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It turns out that if you’re lucky enough to be long-lived and intellectually brilliant; and if you wake every morning at 5:30 a.m. with curiosity and energy and your thinking cap on, willing to put in a full day’s work, you can accomplish a lot in life. Further, if you have the human capacity for relatedness and dialogue and are willing to share generously with and receive from others, you can create a rich relational world of connectedness, collaboration, and respect. This is the case with Joseph Lichtenberg. Linda Gunsberg and Sandra G. Hershberg, students, colleagues, and friends of Joe L., have created a kind of literary monument—what the Germans call a “festschrift”—to him: Psychoanalytic Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice: Reading Joseph D. Lichtenberg. As a stand-alone volume or a companion to his selected papers, this book surveys the life, relationships, and clinical and theoretical accomplishments of one of the giants of contemporary psychoanalysis. Like a sweeping museum retrospective of a major artist, the book dazzles the viewer with the breadth, depth, and sheer output of the subject. Just like a conversation with Joe Lichtenberg, I found the book awesome, inspiring, and fun to read.
The editors divide the book into sections on Lichtenberg’s personal life and development; his friendships; the creative and professional structures in his life—for example, his creativity seminars, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; his professional and familial partnerships; his wide-ranging contributions to psychoanalytic thinking, including work on developmental theory, play, attachment research, complexity thinking, and especially the motivational systems theory; and his clinical acumen and contributions, including his gifts as a supervisor.
What struck me in all these areas is Lichtenberg’s curiosity and openness to experience—physical, intellectual, and aesthetic—and his refusal to be constrained by narro