Edgar Levenson, Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness and the Purloined Self

I am deeply fond of a quotation, variously ascribed but at least to Isaac Newton as early as 1675: “Standing on the shoulder of giants.’ It’s a comment that encourages us to acknowledge our sources, our bedrock. But there is a second clause to this quote. “Standing on the shoulders of giants, one can see further.” Edgar Levenson is one of our giants.

He has recently published two books, one a new compilation of papers written over the past 30 years, and one a reissue of The Purloined Self, a book originally published in 1991, with updated and edited papers dating back to the mid-1970s. In both cases, the skillful editor is Alan Slomowitz. It is a wonderful opportunity to think of Levenson’s work as it has unfolded in the context of more than four decades of theoretical and clinical change, breakthroughs, and conceptual shifts. Levenson’s career spans a period from the more conservative and more socially constricted postwar ego psychology to more expansive and interactive approaches. These changes are internal to psychoanalysis as well as broadly social and cultural. The range of patients we imagine working with and the ways we work have undergone enormous transformat

ion in the period of Levenson’s career. So, I hope, in this review, to both look closely at Levenson’s work in its own right, as well as to contextualize the work in its historical and theoretical setting.

In my own career, as I noted at the beginning of this review, it feels crucial to honor my professional ancestors, to see the lineage and the particularity of my development, to know where I come from. I felt that sitting in the audience at the first Ferenczi conference in New York City. In a powerful series of talks at that meeting, I came to know where I come from psychoanalytically. I knew my own genealogy for the first time.

Here, in these two volumes, I find another genealogy, a clear strong line of theory building and influence, a powerful branch in the interpersonal, intersubjective psychoanalyt