Levenson's Self

Dr. Levenson seems both wary of and delighted with theoretical conceptions. On the one hand, it is a pleasure to watch his wily ways, in the unedited conversation, of evading his interlocutors' efforts to pin him down to one or another conception or technique. On the other, it would be difficult to think of another psychoanalytic scholar more broadly and seriously interested in theories. Korzybski, Piaget, William James, and Kuhn, among others, figure in his discussions, and he explores ideas originating in linguistics, general systems theory, the Tao and Sufism, Chaos Theory, right-brain—left-brain perspectives, and recent neurological approaches.

How can we make sense of this apparent contradiction? It appears to have to do with Dr. Levenson's high valuation of theory and, equally, his fear of its misuse. He sums up his concern metaphorically as the danger of confusing the map of theory with the terrain of the patient-therapist interaction. Theories are valuable as they offer new perspectives on that relationship. The danger is that instead of being one among many lenses illuminating the clinical situation, a theory becomes dominant, a Procrustean bed into which the patient must be fitted.

This love of theory and fear of its misuse seem evident in one of Levenson's central foci of interest, the patient's self. He abjures any formalized theory of self. “I don't even know what ‘self’ really means,” he says. He finds that in the entire psychoanalytic literature there is not one single convincing definition of self. At the same time he titles his volume of collected papers The Purloined Self, and in the course of his writing he makes a wide range of observations about the self that suggest it to be fundamental to his thinking. As one might expect of him, these observations are firmly rooted in his clinical experience, modulated and expanded as he views that experience through the lenses of various theories.