Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Ethics: Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, and the Call to Care

Alternate titles:

The Undecidable Unconscious and Decidable Care: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Necessity of Embodied, Messy Care
The Undecidable Unconscious and the Ethical Demand of Care
The Undecidable Unconscious and the Wild Dance of Care: Olthuis, AI, and the Ethics of Messy Love

Introduction

Jim Olthuis’s Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love: A Theopoetics of Gift and Call, Risk and Promise (2022) was published after The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis had ceased publication in 2021. However, its themes speak directly to concerns I had raised in my founder's inaugural essay, "Let Us Not Forget the Clinic," particularly regarding the intersection of care and ethical responsibility within psychoanalysis and deconstruction.

I first encountered Jim Olthuis’s work around 2013, while assembling the editorial board for The Undecidable Unconscious, through his 2002 edited collection, Religion With/Out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo. At the time, I was immersed in the intersections of deconstruction, theology, and ethics, having recently read what I still consider the most insightful book on Derrida—James K. A. Smith’s Jacques Derrida: Live Theory (2005). Unlike many engagements with Derrida that remain ensnared in the aporias of textuality, Smith’s work distinguished itself through both its depth and clarity, offering a reading that not only upheld Derrida’s deconstructive rigor but also illuminated an ethical dimension—one that implicitly recognized the primacy of a call to care. Though I had not yet articulated this insight with precision at the time, Smith’s approach resonated with an intuition I was already grappling with: that deconstruction, far from being an exercise in infinite deferral, could be understood as a mode of responsibility, attuned to the ethical demands that emerge in relation to the other.

When I began my analytic training in 1999, my academic background—particularly my engagement with deconstruction—was met with more than mere suspicion. During my initial admissions interview at my training institute, I was bluntly told that I would need to convince the interviewer that deconstruction had anything to offer psychoanalysis in terms of care. Though this challenge was unduly aggressive and inappropriate given the power dynamics of an admissions interview, my interviewer was not entirely wrong to raise the question. My dissertation was a Derridean reading of Freudian theory, one that uncovered numerous resistances of psychoanalysis, as Derrida made clear. As I would later argue in "Let Us Not Forget the Clinic" (2014), deconstruction itself harbored a resistance to the call for care—or, more precisely, to any decidable call to care.

Where many Derrida scholars remained cautious—if not outright resistant—to acknowledging the ethical urgency embedded in Derrida's work, Smith embraced it, demonstrating that deconstruction need not be reduced to an infinite deferral but could instead be understood as a practice of responsibility. In Jacques Derrida: Live Theory, Smith presents Derrida as a profoundly ethical thinker, foregrounding his emphasis on openness to the Other. He argues that deconstruction is not merely a method of critique but an affirmative response to the call of the Other, positioning it as an inherently ethical and political vocation. This reading challenges the notion that deconstruction is purely destabilizing, instead framing it as a form of engaged, responsible thought—one that not only exposes aporias but also commits itself to the demands they impose upon us.

However, some critics contend that this interpretation risks oversimplification, casting Derrida as uniformly ethical and political while potentially neglecting the more unsettling, disruptive dimensions of his work—particularly those that resist any final reconciliation with conventional notions of ethics and politics. Yet it was precisely in this intellectual space—where deconstruction, care, and ethical commitment were beginning to converge in my own thinking—that I wrote "Psychoanalysis and Difference: Alan Bass’s Generalization of Fetishism," my first serious attempt to grapple with the complexities of Derrida, Heidegger, Bass, and the ethical call to care in psychoanalysis.

As I later assembled the editorial board for The Undecidable Unconscious, these concerns remained central. I reached out to Smith, inviting him to join the journal. Though he declined, he pointed me toward Jim Olthuis, whose work would not only deepen my engagement with these questions but also challenge me to think more expansively about the intersections of deconstruction, ethics, and psychoanalytic practice.

