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The book - Affect, Representation and Language; Between the Silence and the Cry - by Howard B. Levine provides an original and creative synthesis of psychoanalytic theory from Freud onward. It integrates both past and present analytic theory as it has developed in Britain, Europe, and the Americas. Further, the book incorporates these theories so as to make them usable for the practicing therapist. Such application is essential for us practitioners. When in the field - in that alive moment in the session - each of us relies on theory to hold us while we swirl in the turbulence of a real relationship with our patients. In order to use our trained intuition, we need to have a theoretical foundation upon which to stand. This book describes the process of being attuned and deeply involved with our patients, while also able to step back, stand on firm theoretical ground, and see the bigger picture. Levine’s synthesis of theory is deep and thought-provoking. He does not casually mix theories that are in opposition to each other, but integrates those theories that fit together.
In beginning his book, Levine quotes Andre Green (1977): “Language without affect is a dead language: and affect without language is uncommunicable. Language is situated between the cry and the silence. (p. 205)” (p. vii). By quoting Green, he leads his reader on a journey inside the self-experience of analytic theory that is alive and pregnant with possibility. Psychoanalysis is continually evolving and as it does, it becomes alive and vibrant with its own possibilities. Levine emphasizes that, “particularly at the level of emerging psychic structure, self and object, object and drive develop from a common matrix and form indissoluble pairs” (p. 7). This firmly grounds current analysis in both theory and practice.
One current psychoanalytic interest - long a love of Levine’s - is unrepresented states. Unrepresented states are those states outside of the symbolic order, found in all of us to greater o