Interview With Edgar A. Levenson January 24, 2004

Hirsch: I want to start by saying that it's an honor for both of us to do this interview with you. As do many, we consider you the key interpersonal theorist following Sullivan, Fromm, and Clara Thompson—the Willie Mays or perhaps the Michael Jordan [laughter] of interpersonal analysts. Seriously, you are the key interpersonal theorist responsible for bringing interpersonal psychoanalysis from them [Sullivan, Fromm, Thompson] to contemporary times. Your uncompromising attention to the inclusion of the analyst's subjectivity has played a seminal role in laying the groundwork for opening up psychoanalysis to include the study of perspectivism, postmodernism, and for what's now widely called the “relational turn” in psychoanalysis. With that said, we feel there is a lot of ground to cover in the interview and so we decided not to focus too much on your personal life history. However, I would like to begin by asking what your personal reasons for becoming a psychoanalyst were?

Levenson: I arrived at it in a rather desultory way. I had gone to medical school, as a lot of middle-class Jewish kids did, because there weren't an awful lot of things one could do professionally in the 1940s. Once I got through medical school I really wasn't particularly sure what I was going to do with it, since I hadn't figured out what I was interested in really. At that point I went into the army for two years and was stationed overseas during the occupation. When I went in, I'd had a neurology residency, so the army gave me a neuropsychiatry specialty rating, and when I came out I was, mirabile dictu, a psychiatrist. I went on to get my boards in psychiatry, and then I went into analysis because I needed an analysis. In those days analysis was a little like syphilology in that it was okay to treat the disease but not to have it. It was still considered

somehow moderately embarrassing for me to be in analysis, so I sugarcoated it as a training requirement and it became a lot more acceptabl