When I first encountered Olthuis’s work, it felt like an answer to the tensions and unresolved conflicts that had surfaced in our early editorial meetings for The Undecidable Unconscious. My co-editors, Alan Bass and Jared Russell, envisioned the journal primarily as a space for bringing the insights of deconstruction into conversation with psychoanalysis. In contrast, I was committed to a more reciprocal exchange—one that not only placed deconstruction and psychoanalysis on equal footing but also insisted on grounding our work in the practice of psychoanalysis itself, particularly in its ethical dimension: the ethics of care.

In our initial discussions, the notion of “ethics” frequently came under scrutiny. Bass and Russell emphasized that deconstruction, in its strictest sense, resists grounding itself in fixed moral or metaphysical principles. Yet I contended that psychoanalysis cannot proceed while disavowing its inherent ethical core—the imperative to listen to another’s suffering, to hold open a space for transformation, and to navigate the unpredictable terrain of another’s internal world. This ethical responsibility, I argued, is not an imposed framework but something that emerges within the analytic encounter itself, much as Levinas asserts that ethics precedes ontology. While we agreed that psychoanalysis is not reducible to a humanist project, we diverged on whether its ethical commitment risks reinstating what Derrida termed “a metaphysics of presence.” However, this opposition may itself be misleading: if deconstruction does not reject ethics outright but rather exposes its aporias, then ethical engagement and deconstructive rigor need not be in conflict. Reading Olthuis’s 2022 work ten years later, I saw an affirmation of my 2013 position—not merely that one can hold deconstruction and ethics together, but that deconstruction itself might be an ethical mode of engagement, deepening rather than destabilizing psychoanalysis’s ethical imperative.

Although Olthuis’s 2022 work arrived too late to influence the journal’s formation, his earlier writings—along with Smith’s—had already reinforced a principle I had long defended: that one can sustain the rigor and critical edge of postmodern thought while remaining steadfast in an uncompromising commitment to embodied care and relational depth.

In fact, I would go further—Bass and Russell resisted grounding their theoretical work, arguing that any such grounding was incompatible with deconstruction’s opposition to metaphysics. While my commitment lay in an ethics of care as a grounding, theirs was in resisting metaphysical foundations altogether.

Finding Foundations: Speculation, Commitment, and Editorial Disputes

The term commitment is crucial here, a concept I borrow from Smith’s essay in Religion With/Out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo. In "Is Deconstruction an Augustinian Science? Augustine, Derrida, and Caputo on the Commitments of Philosophy," Smith contends that “deconstruction, rather than being characterized by a spirit of suspicion, is concerned with the primordial trust that sets questioning in motion, and thus is itself always already committed.”

This notion of primordial trust—a kind of constitutive engagement that precedes even the most rigorous forms of critique—suggests that no discourse can begin without a tacit investment in certain foundational structures, even if it later seeks to question or destabilize them. In this sense, deconstruction itself, despite its insistence on différance and the impossibility of absolute presence, is not immune from the logic it exposes elsewhere: that all discourses, in their very act of establishing themselves, find themselves in their founding, even if that founding is always marked by undecidability.

Derrida makes a strikingly similar argument about psychoanalysis in To Speculate—on “Freud”, particularly in his reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. There, he traces how Freud, in his attempt to ground psychoanalysis as a science, necessarily engages in a speculative movement that undermines the very certainty he seeks. The introduction of the death drive—a concept Freud admits is neither directly observable nor fully demonstrable—reveals an intrinsic instability at the heart of psychoanalysis: it finds itself at the very moment of its own foundational uncertainty. What Derrida shows, however, is that this moment of self-finding is not unique to psychoanalysis but rather exemplifies a broader structure at work in all discourses. Any system of thought that aspires to a foundation ultimately discovers itself in the process of articulating that foundation—yet this discovery always involves an encounter with the limits of what can be known, expressed, or secured.

