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Relinquishing a neurotic solution, with its attendant redundancies and spurious assurances of predictability, entails confrontation with uncertainty. Customary ways for feeling, thinking, choosing, and behaving yield to new, untested ways. This, then, is the ambiguity of change consequent to effective therapy: false security is replaced by a rich integration with an immensely complex world, one impossible to know fully.
Edgar Levenson is a radical interpersonalist who finds Sullivan, his antecedent in theory, lacking the courage of his own premises and failing to follow them to their logical conclusions. Although admiring both Freud and Sullivan, Levenson is primarily concerned with the context of the psychoanalytic encounter, not its content: the experience of what we talk about is more to the point than the talk. Psychoanalysis explores this experience and, in so doing, is an adventure in semiotics where language, behavior, and symptoms are transforms of each other. Psychoanalysis is the preeminent means for correcting deficiency in semiotic competency.
It is precisely this deficiency in effectively and subtly communicating what one means and for comprehending what others mean that Levenson finds as the source of anxiety. That is, children are not made anxious by repressed sexual fantasies striving for expression against superego imperatives, by conflicting personality trends, by failures of empathy, or by inadequacies in the object. Very simply, children are made anxious because they don't know what is going on, and, if they do know, they feel compelled to believe they don't. Mystified, they not only become anxious, but they conjure fantasies, distort reality, and evolve attitudes which, elaborated through the years, generate the neurotic adult.
The role of mystification for Levenson is akin to that of the id for Freud, clarity and comprehension to that of the ego. Levenson reinterprets the Oedipus myth as centrally concerned not with parricide and incest, but with