Levenson and Language

The game of basketball has always been an area of fascination for me.  It’s a relationship of mine that seemingly parallels the ways in which others might obsess over comic books or sci-fi series.  Since as far back as I can remember being a fan, I recall that fandom not only being in finding opportunities to get out and play, but in seeking out and trying to understand the parts of the game that extended beyond developing my own skills as a player: exploring coaching strategies, the games history, and the hagiography of those who shaped the game as it had come to be played.  I came into my fandom in the early 90’s, the heyday of Michael Jordan’s reign, and a time when NBA commissioner David Stern had completed his transformation of the marketing of the league from one that promoted teams to one that was driven to promote and market its stars in order to spur interest.  That shift in focus meant a reappraisal of the history of the league as well, and elevating names of those who had previously dominated its courts.  Many of these names were already well known to casual fans: Russell, Wilt, Elgin, West, Robertson, Dr. J, Magic, Bird and many of the other players whom your favorite players would rattle off as being their favorite players.

Every now and then I would be gifted a burst of excitement, as my own rabid fandom would pay off in revealing some other slightly more obscure name from the annals of the league’s past.  I remember moments where I suddenly discovered the names of players like George Gervin, Bernard King, Elvin Hayes, Jerry Lucas, or Adrien Dantley, and would rush to use their names in conversation with friends or family who were fans of the game.  The same interest in history would serve me in my teen years, as this fervent curiosity expanded to include the world of drumming and percussion, an interest that would be fueled by the development of the internet into the most potent search engine the world had ever seen. This leap in technology meant I was able to endlessly unearth those who existed on the margins of rock and jazz drumming, repeatedly honing and reshaping my craft as new patterns, techniques, and ways of approaching the instrument were discovered.

All of that preamble is to say, the same level of excitement still exists for me when I find myself discovering a new name in the rich and storied tradition of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis that strikes a novel chord or seems to offer something that clarifies some component of my own thinking.  I remember being exposed to Erving and Mariam Polster, and suddenly realizing that the history of Gestalt therapy was about so much more than Fritz Perls.  Or my introduction to the work of Eugene Gendlin and the ways that reframed how I think about the precision of implicit experience.  But better yet are those moments when you stumble upon someone, seemingly of your own accord, and come to discover that those who are “in the know” have been quietly singing the praises of this individual, using lilting words like “seminal”, “essential”, and “revolutionary” to describe their work.

I have been fortunate recently to have had the privilege of this experience with the discovery of two remarkable thinkers who have been hard not to be consumed with as of late: Edgar Levenson and Leston Havens.  Contemporaries of one another who were influenced by the interpersonal school established by Harry Stack Sullivan, both were quite interested in evaluating their understanding of how and why therapy came to “work”.  For both, the ways in which therapy was languaged came to be the essential principle to understanding the role of the therapist.  How and what we chose to talk about and more importantly the way we talk about it was the primary function that allowed us to bridge the empathic gap, entering into, clarifying, and helping to shift the experiential field of the other.  I’m going to say more about Levenson here and will hopefully come back to Havens in later post, as I have recently begun his Making Contact and think it premature to take on the topic of Havens and language before reading the text in which he outlines his entire theory of the use of language in therapy.

My reading of Levenson at this point is also admittedly thin, having not yet had the chance to read in their entirety the two texts which are most often cited regarding his early work, The Fallacy of Understanding and The Ambiguity of Change.  I have mostly been scouring the pep-web data base for his papers after having read two of them, “Psychoanalysis: Cure or Persuasion?” (1973) and “Shoot the Messenger—Interpersonal Aspects of the Analyst’s Interpretations” (1993), in a collection by Donnell Stern and Irwin Hirsch highlighting some of the essential texts in the interpersonal tradition.  Both these papers, and the others I’ve read, take up the consistent theme in Levenson’s work regarding his sense of the limitations of metapsychologies.  For Levenson, theories are in a sense overprivileged in the work of psychoanalysis and other therapies, and worse yet, might even be a little dangerous in how much they are overprivileged.  