Deconstruction, as Smith suggests, is no exception to this. It operates under the assumption that différance, trace, and the instability of meaning are always already in play, but in articulating these principles, it too participates in the same founding paradox it identifies elsewhere. The act of marking différance presupposes a minimal commitment to the very structures of language, thought, and inquiry that it seeks to unsettle. Like Freud’s speculative engagement with the death drive, deconstruction inevitably gestures toward a foundational moment—one that is marked by both an unavoidable investment and a simultaneous destabilization of that investment. In this way, both psychoanalysis and deconstruction demonstrate that no discourse is free from the necessity of finding itself in its own act of constitution.

Smith ultimately declined my invitation to join the board but suggested his former teacher, Olthuis, as a potential member. When I reached out, Olthuis accepted. My co-editors, however—both deeply committed atheists—resisted the inclusion of a theologian, despite Olthuis’s credentials as both a Derrida scholar and a seasoned clinician. My motivation for inviting him was straightforward: I wanted a scholar who, like Bass and Russell, was also an experienced clinician, someone invested in applying deconstruction not only to textual interpretation but also to the lived realities of psychoanalytic practice.

For me, the journal was never meant to be an abstract intellectual exercise but a project rooted in the ethical responsibilities of clinical work. My commitment had always been to the promotion of health in my patients. An ethic of care was not merely an auxiliary concern but the very ground upon which theoretical discourse should rest. And yet, this grounding—one that I saw as an ethical necessity—was viewed by some of my colleagues as an unacceptable concession to metaphysics. This divide encapsulated the central tension in our early editorial meetings: whether psychoanalysis, as a practice fundamentally concerned with the well-being of the other, could afford to remain indifferent to the ethical imperatives that arise within the analytic encounter.

Derridean Objections and the Question of Ground

In light of the preceding discussion, one might ask how Jacques Derrida or scholars of deconstruction would respond to my insistence that an ethic of care is not merely an adjunct to theoretical discourse but its necessary foundation. Deconstruction has long been perceived as opposing any form of moral grounding, committed instead to the vigilant unmasking of stable "centers" in philosophy and ethics. If deconstruction continually unsettles final justifications, how can we assert care as a non-negotiable principle—something that functions as a grounding while remaining indispensable?

From a Derridean perspective, the concern would not be directed against care per se; rather, it would question the language of “foundation” and “ground.” Deconstruction suspects that naming a certain ground (e.g., care) as the starting point risks ossifying it into a metaphysical presence—a stable anchor immune to critique. In Derrida’s terms, an ethic of care might easily become a new transcendental signified, a moral concept presumed to exist prior to, or outside of, the flux of language and difference. The question then becomes: Is care truly an unassailable ground, or does it gain its force precisely because it refuses final closure?

Derrida would not dismiss the imperative to care. Rather, he might suggest that care’s genuine power—and its ethical urgency—flows from the very absence of guarantees. If no grounding can be fully secured, then the decision to care cannot rest on an absolute principle or final authority. Instead, one faces an aporetic responsibility each time one encounters another’s suffering. This is close to Derrida’s emphasis on responsibility as that which arises in an encounter without a solid foundation—an act we cannot entirely justify in theoretical or metaphysical terms, yet we must undertake nonetheless.

However, from my perspective—one that draws upon both psychoanalytic practice and an insistence on lived responsibility—care may indeed serve as a certain ground, at least in the sense Levinas suggests: namely, that before all theorizing, all discourse, we are called by the face (or the presence) of the other. For Levinas, our responsibility for the other is “older than the ego,” a demand that pre-exists any rational calculus. This is not so different from an “ethic of care” that sees itself as indispensable. If I am “certain” that care is required, it is because, in the clinical setting, I see daily how ignoring the suffering other leads to deep ethical and interpersonal failures. In that sense, care acts as a first principle in practice, even if we cannot finalize it in an eternal, metaphysical edifice.

Yet, it is precisely here that we meet Derrida’s challenge: Could not this assertion of “certainty” mask an underlying undecidability, a vulnerability, that actually animates care? If we say we are “certain” of care, do we risk failing to acknowledge the irreducible risk, the perpetual re-negotiation, that care requires? Do we mask the messy impetus that each new encounter summons—an impetus that might be better described as what compels us despite our inability to ground it conclusively?

