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Edgar A. Levenson: The Fallacy of Understanding New York: Basic Books, 1972. 236 pages, $7.95
WE HAVE COME TO EXPECT a new conception of psychotherapy to be a great bore. We will be asked to accept another batch of neologisms (Vector Therapy; Being-in-the-World), and will watch an alleged innovation rudely elbow aside all previous understanding ("Anxiety is nothing but stage fright"). A thin ray of light comes shrouded in a thick fog of statistics about therapy variables and outcomes, or is refracted completely into a prescription for therapeutic behavior (confrontation, implosion, etc.).
By now it seems unlikely that we have completely overlooked a major, grossly different, useful way of talking with patients. What we need and rarely get is simply a new view of what we do as psychotherapists, how this squares with what we think we do, and how thinking about it differently might improve our effort.
Edgar Levenson's The Fallacy of Understanding is such a rare contribution. Brilliant and true, it is in its line the next significant book after Frank's Persuasion and Healing, but it is a much more important book because the anthropological facts that impressed Frank have been roughly common knowledge, while the highly abstract background of Levenson's thinking is not.
Yet this is not a book of precious esoterica. Neither a ponderous Germanic system, nor an elegant French terminologic love-affair, it has been appropriately packaged by the publisher as an honest, 19th century English philosophical essay, plain-spoken, personal, comprehensible, and always directly related to experience. There is wizardry in making so fundamental a book on psychotherapy brief and comprehensible. Almost the most difficult thing to understand