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The selected articles of Joseph Lichtenberg (2016) offer a bird’s eye view of the work of one of the most prolific and protean authors in the psychoanalytic canon. Lichtenberg started his career during the hyper-rational epoch of American ego psychology and took up the vanguard during the golden age of infant research and self psychology. More recently, he has advanced an intersubjective psychology that looks to narrative as the best way to format our interpenetrating human experiences. In all his efforts, Lichtenberg seems to stay in Vygotsky’s (1986) zone of proximal development, one step ahead of what’s going on.
The book is divided into three sections, the first focusing on Lichtenberg’s work as a developmentalist, the second on his elaborations of self psychology, and the third on clinical contributions. But a set of powerful attitudes pervades all these labors.
First, the tireless Lichtenberg quite naturally puts a premium on human action and agency. In these articles, the neonate is frequently referred to as a “doer doing” and the adult understood in terms of his intentions and actions in the world and in the room. In the rush to reject the rigidity of Freud’s drive theory, many contemporary relational theorists have simply shifted their attention away from human agency toward more abstract ideas about mutuality and the intersubjective field. Lichtenberg does not see an either/or proposition. By at once privileging intersubjectivity and context and at
the same time allowing for an idea of innate predispositions, Lichtenberg reconceptualizes the drive theory as a motivational systems theory. Human intentions have a genetic (or early historical) basis but only find their shape through interaction with the human and non-human world.
Second, Lichtenberg is very much an American pragmatist. Theory hums in the background, not the foreground. The doer doing changes the thinker conceptualizing more than the other way around. An openness to revising received ideas aro