I contend that Derrida’s challenge might deepen rather than negate the Levinasian or psychoanalytic impetus to care. Where Levinas sees an incontrovertible demand in the face of the other, Derrida might ask us to inhabit the question of how that demand makes claims on us, while acknowledging that no formula can guarantee a correct response. Instead, we live in a perpetual state of responding, each time confronted by the singular other. To declare ourselves “certain” of care does not have to foreclose this open-endedness; it can signal our unwavering stance that we must care, even when we lack an ultimate foundation or totalizing rationale.

Let Us Not Forget the Clinic: The Call for a More Human Ethic

In Let Us Not Forget the Clinic (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/572068), I voiced concern that in certain psychoanalytic and philosophical circles—especially those immersed in deconstruction or an overly discursive approach—there was a tendency to lose sight of the human dimension of our work. While these traditions have brought critical insights (for instance, the necessity of questioning totalizing metaphysical frameworks), they can also slide into an almost sterile intellectualism that brackets out the embodied, vulnerable encounter in the clinic. Real human suffering, I argued, demands an ethic that is prepared to step into the unpredictable realm of a patient’s experience and the analyst’s own embodied subjectivity.

This is precisely where Jim Olthuis’s Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love becomes a kind of answer—a “gift.” By reframing care and love as a dance carried out in “wild spaces,” Olthuis directly addresses my call to remember the profound, messy reality of the clinical encounter. While many deconstruction-influenced theories want to keep psychoanalysis safely in the realm of discourse analysis and linguistic deferral, Olthuis’s theology refuses to ignore the flesh-and-blood dimension of relationship. Thus, his conception of a relationally grounded, improvisational “dance” can serve as a corrective for anyone—clinician or theorist—who might forget that the body, emotion, and empathy are central to care. This is the “gift” that so thoroughly answered my own anxieties about depersonalizing the clinic.

When I speak of a “gift,” I am not referring to a simplistic solution or a tidy theoretical framework. Rather, Olthuis’s text offers a way to reclaim the experiential richness of caring encounters, something that can too easily be lost when we remain at the level of textual analysis or abstract theoretical posture. The metaphor of dance underscores how each encounter with a patient—or with any suffering other—demands a new choreography, shaped by the immediate needs, unspoken emotional cues, and unpredictable dynamics that arise in that relational moment. Far from discarding the valuable critiques of deconstruction, Olthuis adds a vital dimension: the invitation to remain deeply and bodily present with the other, despite the uncertainty and risk that such presence entails.

I recall one particular patient whose profound grief did not manifest primarily in words but in a tremulous bodily stance—eyes downcast, shoulders hunched, voice barely above a whisper. This patient’s suffering could not be fully captured by interpretive acumen alone. Instead, what allowed for eventual healing was a slow, tentative process of emotional attunement. Week after week, I had to “dance” with the patient’s subtle cues, sometimes not speaking at all, other times offering a gentle question or a supportive glance. It was, in many ways, an improvisation in real time—far beyond any purely linguistic or deconstructive endeavor. Reading Olthuis later, I recognized that this was precisely the kind of “wild space” where love, care, and psychoanalysis intersect in the most tangible way.

Importantly, the theopoetic thrust in Olthuis’s text also resonates with the day-to-day improvisation required in the consulting room. Psychoanalysis, like a dance, is less about executing memorized steps and more about attuning to the patient’s unspoken or half-spoken signals, responding to emotional cues in ways that cannot be pre-programmed. Olthuis’s “gift” is thus not a rigid doctrine but a call to ongoing creativity within the messiness of relationship—mirroring the clinician’s task of weaving theory with presence, empathy, and intuition.

