Follow the Fox: Edgar A. Levenson’s Pursuit of Psychoanalytic Process

Abstract

The author examines Edgar A. Levenson's argument as presented in his two seminal texts (1972, 1983), placing this argument in the context of our work today. Levenson has contributed to a profound shift in our experience of psychoanalysis. By giving priority to psychoanalytic process, he spelled out the implications entailed in the fact that patient and analyst continually influence each other in clinical work. The ongoing relevance of Levenson's work is evident first in his location of therapeutic action beyond understanding, that is, in the spontaneous interaction between patient and analyst, and second in his critique of our uses of abstraction, explanation, and theory.

Interpretation: Voice of the Field

“…While Levenson's work (1972,1983,1991,2017) is not as widely recognized as it deserves to be, he belongs in the company of these innovators. (See Stern 2006 andFoehl 2008 for presentations of Levenson's views.) I recently described the heart of Levenson's work in this way:…”

“…The intention is not to identify the patient's unconscious fantasies, an aim Levenson (1983) identifies with persuasion and not cure. As Foehl (2008) puts it, for Levenson (1972), even in his early work, "explanation-the search for cause and validation-was relinquished in favor of the description of structure" (p. 1242). The configuration of the analytic relatedness, the patterns themselves, in which the analyst is involved right along with the patient, are the point.…”

“…While Levenson’s work (1972, 1983, 1991, 2017) is not as widely recognized as it deserves to be, he belongs in the company of these innovators. (See Stern 2006 and Foehl 2008 for presentations of Levenson’s views.) I recently described the heart of Levenson’s work in this way:One [i.e., the analyst] can’t just describe at will one’s own unconscious participation in the analytic relationship, even that part of it one can infer well enough to characterize it, because every time one says something, one is interacting from within the same configurations one wishes to name.…”

“…It was our presence together, and what we did and felt, that created the new freedom from which novel aspects of experience became accessible, and then emerged between us, partly in the form of an interpretation. In Levenson’s view, writes Foehl (2008), “Understanding must give way to not understanding, to something new that we can neither predict nor, without being part of the process of its unfolding, describe” (p. 1261). In the same vein, Bromberg (2009) says that “interpersonal novelty is what allows the self to grow because it is unanticipated by both persons, it is organized by what takes place between two minds, and it belongs to neither person alone” (pp.…”

A response to LaFarge

“…Crowley, ; Fromm, ; Tauber, ; Thompson, ; Wolstein, ) saw that this point was no less true in the analytic situation than it was in any other relationship. A full and widespread appreciation of the role of the analyst's subjectivity in clinical practice, however, came about in the interpersonal literature only in the 1970s and early 1980s (Gill, ), largely as a result of the work of Levenson (, , ; Levenson, Hirsch and Iannuzzi, ; Foehl, ) and Wolstein (; Hirsch, ; Bonovitz, ).…”