Loving Psychoanalysis: Technique and Theory in the Therapeutic Relationship (Hardback)

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. - Axel Hoffer M.D., Harvard Medical School

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. - Adrienne Harris Ph.D., New York University

'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. - Patrick Mahony, Ph.D., Canadian Society of Psychoanalysis

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. - Clinical Social Work Journal

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. - The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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. - Salman Akhtar, MD, is professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.