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Loving Psychoanalysis: Technique and Theory in the Therapeutic Relationship

Psychoanalysis as a profession is unique in many ways, its impenetrability being one. Unlike a musician who can wax unselfconsciously about her love for music, or a scientist who can unhesitatingly express his fascination for science and the scientific method, or a clergyman who can unquestionably declare his passion for religion, a psychoanalyst advertising her love for psychoanalysis carries the unique burden of requiring a self-reflection and a self-examination that can be hard to sustain alongside an authentic passionate engagement. Perhaps it is because of this burden that we so rarely see a whole book dedicated to expressing and examining one’s love for the practice of psychoanalysis. Loving Psychoanalysis: Technique and Theory in the Therapeutic Relationship by Susan S. Levine is an exception. This book brings to mind another published 18 years ago – Janet Malcolm’s (1981) book, The Impossible Profession. That book, written by a journalist reporting to a lay audience, and Susan Levine’s book, written by a psychoanalyst sharing with other clinicians, could not be further apart. One makes an attempt to take outsiders in to the world of psychoanalysis, the other to bring the insides of the profession out to the surface. While one book emphasizes the negative and the impossible, the other raves about the positive and the possible. Yet it can be said that they are linked in some psychic sense that relates to our need to reveal what is esoteric, to explain what is mystifying, and to justify what insists on existing in spite of the odds. Could it be that Susan Levine’s book is a response to the cultural gestalt created by Janet Malcolm’s? Loving Psychoanalysis is a title that seduces the reader to wonder about the intention behind it. Is it about a psychoanalytic approach that considers ‘loving’ to be an essential component of therapeutic activity? Is it about the author ‘loving’ the field of psychoanalysis from an academic and intellectual perspective, or is it about ‘loving’ the experience of practicing as a psychoanalyst? (For one can certainly love the field but hate the practice of it.) Levine states in her introduction to the book: ‘‘I have come to believe that the proper working attitude of the analyst is not one of neutrality but of loving’’ (p. 1). This is not a book, however, that is meant to present scholarly and logical arguments as to why neutrality and love are mutually exclusive, or why one constitutes a more useful approach than the other. Instead what Levine presents is a collection of essays (or what she considers to be dreams ‘requiring interpretation and reflection’) that allows the reader access to the analyst ⁄ author’s subjective experience of the analysand and analytic process. In a sense this book is less about ‘technique and theory’, Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91:219–248 219