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Loving Psychoanalysis

Name: Loving Psychoanalysis
Author: Susan S. Levine
ISBN: 9780765706249

by Susan S. Levine

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Overview

Loving Psychoanalysis is written by an analyst who loves doing psychoanalysis, and who believes that psychoanalysis is a fundamentally loving endeavor. Levine argues that the proper working attitude of the analyst is not one of neutrality, in the sense of the blank screen, but one of loving. This love should be expressed through the deepest empathy of which the analyst is capable, through the disciplined use of the arts and crafts of attention and interpretation, through thoughtful abstinence, through considered anonymity, and through the inevitable self-revelations and necessary self-disclosures that each particular patient requires. The chapters explore overlapping interdisciplinary themes, each chapter addressing elements of both theory and technique. How do the analyst's and patient's wishes to create and to be (re)created affect the treatment? What is the role of courage in the clinical endeavor for both analyst and patient? Why do analysts love doing psychoanalysis and why can psychoanalysis be thought of as aesthetic? What is the "self" of the analyst in self-revelation and self-disclosure, and how can we think about this technical issue in a fresh way? Levine addresses these and many other relevant questions in Loving Psychoanalysis.

Synopsis

The underlying theme in Loving Psychoanalysis is that the analyst can love doing psychoanalysis and that appropriate love and respect for the patient are essential to clinical effectiveness. This book explores the art and craft of psychotherapeutic work through an examination of overlapping interdisciplinary themes: fantasies of creation, courage, having another, the aesthetics of psychoanalysis, self-disclosure, and chaos theory.

About the Author, Susan S. Levine

Susan S. Levine is in private practice in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and Supervision in Ardmore, Pennsylvania.

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Editorials

Clinical Social Work Journal

Throughout this book, Levine describes cases that help to illuminate the topics she is explores.... Overall, I found this work to be thought provoking and thoughtful, a book that gives us pause to think about our participation in the clinical process.

International Journal Of Psychoanalysis

One of Levine's contributions in this collection of essays is the conviction of her love for psychoanalysis. It lifts the experience of enjoying psychoanalytic work out of the realm of narcissistic pathology and into the arena of aesthetics, aspiration, ideals and even ethics. This is a gift to the readers. . . . It forces each reader to examine his or her own biases, prejudices, defenses or inhibitions about acknowledging the potential beauty and lovingness involved in a profession as psychoanalysis.

Axel Hoffer

Playful, yet profound, Susan Levine's book, Loving Psychoanalysis, makes the too-often forbidding world of psychoanalysis accessible to everyone by her unique writing style. She writes evocatively and artistically on topics ranging from My Fair Lady and leopards to courage and fractals. As she candidly describes her own experiences with her analysands, she conveys the essence of the analytic relationship. In her writing the reader feels the personal touch of Montaigne blending with the bright colors of Chagall. Levine's insightful and original view of analysis leaps from the pages—a view embodying an experience which is authentic, aesthetic, loving, and deeply helpful. Her enthusiasm is contagious. This alone recommends this book for her analytic colleagues as well as for all potential analysands who will appreciate Levine's insights into the essential humanity of today's analysts.

Adrienne Harris

It is a pleasure to read this collection of Susan Levine’s papers. She brings a deep scholarship and a subtle, discerning clinical eye to a number of important problems in contemporary psychoanalysis. She writes in the venerable tradition of Loewald, the object relational, and the relational world. Character and integrity matter deeply to Levine even as she inhabits a postmodern clinical world filled with uncertainty, enactment, and complex mutual influences of analyst and analysand. Her writing and her clinical work combine playfulness and surprise, alongside meticulous, self-reflective judgment. Free to find her own authorities, use many ancestors and modes of work and thought, Levine is very much of the new generation of psychoanalysts, less hobbled by sectarian conflicts, but always committed to thinking with rigor and complexity.

Patrick Mahony

'A terrible beauty is born' [W. B. Yeats]—the evolving, instructive story about Susan Levine's love of her patients and psychoanalysis in both its clinical and theoretical reaches.

Salman Akhtar

Deftly interweaving clinical observations with ideas from theatre, movies, aesthetics of communication, and chaos theory, Levine offers us a rich and tightly argued discourse on the nature of the psychoanalytic relationship. Her writing is elegant and her themes, when all is said and done, are fundamentally clinical. The dialectics of compliance versus authenticity, masochism versus courage, alienation versus belonging, and restraint versus abandon inform her theoretical orientation and her clinical approach. This is a book to be read slowly and carefully and the rewards for doing so are indeed plentiful.