Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness

Edgar A. Levenson, Alan Slomowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315532394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Edgar A. Levenson is a key figure in the development of interpersonal psychoanalysis whose ideas remain influential. Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness builds on his previously published work in his key areas of expertise such as interpersonal psychoanalysis, transference and countertransference, and the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and sets his ideas into contemporary context. Combining a selection of Levenson's own writings with extensive discussion and analysis of his work by Stern and Slomowitz, it provides an invaluable guide to how his most recent, mature ideas may be understood and applied by contemporary psychoanalysts in their own practice.

This book explores how the rational algorithm of psychoanalytic engagement and the mysterious flows of consciousness interact; this has traditionally been thought of as dialectical, an unresolvable duality in psychoanalytic practice. Analysts move back and forth between the two perspectives, rather like a gestalt leap, finding themselves listening either to the "interpersonal" or to the "intrapsychic" in what feels like a self-state leap. But the interpersonal is not in dialectical opposition to the intrapsychic; rather a manifestation of it, a subset. The chapters pick up from the themes explored in The Purloined Self, shifting the emphasis from the interpersonal field to the exploration of the enigma of the flow of consciousness that underlies the therapeutic process. This is not the Freudian Unconscious nor the consciousness of awareness, but the mysterious Jamesian matrix of being. Any effort at influence provokes resistance and refusal by the patient. Permitted a "working space, " the patient ultimately cures herself. How that happens is a mystery wrapped up in the greater mystery of unconscious process, which in turn is wrapped into the greatest philosophical and neurological enigma of all—the nature of consciousness.

Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness will be highly engaging and readable; Levenson's witty essayist style and original perspective will make it greatly appealing and accessible to undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, as well as practitioners in these fields.

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Part I
The Unfolding of Interpersonal Pyschoanalysis, from Interpersonal Psychiatry to Interpersonal Psychoanalysis

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Chapter 1
An Interpersonal Therapist¹

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Gregory Bateson (1979) said that the point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer; that is, every voyage of discovery leads back to the self. As I understand it, this is the theme of this book, namely, how the therapist’s own life experience inhabits and defines his or her theoretical and clinical understandings.

In the process of thinking about this issue, an iconic memory popped into my mind. Iconic memories are those highly stylized and persistent accounts we have of our lives, memories that loom like monoliths through the mists of the past. Their tangibility is deceptive, however, inasmuch as they seem very clear to us until they are stressed, and then they fracture and deconstruct in very odd ways.

My iconic memory, par excellence, is of being in a synagogue with my father. I was, I suppose, about 8 years old. My father was not a religious man. He was, rather, a sort of diffident Marxist, unlike several of my uncles who were really rabid and unregenerate Stalinists. We were in synagogue because my mother—who did not entirely believe in God, but was afraid of Him—thought that my father should do his paternal duty and take me there. It was an Orthodox synagogue with the women upstairs, the entire service in Hebrew, and notably lacking any of the choral effects, organ music, or other chic, “reformed,” goyish elaborations that would have sent my grandfather spinning in his grave.

At any rate, there came a point in the service when the doors of the Ark, which contains the sacred scrolls, were opened, and the members of the congregation covered their bowed heads with their prayer shawls, and looked fixedly at the floor. “Don’t look,” said my father. “Why not?” I asked (already a troublemaker). “Because you’ll die on the spot,” he said. That’s like telling a kid not to touch wet paint. So, I glued my eyes to the floor, dreading their inexorable upward drift. I would look! I would see! And that would be the end of little Edgar.

I did, however, sneak a sidelong look at my father, and to my absolute horror, he was staring straight ahead, totally unperturbed! I can—to this day—still see with total clarity the tiny red capillaries in his eyes. Now, that’s where the iconic memory ends. I don’t know whether I then looked, or if I expected him to drop dead, or if I decided that he must be immune to God’s vengeance. I don’t know why he constrained me in such a draconian fashion (a variant of the Old Testament story of the Hebrew who rushed forward to steady the unbalanced Ark and was killed on the spot for his troubles). Was he exasperated with my endless whys? Was he kidding? In his Freudian Unconscious (not a concept either of us was cognizant of at that time) did he hope I’d drop dead? Did I hope he’d drop dead? The more I think about the incident, the less clear it becomes. As I said, this heavy over-determination is a cardinal characteristic of iconic memories.

So I became a skeptic. Or, maybe I became a disenchanted kid, and later a skeptic. The ancient Greek skeptics were defined by their belief that the truth of all knowledge must always be in question, and that true inquiry was a process of doubting. There is no absolute truth, and inquiry into the premises of belief is more fruitful than belief itself. This is, I think, not the same as Jewish skepticism, wherein truth is not given by authority, but must be arrived at individually.² I suspect, but I am not sure, that the classic skepticism is more austere. Truth remains always elusive and in question.

