, about reality itself. Pregiven interpretive schema be they Freudian or Lacanian have the potential to block new discoveries. For
Irigaray, there is always a backside to any representation, some aspect of signification
that seeks to remain hidden, or secret. This dynamic holds true for theory in general,
including psychoanalytic theories, as well as the utterances of the analyst and the
analysand. Thus, there is always the potential for violence to break out either between
factions of psychoanalysts, or between analyst and analysandwhen it comes to the
disavowal of the backside of the sign. Or, as Irigaray (2002) puts it, in regard to this
chronic disavowal,
it can result in all kinds of murdersreal, imaginary, symbolic. Nonetheless . . . it seems the
murder succeeded in part, that it formed one body with a so-called proper word, with a
realized identity to the self. Which does not prevent fights to the death from persisting among
theoreticians, or even writers, to appropriate the proper signification. . . . The war is also

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waged in analysis. When it comes to meaning, analysand and analyst do not surrender unity
of voice easily. (p. 200)

This essential surrender must take place both within the analyst and analysandand
between them. Without it, there can be no giving way of the static for the dynamic, the
fetishistic for a sexual difference that is fundamentally different. In Irigarays vision of the
psychoanalytic process, ultimately one of the voices comes back to the subject from
behind. If he or she silences it, then he or she risks losing his or her own (Irigaray, 2002,
p. 200).
Thus, for Irigary, there is always an Angst-provoking risk in the encounter with
destructive, dedifferentiating sameness. The new discovery of objects can be silenced,
and, in that defensive moment, the possibility of the analyand discovering new ways of
being her self or him self can be lost. In a move that echoes Irigaray, Loewald (2000)
himself cautions against the analysts investment in abstract concepts of reality or
normality (p. 229) when making interpretations of transference and of defense. Such an
approach would make it impossible for the analyst to reach the patient (p. 229). At the
same time, Loewald does not emphasize, as Irigaray does, the extreme difficulty involved
for the analyst in finding a way beyond static and therefore normalizing constructs.
Irigaray helps us to see that the analyst must ultimately fight a war with ones self and
ones own investments (conscious and unconscious) in order to be able to respond
psychoanalytically to the strange newness within ones self and the analysand as other.
Irigaray (2002) writes, Communication or communion respecting the life of the other
while tasting of the strangeness of his or her desire. . . . At the very boundaries of
interpretation, beyond which the risk of conflict is most implacable (p. 245).
In writing about the strange newness that can be discovered by both analyst and
analysand, both in reference to Loewald and Irigaray, I am drawing upon a particular
reading of Loewald by Alan Bass (2000). Bass is critical of Loewalds tendency to
minimize the various kinds of distress that accompany the new discovery of objects,
whether that distress is framed as anxiety, Angst, tension, or pain. For Bass, as for
Loewald, the new discovery of objects must be thought in terms of processes that do not
lead to a sameness between self and otherin another other word, identification. Rather,
it is necessary to think about a discovery that leads to integrative differentiation between
self and other that gives something more to both self and other in the process. Loewald
names this process internalization, and he ultimately argues for the importance of
clearly delineating internalization from identification. Bass takes Loewalds theory of
internalization and moves with it in the direction of the riskiness that Irigaray locates in
any encounter with static, fetishistic reality organizations. (Bass, like Irigaray, is a theorist
of fetishism.) What he arrives at is a theory of what he calls internalization anxiety
(2000) a specific kind of anxiety that emerges when the new discovery of objects threatens
to disrupt what Irigaray calls the subjects unity of voice. For Bass, in thinking the new
discovery of objects from the perspective of internalization anxiety, the analyst as new
object has very little if anything to do with the analysand taking comfort in the analyst as
empathically attuned. Rather, it has to do with an experience of uncanninessthat weird
mixture of familiarity and strangeness, according to Freud. The uncanniness that exists
within the analytic setting cannot be delineated in any reassuring manner in terms of the
everyday, ontic sense of the time or space of the therapeutic process. It cannot be located
within the analyst any more than it can be located within the analysand. It unsettles as it
transforms, transforms as it unsettles. Bass (2000) writes,

