Questions and Responses Regarding Levinson and Atwood's Chapter

M. Sucharov: I want to ask a question concerning the relational and therefore the ambiguous nature of meaning. Now, Bill mentioned two levels of agency, the external observer one and a more phenomenological one, the experience of the patient. We don't always know what the experience of the patient is. Hearing this case, presented in retrospect, one might go away with the misguided assumption that it was all so clear, that it is obvious that the manic actions of the patient are his attempts to express his own self and so forth, and that it would be a disaster to address the destructive aspect. Since, in a relational field, meaning is embedded in the field, it is not clear whose experience this is. I think that one thing that was left out is the subjectivity of the therapist and how she knew what was going on. What about the resonances in her own sense of agency? So could you just make some comments on how you sort out what is going on in the middle of the session when we're not presenting it in retrospect?

D. Levinson: It certainly was not clear to me for a very long time that Adam's enactments represented the surviving remnant of his sense of agency. I had been trying to understand him in the ways that I knew and thought that I was observing ruptures in an idealizing/mirror selfobject transference that I kept attempting to repair. When Adam continually rejected such interpretations and clearly felt profoundly injured by them, I tried to find other ways of understanding him. Even the interpretation of Adam's spending his inheritance as a giant “NO” to a life of compliance, which helped him so much and

which I had offered out of desperation at the time, was not based on any real understanding of his motivation, for negation and opposition never appeared as salient themes in Adam's conversation. In fact, the interpretation bore a close resemblance to his protestations of deliberate intentionality when faced with the disastrous consequences of his enactments. It was on