Reading What We Encounter: Levenson, Hoffman, & Orange
Opening up to the felt space of the therapeutic encounter can elicit a challenging set of difficulties for the burgeoning therapist. The ability to read the contours of relational work is not easily trained and the processes involved in the evaluation of this field take time to develop. Once properly honed, the exact dimensions of what is happening by whose hand and how are not always universally understood. I want in this post to take a little time to explore the competing ideas of three different thinkers who offered related but distinct interpretations of how to understand this dimension of the therapeutic dyad. My hope is we can emerge with a sense of the value each independently delivers and enjoy the subtleties in the variations on this aspect of the work which can be helpfully triangulated between the three of them.
The theorists I have in mind are Edgar Levenson, Irwin Hoffman, and Donna Orange. Hoffman and Levenson are front of mind lately due to their recent passing and some of the memorial notes I have received from different psychoanalytic institutions I follow. This is my first go around with Hoffman’s Ritual and Spontaneity, a classic in the relational literature I had not yet taken the time to parse through. More explicitly philosophical than some of his peers (Orange excluded) it seems like some of the rub on Hoffman is that he is most challenging because of a willingness to incorporate thinkers from outside of traditional analytic spaces, such as the philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Charles Taylor, into his psychoanalytic writing. Hoffman’s major contribution, like that of Levenson’s, is one that ought to be familiar to readers of this space and is one I reflect on often—how do we understand the therapist’s influence on the therapeutic process and what does that tell us about how we should be involved in what happens in the therapeutic encounter.
Hoffman is interesting, in that he seems comfortable in his written work to be quite contentious with other writers with whom we might otherwise see his work aligning with. At least “contentious” in as much as he seems to be committed to working through the nuances of his approach as compared to others who might otherwise be considered of the same category as Hoffman—writers like Levenson and Orange, whom he references specifically in the book. Usually, it seems, there is a sense, particularly in the relational and intersubjectivist space, that the analysts working in that register ought to write in a way that initiates from a place of honoring the kinship of those involved in developing these traditions as viable and independent tracks within the broader history of psychoanalysis. That genteel orientation does not seem to be Hoffman’s disposition. The tone is not combative, but he seems sincere in wanting to get some sense of what is in fact fundamentally different about his own dialectical-constructivism, and what he refers to as Orange’s perspectival realism and Levenson’s naïve realism (definitely not Levenson’s term).
Starting with Hoffman, his position takes into consideration the subjectivity of the therapist and its inevitable influence on the co-construction of the therapeutic field. The philosophical lives in Hoffman through his evaluation of the dialectics of therapy (a richly philosophical concept I’ve returned to repeatedly in this space). Hoffman highlights many of these dialectics, but perhaps the most obvious place for us to demonstrate what he is trying to get at is to take on the dialectic introduced in the title of the text.
Hoffman sees an important tension as taking place in the dialectic between the ritual of therapy (it’s routines, rules, defined roles, and expectations) and the spontaneity that must be permitted to take place within those existing structures (the genuine, unscripted moments that take place somewhere beyond the realm of technique). The understanding of dialectics in this regard is a fundamentally hermeneutic one. The ritual is what makes the spontaneity possible and the need for spontaneity makes the ritual necessary. One does not work without the other. The client needs us to set the frame in order to be able to take interpersonal risks safely in the work that we do together. They need to trust the process to let the process live and breath as necessary so they might allow meaningful psychological and existential change to be able to take hold. But adhere to rigidly to “the way things are supposed to go” and we might foreclose something essential about this particular client’s process as it needs to play out in the specific therapy as co-created with this therapist. The unique movement of this client within the therapeutic frame as it has been established will tell us something important about this client that we must be willing to be genuinely responsive to to bring an essential richness into the therapeutic work (this competing and collaborative juxtaposition of the therapist’s and the client’s relative risks in the therapeutic encounter could be considered another kind of dialectic).
