Joseph Lichtenberg, this year's Fall Meeting plenary speaker, has already enjoyed a long and extremely productive career as a psychoanalyst and as a prolific contributor to our body of psychoanalytic theory. Yet in many ways he seems to be just warming up.
Lichtenberg trained at Spring Grove State Hospital, Sheppard Pratt, and the Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, where he also was president of the Psychoanalytic Society.
Steeped in ego psychology, he studied the writings of Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein, read virtually all of Freud in a course taught by David Rappaport, and listened to lectures by Charles Brenner, Jacob Arlow, and Max Schur. From the beginning of his training, he has immersed himself in the body of theory he studied and to examine it both for its essential contribution as well as its weak points and discrepancies.
His involvement with self-psychology was accidental, in that he was asked by the Bulletin of the Philadelphia Association to review The Analysis of the Self by Heinz Kohut. Joe was thunderstruck by Kohut's approach and considered the book a classic. After being exposed to the beginnings of self-psychology, Joe began to integrate ego psychology, Mahler's theories, and Kohut. Next he mastered the expanding research on infant development, and in 1983 subsequently published his first book, Psychoanalysis and Infant Research, which challenged many of the givens about development according to classical psychoanalytic theory.
Increasingly immersed in self-psychology, Lichtenberg was preoccupied with its clinical richness, but also its relative thinness in its motivational theory. Of course, he had now integrated the wealth of research on infant development, which seemed at odds with many of the classical motivational assumptions. But he now also had the data to formulate his own new research-based motivational theory and to integrate it within self-psychology. The result was his second book, Psychoanalysis and Motivation, in 1989. This book, along with a number of articles, outlines Lichtenberg's theory of five motivational systems, each developing in response to an innate need, which includes: 1) the psychic regulation of physiological requirements 2) the need for attachments and later affiliations 3) the need to explore and to assert preferences 4) the need to react aversively through antagonism or withdrawal, and 5) the need for sensual enjoyment and later, sexual excitement. The motivational systems are understood to develop within the object relationships with caregivers whose responses shape the growth and integration of each system within the developing personality.
Such considerations led soon to Lichtenberg's next book, in 1992, written with coauthors Frank Lachmann and James Fosshage, Self and Motivational Systems: Toward A Theory of Technique. This book outlines new principles of technique that are a logical outgrowth of the earlier book. Lichtenberg's most recent book, The Clinical Exchange: Techniques Derived From Self and Motivational Systems, examines one analytic case in detail and elaborates ten principles of psychoanalytic technique. It offers a way to rethink many of our time-honored approaches to transference, dream interpretation, affects, and issues of sexual abuse.
In addition, Lichtenberg is deeply involved in integrating theories of inter-subjectivity and self-psychology. He also has pursued the psychoanalytic understanding of great literature, both in articles and in an ongoing study group. He has recently founded a new training program in the Washington metropolitan area, The Institute Of Contemporary Psychotherapy. He teaches at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, The Washington School of Psychiatry, and is clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine.
Lichtenberg and his wife, Charlotte, live in Bethesda, Maryland. They have four children and four grandchildren. This winter The American is fortunate that it can look forward to an illuminating plenary address as well as to many more years of innovative theoretical contributions by Joseph Lichtenberg.