Joseph Lichtenberg’s Unfinished Contribution

Joe Lichtenberg embraced the meaning of embodiment in living his life. Psychoanalysis gave him the evolving model. Psychoanalysis is set in a direction of inclusion of separate parts into a whole person; body, mind, pleasure, pain, past, present, real, unreal, objective and subjective resulting in a life well lived. As I knew Joe, he never wavered from his love of psychoanalysis and his love of life.

My first contact with Joe was thirty years ago when I read his paper on the body self (1977). I had recently graduated from psychoanalytic training. I was living with bewilderment and confusion because I was unable to bridge the elegant theory of psychoanalysis with the experiences of the psychoanalytic process which was incomplete and frustrating. Psychoanalysis needed further work and Joe was working at it in his early papers.

Joe had written two other papers: “The Sense of the Self” (1975) and “The Sense of the Object” (1979). In these three papers he was embodying the mind and the body to approach actual experience within the analytic relationship. I invited him to Michigan to present his paper on the Sense of the Object. Our friendship began. It evolved into the creation of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, devoted to a single topic for each issue with variety of discussion papers. We had one basic principle for the journal, any topic that had psychoanalytic relevance would be considered. The journal has added to the development of psychoanalysis and ourselves.

Recently a supervisee told me about a woman he has in analysis. She is depressed, inhibited in her relationship with her husband and children The supervisee told me about his being caught in a sadomasochistic, transference-countertransference interaction with her. She gets him to do things for her like telling her what to do and how to think. The analysis is directed to embodying this behavior into their individual narratives and selves resulting in feeling whole and alive: The essen