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The analyst as object can become strange or new, in Loewalds sense only when the
patient can internalize that he or she also is different from what had seemed to be certain. To
the extent that the entire analytic process represents the threat of this difference, the patient
will indeed . . . attempt to control time and space totally. (p. 235)

To think about Loewalds new object as a strange object reminds me of an

experience from my own psychoanalytic training. I bring up this vivid memoryshall we
take it as a screen memory?in the hope that it can speak in a visceral way to this whole
problematic around the term new object. I was in a supervision group in which
Loewalds theory of therapeutic action came up in the context of a particular case that we
were discussing together. One of the participants spoke of the reassuring importance of the
analyst being a new object for the patient in terms of not reacting as the patient expects
based on the patients transference. At the time, I was in the initial process of thinking
through Loewalds and Basss formulations. So, I stated to the group that I was thinking
about the idea of the analyst as a new object as being more about the analyst as a strange
object. Much to my surprise and embarrassment at the time, everyone in the group laughed
at me. As far as I can remember, the moment was never really thought about within or by
the group after the fact. In retrospect, I have to wonder if the groups response is indicative
of, indeed even symptomatic of, the Angst that emerges around a more dynamic formulation of the new object, or, as I have emphasized, the new discovery of objects. Did
I, without quite knowing what I was doing, interpret the backside of the more static,
familiar, ontic, conceptualization of the new object with my evocation of the strangeness of the analyst?
To think about Loewalds new discovery of objects in terms of Angst and uncanniness
is to come full circle back to Heidegger. I would like to end the essay with a quotation
from a later work of Heideggers, Identity and Difference, in which he returns to a
thinking of the ontological difference. Significantly, his thinking of the ontological
difference has shifted since his earlier analysis from Being and Time, with his emphasis
in the earlier work on Da-sein. In Identity and Difference, Heidegger (1969) writes,
We speak of the difference between Being and beings. The step goes back from what is
unthought, from the difference as such, unto what gives us thought. That is the oblivion of the
difference. The oblivion here to be thought is the veiling of the difference as such, thought in
terms of . . . concealment; this veiling has in turn withdrawn from the beginning. The oblivion
belongs to the difference because the difference belongs to the oblivion. The oblivion does not
happen to the difference afterward, in consequence of the forgetfulness of human thinking.
(pp. 50 51)

A thorough interpretation of this passage is not possible at this juncture as I move

toward the conclusion of my article. Therefore, I read it to you now in the hopes that it
will inspire a different kind of thinking, a pondering or meditation on the ontological
difference. The ways in which we all lose sight of what is most fundamental and yet most
strange, our very Being, has everything to do with the belonging of difference to oblivion.
Whatever Heidegger may mean by this belonging, I know that in reading about it I feel
profoundly unsettled. It speaks to the way in which ontological thinking does not divorce
itself from the painfulness of our limitations just as it can potentially open us up to new
ways of being with ourselves and others. I believe that this ontological perspective imbues
Loewalds psychoanalytic thinking of the dynamic as always already possible within the
static. By stepping back, and keeping in mind Heideggers thinking of oblivion, Loewalds
elegant formulations, such as the new discovery of objects, or primary reality, can take on

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a more disruptive edge. Loewald, in his own subtle way, takes us closer to the abyss of
a reality that makes possible as it troubles and confounds.
For Irigaray, sexual difference is itself impossible, or almost impossible. And reading
her work, at times, feels the same way. Nonetheless, her commitments to an ontological
thinking of sexual difference, as well as the radical potential of the Freudian psychoanalytic framework, place her in a unique position to think through some possible futures for
the difference within and between women and men. If we follow her lead, she gestures
toward a passionate embrace of the sexed otherpast, or rather through, the violence of
sexual indifferencein which there truly could be two.

References
Bass, A. (2000). Difference and disavowal: The trauma of Eros. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Heidegger, M. (1969). Identity and difference (J. Stambaugh, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper and
Row.
Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and time (J. Stambaugh, Trans.). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Irigaray, L. (1985). Speculum of the other woman (G. C. Gill, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Irigaray, L. (1993). An ethics of sexual difference (C. Burke & G. C. Gill, Trans.). Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Irigaray, L. (2002). To speak is never neutral (G. Schwab, Trans.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Loewald, H. (2000). The essential Loewald: Collected papers and monographs. Hagerstown, MD:
University Publishing Group.