ABSTRACT
Edgar Levenson (1992), summarizing how he sees the pragmatics of psychoanalysis, leads us in one succinct paragraph to what I believe is the core of the postclassical paradigm shift that he (and other interpersonalists following him) have been central in shaping:
Within the safety and containment of the frame, one tries one’s best to be a perfect analyst—fails of course—and uses one’s deviations from the ideal as participatory data defining the interpersonal field of the therapist and patient; and not incidentally, throwing light on the patient’s life outside of the therapy room, since it is axiomatic in psychoanalysis that there is a recursion, a repeating of pattern in the transference and in the material under discussion. What is talked about in therapy is reenacted (in reality or fantasy, depending on one’s theory) in the relationship of the therapist and patient [pp. 560–561].