The term “theopoetic” highlights that Olthuis is not operating within a narrow dogmatic theology; rather, he engages a creative, imaginative approach that sees love as both gift and risk, promise and call. This resonates with the psychoanalytic stance that must remain open to the unknown in each session. No matter how trained we are in interpretation or technique, real healing emerges from the spontaneous interplay—indeed, the dance—between analyst and analysand. This synergy is necessarily messy, and that is precisely where its potency lies.

Why a Sometimes Unitarian Universalist Invited a Committed Christian Theologian

When founding The Undecidable Unconscious, I invited Jim Olthuis to join the editorial board, despite the fact that the rest of the board was composed almost entirely of self-described atheists—"committed" atheists, to borrow from James K. A. Smith’s vocabulary (Smith, 2009). Smith has argued that all humans are liturgical and desiring creatures, suggesting that even the most ardent atheist can be deeply “committed” in a quasi-religious way to certain visions of truth or goodness. This shared commitment ironically brings atheists and theists closer together than one might initially suspect.

As a not-totally-committed Unitarian Universalist, I find value in diverse religious and philosophical traditions—so long as they amplify compassion and critical understanding. Olthuis’s framework of relational theology and “wild love” speaks directly to what I call the “undecidable” dimension of human experience: the embodied care, suffering, and hope that defy reduction to any single discourse. His presence on the board is not merely a gesture of “inclusivity.” Rather, his notion of love as dance—with its robust emphasis on embodied responsibility—more than justified the collaboration. I saw Olthuis’s approach as an essential counterbalance: a way of reminding colleagues who often champion anti-metaphysical stances that deep care might transcend neat boundaries, whether they be atheistic or theistic.

I recall some initial hesitation from certain board members, who worried that inviting a Christian theologian might undermine the journal’s staunchly postmodern and critical ethos. Yet the moment Olthuis began contributing to our conversations, it became evident that he was far from an apologist for institutional dogma. Instead, he spoke from a deep well of relational insight, one that complemented deconstruction’s suspicion of master narratives by reintroducing a dimension of careful presence—something many of us felt was lacking. His theological perspective did not stifle the conversation but rather breathed new life into discussions about ethics, responsibility, and what it means to truly encounter another person’s suffering or hope.

Furthermore, Olthuis’s theological perspective opened avenues for dialogue that neither purely psychoanalytic nor purely deconstructive frames could fully illuminate. For instance, questions of faith, hope, and redemption often arise implicitly in the clinic—patients grappling with existential crises, with guilt, or with yearnings that transcend tidy theoretical categories. Olthuis helped us to see how these yearnings might be addressed in a manner that remains faithful to the deconstructive ethos—refusing any totalizing closure—while still honoring the patient’s deep desire for meaning or spiritual solace. This interplay between theology, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction enriched our editorial vision in ways I had scarcely anticipated at the journal’s outset.

This ecumenical mindset underscores the idea that psychoanalysis, theology, and humanism each provide languages for grappling with mystery, suffering, and the potential for transformation. If the aim of The Undecidable Unconscious is to probe the zones of “undecidability,” then voices like Olthuis’s are indispensable. They keep us tethered to the living dance of relationship, precisely where transformations happen—in the “wild spaces” that logic alone cannot navigate.

Olthuis’s Dance as the “Gift” of an Answer

In Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love: A Theopoetics of Gift and Call, Risk and Promise, Olthuis frames love as something that emerges precisely at the edges of our certainty. Rather than domesticate care into a universal rule or an abstract discourse, he urges us to accept that care, like dancing, requires constant adaptation, vulnerability, and even improvisation. This is the “gift” that answered my earlier concerns in Let Us Not Forget the Clinic. Olthuis’s work justifies a theological dimension in the midst of my own psychoanalytic and postmodern projects because it names and honors that intangible “something more” in care—call it the wildness or excess of loving encounter—that purely secular, purely discursive frameworks often overlook.

