Leston Havens: Presence and Absence

Les Havens wrote about human freedom, about being a person in the face of invasion, domination, appropriation-developmental, relational, or societal. He wrote about “making contact” (one of his book titles, Harvard University Press, 1986) with persons who were barely present: those who experience no life inside, no purpose or desire; those who are hidden from us, from themselves; those who function through imitation; those who grasp whatever serves them as presence by their own invasiveness, manipulations, or projections. He refers to the patient who says, “I'm not here” or, “I have no life.” I can remember hearing his signature inquiry, leaning a little forward in his chair with a soft grunt, “What's for you?”

Independent and personally creative in his clinical thinking, he was ahead of the pack in the Boston area in recognizing the importance of the interpersonalists-Sullivan, and Edgar Levenson. He found an apt metaphor for the psychotherapist from the novelist in Henry James's short story “The Middle Years”: “We work in the dark-we do what we can-we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Les wrote several books over a span of more than two decades, between 1973 and 1996. These were decades in which psychoanalytic thinking absorbed significant transformations of perspective into its mainstream. But Les, living in Cambridge, MA, amidst the traditionalist Boston psychoanalytic community of the 1970s, had to be canny, cagey, and indirect in initially questioning the limitations of the prevailing ego psychology. I will illustrate the evolution of Les's writing with quotations from his 1976 book, Participant Observation, particularly its final paragraphs, and then offer in contrast his consistent yet liberated voice in the postscript to his 1993 book, Coming to Life.

How daring of Les to publish Participant Observation, an entire book devoted to his careful and creative interpretation of Sullivan's work a