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Dr Levenson is an accomplished writer whose erudition is apparent throughout this work. His familiarity with our common and uncommon language is impressive and the reader may be well advised to have a dictionary at hand. His knowledge of linguistics and communications theory is obvious and his references to writers in these and other fields as well as psychoanalysis are numerous. The artistic writing itself tends to be persuasive and thereby may too readily lead some to agreement with his opinions. The work is indeed thought provoking and does cause a thinking person to reconsider his own position and tenets regarding theories of psychological therapy.
His thesis is that Freudian psychoanalysis is based on a mechanistic drive theory (libido and aggression) which has become outmoded. The interpersonal therapies of H.S. Sullivan et al., he says, moved beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, although they still contained a basic drive theory—namely the drive to contain and control a primary anxiety. The object relations theories of Klein, Winnicott, and others hoped to bridge the difference between the Freudian and the interpersonal theories, but they still retained the drive mechanism, an object-seeking drive. Levenson believes that communications theory related to the interpersonal principles does not need an energic drive theory. It seems to me, however, that he implicates a drive to communicate. Levenson's thesis, then, is summed up in two points: (1) that all analysts tap into the same linguistic process regardless of their hermeneutics or explanatory systems and (2) that a radical split has occurred in the utilization of the psychoanalytic method. It is his intention in this work to make a strong case for the 'superior relevance of the interpersonal perspective'. But with respectable humility, he realizes that this 'very considerable bone of contention' will not be buried by his efforts. In the making of his case, he tends towards extremes in describing the F