Somewhat later, I found myself sympathetic to the anthropologist Kluckhohn’s (Kluckhohn and Murray, 1953) claim that every culture is defined by pervasive and profoundly unexamined premises about the nature of time, space, and reality. This led me quite naturally to the cultural relativism current in the 1940s and 1950s, when anthropologists Benedict, Mead, Whorf, Lee, and Sapir were questioning the ethnocentricity of Western man and his view of “primitive” cultures.

Ethnology seemed to me to be a very attractive career, but I’d already gone through medical school, the usual route for bright, but uninspired, Jewish boys in a world that did not, in 1943, permit very many other options. I might add that my father was a physician, which certainly influenced my choice. I really did not have much ambition beyond getting into a medical school, which seemed nigh on impossible, and, when to my surprise, I found myself to be a newly minted M.D., I didn’t quite know what to do with it. I was too prone to panic to make a good surgeon and internal medicine seemed like a depressing and overly intellectualized business.

After my internship, a residency in neurology became available, so I took it. I then spent 2 years (1948–1950) in the Army Medical Corps, mostly in Berlin. The army, in its inimitable fashion, had no category for neurologists, so I was designated a neuropsychiatrist, and a neuro psychiatrist I became. On my return to the States, I entered psychoanalytic training, quite possibly my first entirely proactive career move, a decision that seemed to me then, and seems to me now, an enterprising and creative way to do what I wished without admitting that after all those years of unremitting and agonistic striving, medicine was not what I really wanted to do. Nor was I about to go live in a straw hut and eat witchetty grubs (for all I know, Margaret Mead lived on tinned foie gras, but that’s not what I’d been led to believe). Oh—and also I needed a personal analysis rather badly, although I didn’t quite admit that to myself. Undergoing a “training analysis” seemed like a face-saving way to get therapy, since psychoanalytic treatment, in those presumably less enlightened days, was not considered an entirely acceptable undertaking. Being an analyst was somewhat like being a syphilologist—treating the disease was OK, having it was not.

I applied to the William Alanson White Institute because of its strongly cultural orientation, particularly manifest in Erich Fromm’s teaching. I was not as aware of Harry Stack Sullivan’s teachings, nor of Clara Thompson’s. The White Institute’s position was a heady amalgam of the views of these three innovators—Fromm’s social (Marxist) psychology; Thompson’s Ferenczi-derived, democratized psychoanalysis; and Sullivan’s interpersonal psychiatry (note, not psychoanalysis), which was heavily influenced by Adolf Meyer’s institutional psychiatry. Moreover, White was decidedly different from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Candidates were considered colleagues, dissension and challenge were appreciated, and psychologists were accepted for training.³ I must confess that, although apprised of it, I had no real interest in the intense political struggle taking place between White and the American Psychoanalytic Association.⁴

I wish I could claim that becoming an analyst was the culmination of a sequence of focused experiences, but I think I fell into it, through a congeries of converging needs, and corrections of errors made in my life choices. Is it chance or destiny? Actually, I suspect it is how many people arrive at their destinations. This echoes the theme of my first book, The Fallacy of Understanding, that therapy consists of just such a series of falling into enactments with the patient (transformations) and then creative extrications (Levenson, 1972). That is, therapy consists of a backward reaching process: getting into messes, recognizing and delineating them, and then working one’s way through and out—not so dissimilar to how one arrives at one’s life. Regardless of metapsychological differences, all analysts meticulously monitor their deviation from the standardized technique, their lapses from ideal participation, be it neutrality or authentic interaction. Therapy is a series of lapses and corrections. Isn’t that what countertranference is all about? I do not believe that a therapist stays ahead of the patient, leading him or her to the promised land. Sullivan would certainly agree; wasn’t it what he had in mind when he said, “God keep me from a clever psychoanalyst.”

It would appear, again in retrospect, that it was not incidental that I gave so much space in The Ambiguity of Change to Freud’s dream the night before his father’s funeral (Levenson, 1983). According to Krüll (1979), it was quite possibly the key to Freud’s critical abandoning of his seduction theory. In the dream he reads on a board the following message: “It is requested to close the eyes.” As I pointed out, it is intriguing that the priestesses of the Eleusian mysteries were called mystes and were bound to secrecy. “Mystery” is from the Greek myein—to close the eyes! It was nothing short of a blessing for me to discover a community of psycho analysts who thought, pace little Edgar, that opening one’s eyes was desirable, and moreover, that raising one’s eyes—subjecting authority to a good, hard look—was not a likely invitation to instant death.

Were I to be in a Freudian institute—assuming I’d survived—I would still remain a skeptic. One can no more change one’s characterological style than a leopard can change its spots. Even the White Institute has its share of constitutional conservatives, crypto-Freudians. But I suppose that had I been in the New York Psychoanalytic in the fifties, they would have wished I’d looked up at the wrong time in the service.

