You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Playground or Playpen. Edgar A. Levenson. Pp. 366-372.
These two essays are critical reviews of Paul Dewald's book, The Psychoanalytic Process. The authors' approaches are antithetically paired, but they agree that in
the analysis lasting three hundred and forty-seven hours that Dewald conducted with a twenty-six-year-old married woman who suffered from anxiety and phobias, the most serious flaw was his disregard of the patient's logical conscious understanding of herself and her relationship to the analyst. For his critique, Levenson employs his conceptualization of the split between "classical analysts" (of whom Dewald, according to Levenson, is representative) and the interpersonalist (like himself). Considering this, he states, "in contrast to viewing treatment as an exercise in renunciation, I prefer it to be an exercise in self realization." Lipton lists his "radical conceptual differences" at the beginning of his essay. Elaborations of each issue follow. The six points are: (1) the analyst approaches the patient's associations as though they are entirely illogical and have only a hidden meaning which consequently results in the discounting of their current manifest meaning; (2) the analyst remains oblivious to the patient's responses to him as a person; (3) the analyst tries to influence the patient rather than interpret; (4) he deciphers dreams based on their manifest content only; (5) neither transference nor resistance are dealt with adequately; (6) results of treatment can be explained as due to a corrective emotional experience via an unexplored identification with the analyst rather than as the result of interpretation.