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Rereading Lew’s paper after so many years, I find myself almost overwhelmed by how many different ways I experience his voice, his way of thinking, as well as the content of his arguments and conclusions. So, in the spirit of Lew himself, I think about how he used my work and interacted with my ideas, what influenced him positively versus what he disagreed with, what he changed or left out.
Lew said he had been influenced by my idea of mutuality and my argument that while the mother’s role had been explicated in psychoanalysis, the fact of her being not only the child’s object but also another subject in her own right had been ignored. He suggested that this discovery, an achievement, is in my view a separate developmental line.
However, a careful reading suggests to me that his main concern was not how we encourage the patient’s capacity for mutual knowing but rather the necessity of the analyst letting themselves be known. I think his argument is an attempt to disabuse analysts of the idea that they can hide behind neutrality and know the other without being known. That attitude would discourage the use of their own minds and repress the patient’s subjectivity and desire—like that of a child toward parents—to know the analyst where they “really live.” I believe Lew’s goal was to further the critique of neutrality he had already begun—to encourage the analyst’s responsiveness and engagement with the patient’s here-and-now experience and thus create a relationship that links to where we both “really live.”
Despite agreeing with my fundamental perspective on recognition, Lew was less interested than I in pursuing the developmental conflict around recognition, encapsulated in the child’s question: Can I be recognized as independent and having a mind of my own by someone upon whom I’m so dependent? Or, my question: What kind of recognition does the child need to receive to be able to recognize the mother’s independent subjectivity? Instead, Lew related to the problem of t