Central to this “gift” is the recognition that love involves unpredictability, call, and promise. In the clinical context, this translates into recognizing the patient’s call to be heard and the promise of transformation that can arise when the therapist is fully present in the unpredictable drama of psychic life. From the vantage point of a practicing clinician, it is the day-to-day experience of sitting with real people in real pain, navigating unpredictable transference dynamics, and grappling with our own emotional responses. There, the best theoretical constructs remain crucial but incomplete. The dance metaphor captures the fluid interplay between theoretical knowledge and the living, breathing interplay of bodies and psyches—a synergy that also characterizes the “theopoetic” dimension of Olthuis’s theology.

One of the compelling aspects of Olthuis’s argument is his refusal to reduce love to a mere concept or emotion. In his theopoetic vision, love is embodied engagement, a risky venture that always carries the possibility of surprise. This resonates with psychoanalytic understandings of the transference, which likewise insists that “knowing” the patient cognitively is not enough; one must also be open to the unforeseen ways the patient’s unconscious will speak through dreams, bodily symptoms, or emotional outbursts. The notion of “gift” here signifies not only what the therapist can offer, but also what the patient, in their uniqueness, offers back—a mutual exchange that cannot be scripted beforehand.

I have personally encountered scenarios in which a patient’s sudden disclosure of trauma shatters the carefully orchestrated interpretive rhythm we had established. In these moments, any pre-existing plan or technique is quickly upended, and one must move—almost literally—into a new dance step, guided by empathy, moral responsibility, and a willingness to tread uncertain ground. Olthuis’s text resonates profoundly here, emphasizing that love emerges precisely at these edges, where calculation and prescriptive rules fall short, and where a more profound human-to-human encounter takes shape.

Cyborgian and Embodied Care: The Connection Deepens

Building on my arguments in The Ethics of Cyborgian Care (https://www.undecidableunconscious.net/post/the-ethics-of-cyborgian-care) and Empathy, Embodiment, and Care (https://www.undecidableunconscious.net/post/empathy-embodiment-and-care), I have repeatedly stressed that our shared vulnerability is not restricted to the purely biological; we are embedded in socio-technological systems that shape how we care for each other. Yet this does not negate the wild and messy aspects of actual lived encounters. Instead, it highlights that the “dance” extends beyond face-to-face settings to include telehealth, social networks, medical devices, and more. In other words, we co-constitute our caring relationships through an ever-expanding web of cybernetic and human interfaces.

My critique in Let Us Not Forget the Clinic remains crucial here: we must ensure that these technological augmentations do not overshadow the deeper need for embodied empathy. This form of empathy involves sensing, in our own bodies, another’s emotional presence and responding with attuned compassion. Olthuis’s theology serves as a powerful reminder that even as we embrace cyborgian realities, the core of human care remains an essentially vulnerable, improvisational process—one that is incalculable and undecidable in the best sense of those terms.

This cyborgian perspective does not mean rejecting technology—far from it. Telehealth platforms, for instance, have made therapy accessible to many who would otherwise be excluded. But in our eagerness to harness new tools, we risk confusing efficient data management with genuine empathetic exchange. Olthuis’s emphasis on wild, relational dancing reaffirms that care must always include that dimension of bodily and emotional presence which machines, no matter how advanced, cannot replicate. The ethical demand persists even in technologically mediated encounters, reminding us to remain attuned to the patient as a complex, feeling body rather than a disembodied data point.

By insisting on the unquantifiable dimension of care, we guard against the temptation to see human healing solely as a system problem to be “optimized.” Instead, following Olthuis, we enter the space of theopoetics, where love and care are lived in the tension between gift and risk, call and promise, forging new possibilities that no algorithm can fully predict. This is particularly relevant in the age of AI-driven mental health apps, which attempt to streamline diagnostics and treatment. While these apps may have practical benefits, they lack the “dance” that Olthuis celebrates. There is no genuine improvisational space for the therapist—or the AI—to sense a patient’s contradictory emotional signals, to respond physically and emotionally in real time, and to be vulnerable in turn. The result can be a flattening of care, where empathy is reduced to scripted responses. Olthuis’s vision of dancing in wild spaces stands as a reminder that true care refuses such flattening, retaining the unpredictable, relational core that makes ethical engagement possible.

