Plunging in: Lauren Levine’s Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis

In the introductory chapter of her book, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis (2023), Lauren Levine notes, “What all too often gets left out of the teaching of psychology and psychoanalysis [is] the essential importance of stories and storytelling, the irreducible subjectivity of each individual, and the power, worth, and inclusion of each person’s story” (p. 11). Across a range of tales limning her clinical work with developmental trauma, she leads the reader on a tour of “creating dangerously” (p. 1).

Throughout this slim, inviting volume, Levine shows what it means and conveys how it feels to take emotional risks with patients, ever alert to the necessity of challenging normative analytic stances in pursuit of both the healing of trauma and the promotion of creativity. She is interested in how one apprehends and works with ungrieved loss and unprocessed trauma when a subject’s story is incoherent or unremembered, as well as how one reckons with the fate of stories that have been told feelingly yet have repeatedly gone unheard or been dismissed within familial and societal spheres. She emphasizes the inevitability and endorses the value of mutual vulnerability in our daily work, asserting that cultivating intimacy is a courageous act which requires “radical trust in the unknown of what will evolve” (p. 3).

A central aspect of this work is recognizing, containing, and ultimately transforming the shame that arises as patients speak of and evoke their trauma. Levine does not shy away from sharing how this most contagious affect can inhibit and even destabilize analytic exploration, leading to impasse, overwhelm, and shutdown. Yet, drawing on Mitchell, Bromberg, and other relational forebears, she makes the case that when shame can be interpersonally held, reflected upon, and metabolized, it can create what she calls “an unsettled