It is consistent with my avowed skepticism to be skeptical of the usual explanations of how one becomes anything. So I have elided life experiences that helped shape my path: teachers, books, experiential epiphanies. I like to think that I have become what I always was. My historical tradition is a variety of Jewish freethinking, with an outsider’s sense of irony and play, a lack of conviction about authority, and a traditional entitlement to question what I am told. The post-World War II explosion of interest in cultural perspectivism, the foment of intellectual activity that takes place occasionally in the world (Renaissance Italy, Berlin in the twenties, Paris in the thirties, and New York in the post-World War II diaspora) was current when I returned from the army after a 2-year breather, an involuntary yet very welcome interlude in a lifetime of dogged study. It was, as I have indicated, an easy step into psychoanalysis, which was then an honored and, believe it or not, relatively well-remunerated profession. Philip Lehrman, who was an early Freudian and a close friend of my father, told me that in the early days of psychoanalysis, he paid patients 25 cents a session to come to be analyzed. No such sacrifices were required of me. I was paid 15 dollars a session, which was ample recompense in those halcyon days.

Sometimes, though, in the hour of the wolf, I wonder if indeed I became what I was or whether I became what I am. Is adult personality an evocation of a unique core self, or are there, as Sullivan suspected, many selves, many outcomes? Would I have become the same person had I done something else? Is there, in a parallel universe, another me, the successful cosmetic surgeon or scriptwriter, driving a Mercedes and wearing gold chains? It is certainly more comforting to stick to my original conceit—that there is a core personality, which is, one hopes, approximated, however inchoately, over time—even if I sound a bit like the parrot in Woody Allen’s movie who sings, “I’ve Got to Be Me.”

Notes

1. First published in 1998, in Why I Became a Psychotherapist, Ed. J. Reppen. New Jersey, Jason Aronson, pp. 209–214.

2. See Handelman (1982) for an interesting exegesis of Rabbinic thought in psychoanalysis.

3. At that time, 1952, on a somewhat compromised basis, but shortly thereafter on full parity.

4. Times have, indeed, changed. In 1994 I was made an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

References

Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton.

Handelman, S. (1982). The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Kluckhohn, C., and Murray, H.A. (1953). Personality formation: the determinants. In Personality in Nature, Society and Culture. New York: Knopf, pp. 53–67.

Krüll, M. (1979). Freud und sein Vater. Munich: C.H. Beck.

Levenson, E. (1972). The Fallacy of Understanding. New York: Basic Books.

Levenson, E. (1983). The Ambiguity of Change: An Inquiry into the Nature of Psychoanalytic Reality. New York: Basic Books.

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Chapter 2
Back to the Future

The New Psychoanalytic Revisionism¹

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My father, who was a family physician, told me this story: A Russian physician (in the days before antibiotics) is called to the bedside of a tailor dying of pneumonia. As he is about to expire, his wife timidly suggests a peasant remedy—blinis with sour cream. The physician, being a pragmatist, figures, “Why not?” They spoon the blinis into the moribund tailor and the physician leaves. The next day, to the physician’s astonishment, the tailor is totally recovered. Meticulously, he notes in his diary, “Blinis with sour cream, a specific for pneumonia.”

About a week later, he is called to the bedside of a butcher, who is also dying of pneumonia. Referring to his notes, he feeds him the curative blinis with sour cream. With the first mouthful, the butcher’s eyes roll back and he expires. The physician amends his diary: “Blinis with sour cream, a specific for pneumonia, only in tailors!”

This reductio ad absurdum of the scientific-medical model is not so irrelevant to my thesis. I would like to suggest that psychoanalytic theory suffers from a tragic flaw. Like the Russian doctor, it, too, wishes to be “scientific”: to define the general principles, the “set of transcendental human universals” to which the specifics of experience must adhere (Bruner, 1990). Psychoanalytic principles, we insist, must apply with equal relevance to the tailor and the butcher. In addition, we wish it to be progressive, to unfold in a linear fashion, always toward greater relevance and clarity. As Habermas put it, “In principle, [there is] an ultimate answer to every emerging scientific question” (Habermas, 1971, p. 32).

If it cannot meet these criteria, we fear that it is merely a craft—not a science—a most unhappy contingency for psychoanalysts who, alas, suffer from a severe case of science envy. We are still laboring under an anachronistic, medicalized version of science bequeathed to us by Freud who never doubted for a moment that psychoanalysis was a natural science and that his famous “Project” was entirely a neuropsychological construct (Habermas, 1971, p. 246).

Parenthetically, this traditional psychoanalytic model of science is of nineteenth-century science now displaced by relativity theory and quantum uncertainty. One need only refer to Stephen Hawking’s popular book, A Brief History of Time, to realize that pure science is a much more imaginative and playful game than we have been led to believe by medicine’s austere Koch’s postulates (Hawkings, 1988). It turns out that in pure science, one may invent a theory long before there is any substantive data to justify it. Theories in mathematics and physics may come into play long after their invention, when some new and unexpicable (by the old science) data appears. “What if?” is as much the cardinal question of pure science ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The unfolding of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, from Interpersonal Psychiatry to Interpersonal Psychoanalysis
• Part II Psychoanalytic process
• Part III The philosophy of psychoanalytic theory and practice
• Epilogue: interview with Edgar Levenson by Irwin Hirsch and Victor Iannuzzi (2005)
• Bibliography
• Index