SFI, AI, and the “Chaos-Metaphysics-of-Non-Messiness”

A number of thinkers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), known for their work on complexity science, chaos theory, and emergent phenomena, have advanced the idea that artificial intelligence might eventually replicate—or even surpass—certain aspects of human cognition. Their perspective could be framed as a “chaos-as-ordered-metaphysics-of-non-messiness,” in that they often see chaotic processes as ultimately computable or modelable by advanced algorithms. While this approach has fueled remarkable breakthroughs in AI research, it rests on the assumption that all forms of complexity can, in principle, be reduced to systematic, algorithmic analysis.

Such a stance may indeed be correct in describing how AI can process enormous amounts of data with dazzling speed—data that might appear “messy” to us but is quickly ordered into computational patterns. Yet, from the vantage point of wild love and embodied care, this form of intelligence, while powerful, lacks a dimension that we might call “the messy heart of humanity.” In the clinical setting or any environment where empathy is paramount, the crux of human intelligence—our capacity for care, love, and perhaps even spirituality—resides in those incalculable “wild spaces” that are not wholly subject to algorithmic resolution.

The “undecidability” that psychoanalysis has long championed (through Freud’s concept of the unconscious or Lacan’s notion of the Real) points to a realm of experience that is not merely disordered but excessive, beyond quantification. While AI might mimic certain features of emotional responsiveness (through large language models, for instance), it does so without the same fleshy stake in the game. It is precisely this stake—our mortal bodies, our social entanglements, our unstoppable vulnerability—that makes us question, risk, and love in ways that cannot be codified into neat computational “decisions.” The SFI approach, no matter how adept at mapping complex systems, does not fully capture the human messiness that grounds ethical responsibility and relational warmth.

Moreover, this is not just a question of “emotional labor” or aesthetic nuance; it is about the spiritual or existential openness that emerges within undecidability. The very fact that meaning remains uncertain, that our relations with others cannot be fully predicted or enclosed, makes possible the alchemical moment of care and compassion. Such care arises from the interplay between our embodied presence and the irreducible singularity of another human being—a dynamic far more subtle than anything captured by computational “thought.”

Consider the example of a clinical encounter where a patient unexpectedly breaks into tears mid-session. An AI-driven therapeutic tool might have a protocol for responding—perhaps by offering soothing statements or referencing relevant data about emotional crises. Yet only a human clinician, sharing in the vulnerabilities of embodied life, can spontaneously respond with genuine compassion that emerges from a place of mutual fragility. This moment cannot be standardized or “solved”; it must be experienced in all its unpredictability. The “chaos-as-ordered-metaphysics-of-non-messiness” simply has no parallel for this lived reciprocity, which is where true care and connection flourish.

Such considerations have practical implications for how we envision the future of mental health services. The push to adopt AI-driven diagnostics, while cost-effective, may perpetuate a model of care that overlooks the intangible, unprogrammable dimensions of empathy and love that Olthuis so powerfully articulates. It is one thing to develop an algorithm that can flag certain symptoms; it is entirely another to engage in the delicate dance of shared vulnerability. Olthuis’s argument thus poses an important ethical question: How do we preserve the incalculable core of human relationality in a world increasingly enamored with computational “solutions”?

Conclusion

Olthuis’s Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love: A Theopoetics of Gift and Call, Risk and Promise is not merely a pleasant metaphor but a substantive argument for why we cannot foreclose the messy, unpredictable, and often chaotic dimensions of human care. In Let Us Not Forget the Clinic, I insisted that psychoanalysis—and indeed any ethical engagement—must hold fast to the human dimension, resisting the pull toward abstraction that loses sight of flesh-and-blood encounter. Olthuis’s work is, in many ways, the answer I had been seeking: an articulation of how an open, embodied, and spiritual posture can address the deficits in purely discursive or anti-metaphysical frameworks.