Levenson sees the language of meta psychology and theoretical frameworks as a potential contaminant on the work of therapy if used by the therapist in a way that isn’t careful and accompanied by a fair amount of curiosity.  He seems to think about theories in a manner in which I have been encouraged to come to think about them myself, which is as a useful frameworks that provide some foundation for considering our clients, while also running the risk of pigeonholing our clients or plastering over the subjectivity of their experience, leaving turgid objectifications which sand away the client’s authentic presence into something more to our liking.  Levenson consistently seeks to undermine anything that might make the analyst too comfortable and actually sees anything that does so, including theory, as countertransference and a kind of resistance to what therapy is meant to be, which is a deeply intersubjective process in which the use of the analysts subjectivity supports the client in encountering and exploring the contours of their own subjectivity.  It’s almost existential in the way he conceptualizes it (and in fact Levenson might be the only analyst I have read who has name checked Heidegger when discussing the concept of hermeneutics).

In doing this, Levenson deepened the psychoanalytic understanding of the idea that the analyst/therapist simply cannot be a neutral observer.  Everything that happens in the therapeutic setting is a kind of interpretation that is wrapped up in conspiratorial engagement with the therapist’s unconscious and subjectivity as much as it is with the client’s.  It’s important to remember when Levenson started this project.  Working in the 1970s, in the (somewhat) waning influence of Freudian and object relation approaches to therapy, Levenson’s influence comes prior to the relational and intersubjective boom of the late 1980s and beyond.  His want is to demonstrate ways in which strict Freudian or Winnicottian/Kohutian interpretations might more usefully give way to direct interpretations about the social and interpersonal dimensions of the interaction, wondering less about what the client is bringing in and bringing more attention to what actually might be going on. Levenson’s whole premise is that the real utility of psychoanalysis is in helping clients better understand the subtle semiotic shifts of interpersonal interactions, therefore that should be the thing of psychoanalytic interpretation.  The ideas espoused remind me a bit of some of the early chapters in Al Margulies’ The Empathic Imagination, another 1980s text, wherein he highlights Freud’s return to the importance of interpreting “dream-work” rather than the content of the dream.  Psychoanalysis—and I would argue all psychotherapy—is a much more precise and insightful discipline when it concerns itself with the process of what is happening (description) rather than offering neat linguistic packages for reducing possible avenues of interpretation (explanation), the latter of which being an activity to which I often fall guilty.

I want to touch on one other element that was of interest in reading Levenson’s “Psychoanalysis: Cure or Persuasion” article, which is his approach to borrowing the literary devices of metaphor and metonymy and the ways in which therapy needs to be able to navigate between these axes.  As Levenson would have it metaphor is “ideological [and a] way of talking about things” whereas metonymy is “highly contextual”.  Levenson seems to be making the argument that where real transformation happens in the therapeutic encounter is when we can take the therapeutic content out of the metonymic field and into that of metaphor, recognizing within the particularities of the interaction some pattern that seems to transpose itself in all of the client’s experiences and many interactions with the world.  That if some kind of agreed upon consensus can be come to by interrogating the intersubjective space, it provides the possibility for some level of understanding the unconscious properties of what the client is bringing into the encounter and can provide some metaphorical map for understanding what is going on for the client out in the world.  What Levenson doesn’t say—at least in the papers I have come across so far—is that implicit in this is the importance of being able to bring ourselves back into the metonymic space, the space of particularity, specificity, and the deeply contextual in order for metaphor not to become staid, reified, and unalive.

There’s a line from Levenson I quoted recently in another piece that I will bring back again because I think it encapsulates so perfectly what must happen in the therapeutic relationship for a certain kind of therapy to take place. He closes his “Shoot the Messenger” paper by stating “the patient does not learn from us how to deal with the world…[t]he patient learns to deal with us in order to deal with the world”.  I have tried to be more cognizant more often to bring the content of my sessions back to the therapy relationship itself, while also being cautious not to get too involved in the kind of interpretative wizardry I (and many of our clients) can be so easily seduced by.  I do think a kind of magic materializes if you can trust enough in that kind of process and trust the possibility that both you and client will emerge mostly unscathed out of its potential hazards of anxiety, confusion, and conspicuous silence.  Certainly the client is more likely to feel seen than merely gazed upon.  Though finding the person in the patient will likely come along with any upcoming posts about Havens.