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Joseph Lichtenberg is one of the most sophisticated, respected, and innovative of the current generation of senior psychoanalysts. His plenary address, a rather informal one, is a curious mix of reports of his three personal analyses (indeed, my commentary could appropriately be titled “The Three Analyses of Dr. L.”) and his somewhat radical proposals for psychoanalytic listening and treatment. What is good in the paper—and there are many wonderful ideas in it—is not new, and what is new is incongruous with Freud's psychoanalysis and much more akin to cognitive psychology and phenomenology (Chessick 1992b). Fundamentally, Lichtenberg's approach eviscerates Freud's psychoanalysis and separates it from what used to be, or for some of us still is, the intensive exploration of the patient's unconscious, the “it” that lives our lives. I propose to respond to this plenary address almost paragraph by paragraph.
Although Lichtenberg does not wish to be labeled a phenomenologist, the second sentence of the paper refers to one of Husserl's