ABSTRACT
Edgar Levenson was one of the first psychoanalytic writers to describe and explicate the continuous subjectivity of the analyst's participation in the clinical encounter. Although he has recently begun to adopt a more accepting attitude, he has been critical of metapsychology during much of his writing life, arguing that theories encourage their adherents to understand patients in ways that merely validate their ideas. From Levenson's perspective "persuasion" in psychoanalysis is the unwitting inclination to indoctrinate patients to embrace the formulations about human development and psychodynamics. He notes with a certain cynicism the degree to which analytic cure is defined in a way that reflects little more than the acceptance of the analyst's ideologies. Levenson, like Benjamin Wolstein, postulates that the value of the analytic experience lies in the detailed examination of the unique, unfolding discourse between patient and analyst.
