Main Meaning and Motivation

Joseph lichtenberg's (1989) psychoanalysis and motivation is a book for prolonged study not simply because it leaves scarcely any aspect of psychoanalysis untouched but because it does not settle for that breathtaking accomplishment. Where one would have expected the author to introduce his theory in a general fashion, he has instead written something closer to a textbook, contemplating the details and difficulties and working out the issues with a subtlety that is usually left to second- and third-generation students who have benefited from a long history of discussion and debate. On re-reading, one keeps discovering that questions in afterthought have been already dealt with. I am far from certain that the issues I call attention to are not better discussed in the book itself.

Of the many facets of development, mind, and therapy that are handled in Lichtenberg's theory, I will concentrate on his solution to what might be called the Problem of the Main Meaning. I refer to the problem of how to determine—and what it means to determine—a particular preeminent significance in a patient's behavior or speech. That is one half of the continuous task of an analyst or psychotherapist—the other half being how to profitably respond to what looks like the main meaning in light of other of the patient's meanings.

Although new psychoanalytic theories almost always advance new main meanings, Lichtenberg's stands alone, I think, in finding detailed justification in both basic science and the dramatic highlights of practice. The tracking of biologically classified primitive motives into