Inviting a Christian theologian like Olthuis onto the editorial board of The Undecidable Unconscious was thus a logical extension of our journal’s commitment to exploring the “undecidable.” In a board largely comprising self-professed atheists—deeply “committed” in the sense of James K. A. Smith—Olthuis brought a refreshing voice attuned to the dimension of love’s excess. Finally, the “chaos-as-ordered-metaphysics-of-non-messiness” advocated by some SFI theorists in relation to AI might well be valid for machine-based intelligence, but it fails to encompass the vital, messy incalculability of human intelligence—an intelligence that is intimately bound up with our capacity to feel, to empathize, and to love. In these wild, embodied spaces of undecidability, we discover what is most profoundly human—and therein lies the heart of an ethics of embodied care. Whether we conceptualize this space in theological or secular terms, its existence underscores why any robust model of human cognition and social life must embrace the unpredictability, creativity, and spiritual resonance that arise from our messy vulnerability.

In retrospect, the editorial journey of The Undecidable Unconscious—and my collaborations with thinkers like Olthuis—underscored a crucial takeaway: theoretical brilliance must never serve as an alibi for neglecting the real, embodied needs of others. The final issues of the journal (2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021) increasingly reflected this concern, exploring how psychoanalysis could remain “undecidable” without becoming clinically aloof and how deconstruction could retain its critical vitality while still honoring the ethical exigencies of care.

Unfortunately, I left the journal in 2018, frustrated by what might best be described as a careless—if not outright dismissive—takeover by my colleagues. The result was that the 2016 and 2017 issues—over which I no longer had editorial control—were almost entirely devoid of essays engaging with the call to care, effectively abandoning the clinic despite my hopes to the contrary. Looking back, had I engaged more deeply with Olthuis’s earlier work when I first articulated my call to care in 2013—when I still believed the journal could bridge the psychoanalytic worlds of the clinic and the university—or had his 2022 book been available sooner, it might have provided an even clearer framework for a praxis that integrates intellectual rigor with heartfelt compassion.

In the end, what truly binds us together is not theoretical allegiance but our shared vulnerability—something the journal failed to recognize in time to keep me involved. Instead, as I had warned in "Let Us Not Forget the Clinic," it became just another unread theory journal, catering exclusively to academia, even when many of its contributors were clinician-academics. It is difficult for me to escape the conclusion that my journal was taken from me because my call to care—grounded in a very decidable compassion for very decidable suffering—was dismissed as naïve, insufficiently steeped in undecidability, and too humanistic-spiritual to fit within the preferred modes of Derridean discourse.

Coda: Supervision, Spirituality, and the Ethics of Care

A major part of psychoanalytic training is the supervised control cases, and I was fortunate to work with Randy Sorenson, author of Minding Spirituality and a professor of theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. Concurrent with this supervision was my work with Alan Bass, which provided an enlightening juxtaposition between two profoundly different orientations to care—one rooted in a Christian psychoanalytic perspective and the other shaped by deconstruction, as Bass is widely regarded as one of the premier Derrida scholars in the world.

Sorenson was likely well-versed in Jim Olthuis’s work, and it showed. His approach embodied the deeply relational and spiritually attuned sensibility that Olthuis champions—a commitment to care that is not simply theoretical but lived, experienced, and responsive to the unique depths of the analytic encounter. Minding Spirituality explores the ways in which spirituality functions not as an abstract belief system but as something intrinsic to human meaning-making, embedded in the dynamics of the unconscious and the therapeutic relationship itself. This resonated profoundly with my own experience of Sorenson as a caregiver—by far the most impactful and attuned supervisory experience of my training.

I was devastated when we lost Randy just a year after our work had concluded. He was only 51 when he died, leaving behind not just a legacy of scholarship, but also a model of psychoanalytic care that demonstrated how spirituality, ethics, and psychoanalysis could be brought into meaningful dialogue without sacrificing intellectual rigor.