Hoffman’s critique of Levenson is that Levenson operates with a kind of “naïve realism”. I understand in some sense what he is saying. Taken literally the use of the word “naïve” here might not be pejorative, but I do wonder if there is a more generous way of describing Levenson’s process. Levenson is certainly more interpersonal than he is a relational dialectician. For Levenson, the therapist is certainly implicated in the various enactments that happen within the therapeutic encounter. However, where he differs, is that Levenson seems to be more optimistic that there is something that is actually happening between client and therapist that can be carefully observed by the therapist if they are willing to open themselves up to the textures of the interaction taking place in the consulting room. It might just be semantics, but for Levenson, the relationship is not so much co-constructed as it is discovered. Perhaps the meaningful difference can be arrived at by reflecting on Levenson’s primary question that arises throughout his work and which he encourages the therapist to be curious about when meeting with clients: what is happening here? Hoffman is even more therapist centered than that, coming from a position which might privilege a question like: how am I implicated in what is going on here? Though I am still feeling out Hoffman’s work, the meaningful difference seems to be that Levenson, for all of his analysis of the interpersonal field, would still ultimately want to bring that analysis back to the client to make their own sense of what Levenson senses he is picking up. Hoffman might be more inclined to offer an even more subjective interpretation and want the therapist to share their own experiential assessment of what seems to be taking place and how they understand themselves to be influencing the process.
Orange, in a specific rebuttal to Hoffman’s work, that Hoffman himself then responded to (we won’t get into the full back and forth here), acknowledges that the differences between the two might seem marginal enough to be deemed a “quibble”. However, she notes that there is a critical epistemological difference in her analysis of the relationship, an epistemological difference which has some bearing on the pragmatics and clinical conceptualizations of what the therapeutic relationship is and how one is expected to work within it. Orange’s critique is that constructivism cannot be held as epistemology. That the two are inherently contradictory. She asserts, in a way, that constructivism can only hold at the level of phenomenology, but its constant reduction and deconstruction of all possible terms leaves it “doomed” from the start to “incoherence”. For Orange, constructivism means the construction of something out of nothing. Perspectivism honors the sense that there is something already there. That the therapeutic processes quest for meaning is one that starts from a point of being situated within a given context, one that honors the historical circumstances and real suffering of the other—factors that cannot merely be understood as being constructed in the relationship between client and therapist.
Orange is perhaps the most Heideggerian in this way. In fact, as I have been playing with the three, I have been attempting to make some sense of the differences by situating each within three broader, but related, philosophical categories. Taken chronologically, Levenson seems to have something to say which resembles early phenomenology and Husserlian ideas related to the phenomenological reduction. Consciousness is consciousness of something, and with the appropriate orientation to a kind of bracketing, that “something” can be described to a degree which is almost scientific in nature. Objectivism becomes more achievable, or at least approachable, once we are willing to understand and account for the contours of our own subjectivity.
Orange, as stated, yields something more like the work of Heidegger and Gadamer. Yes, there is a phenomenological condition to be understood and evaluated, but that understanding is always going to emerge from a context that is inextricably woven into the particular fabric of our being-in-the-world. We are constituted by the various ways in which Dasein might locate itself and the manner in which that influences the ways in which our being becomes disclosed to us. Analysis occurs at the merging of horizons, but horizons which exist separately and are not to be understood as emerging only at the place those horizons meet.
Hoffman, by way of contrast, seems to map onto something like the anti-foundational pragmatism of a philosopher like Richard Rorty, who is trying to work through the tradition of these other philosophers without falling into something entirely like where Derrida and the post-structuralists went. Rorty takes seriously the continental project, though his American sensibility leads him to go back to Dewey and James, rather than extend that project forward in the way the later French theorists of the 20th century did. Rorty sees the ideas and language that emerge from this situated existence as informing the ways in which we cope. It is not about whether they correspond with reality, but how we put them to use and what that means about the quality of existence we are able to manufacture. Hoffman brings a similar pragmatism to his co-constructionism (which is why he maybe overstates his allegiance to a social constructivist view). His belief is not that the co-construction suggests a meaninglessness to the therapeutic encounter or a kind of nihilistic turn which might suggest there is nothing real at stake. The focus on the therapist’s subjectivity is ultimately on what it then allows the therapeutic encounter to do, not on whether or not we are able to detect something that corresponds to the reality of the relationship (a la Levenson).
The truth is, from a clinical perspective, all these positions offer something valuable in our analysis of the relational field. Levenson positions us as working within the client, Hoffman within ourselves, and Orange collapses the split into “true” hermeneutics. The task of the relationally oriented therapist is to be able to adeptly scan all of these possible positions on the relational spectrum and hone a clinical sensibility with regards to how to utilize each to help the client move towards the kind of qualities we privilege in this work: curiosity, commitment, surprise, wonder, awe, and authenticity. Each of these carries the weight of a kind of experiential resonance which can help to bring a client more fully into their being, with all the dialectical richness of self and other, subject and object, grounded and ecstatic, that the idea of experiential resonance suggests.
