Introduction to “WE” by Aurelia Levi

Aurelia Levi, in her 1971 article “WE,” took a single word and turned it into a concept that was four decades ahead of its time and she did it through the human story of a patient and an analyst. It is both an authentic psychoanalytic classic and a page-turner as a reading experience. During the next 40 years, the postclassical impact of interpersonal psychoanalysis and Harry Stack Sullivan in reshaping psychoanalytic thinking has powerfully elaborated her prescient vision, but has left it insufficiently acknowledged even by current interpersonal authors. Not only is it as contemporary as when it was first published, it provides a clear bridge between Sullivan and many classical concepts that psychoanalysis has rethought and now takes for granted.

For example, most postclassical theory no longer defines the clinical phenomenon of resistance as “a patient's defensive efforts to avoid self-knowledge” (Moore & Fine, 1990, p. 168), and in one form or another has subsumed the “defense” component more and more into the broader context of a complex reality, a necessary illusion that configures and sustains the analytic situation as a two-person playground for self-development that echoes what Winnicott (1967/1971) called the use of “potential space.” Within this context, the primary task of an analyst's therapeutic role is to contribute dyadically to the viability of the patient's self-continuity while growing in new ways. The analyst accomplishes this task by not defining the boundary between conscious and

unconscious and between reality and fantasy other than through a process of consensual negotiation. The goal is to enable the experience of self-growth—not simply its result or outcome—to be rewarding, to be one of transition rather than of “insight” per se. The heart of the process depends on the ability of the analyst to avoid imposing meaning, so that a patient can feel free to enact new ways of being in the relationship without fear of traumatically losing the con