ABSTRACT
“A Different Universe” provides a close reading and theoretical-clinical exegesis of Loewald’s foundational “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis.” This paper, a comprehensive, elegant account of the analytic attitude–“love and respect for the individual and individual development”–that enables a psychoanalytic process, presents a radically original, fine-tuned conceptualization of psychic change. Here Loewald expresses his view that transference and fantasy are fundamental human experiences, essential to psychic health and aliveness. They are prisms that bring meaning and connection to the world. “Therapeutic Action” does not include technical or interpretive recommendations or claim to offer a new metapsychology. Yet it elaborates the multiple facets of the relationship between analyst and patient and offers a subtly complex description of the epistemology of clinical work. Loewald is both an ego psychologist and an object relations theorist. His paper provides a foundational description of intersubjective ego psychology–subject-subject relations–as theory and practice.
This chapter discusses each section of Loewald’s paper and provides an overview of its contributions. Following Loewald, it focuses on analytic stance; the psychic apparatus; analytic activity; the language of interpretation; the topographic, and, finally, transference, fantasy, and reality in the transformation of “ghosts into ancestors.”
